Just to elaborate on Hugos answer, use the enumitem package it is a great package for configuring lists.
Manually just once use
\begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman*)]
It might be an idea to load enumitem with the shortlabels option:
\usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem}
Then you can simply use
\begin{enumerate}[(i)]
A great feature is that if you now use \item\label{item:1} and then use \ref{item:1} then you get (i), that is the formatting is included! This is also configurable, see the enumitem manual.
Also lists can be resumed.
If you are writing a book using say, theorems, there are also general methods to add list configurations into theorems (I typically use etoolbox to do that). This means that inside theorem I just write \begin{enumerate} and we then control the appearance of enumerate inside theorem from the preamble.
Then the only time we explicitly need to set options on enumerate inside a theorem, would be if we have two types of lists in the theorem, say, one specifying conditions and then one listing subsequent conclusions. In such a case I'd let the conditions follow a different pattern.