One of the most difficult topics I had to explain in the research courses/seminars at all levels is how to construct the section of statement/description of the problem. Sometimes, it is because – despite all the text students have managed to write – when you read the section, there is not a problem in sight, other times it is because the problem is unsubstantiated, usually because it is based on students’ prejudice, belief or opinion, and not supported with solid evidence.
Fortunately, I came into a book which helped me lots in setting a structure for this section. Even though this text is from a field different from education (Economic sciences: Business, Economics and Accounting), I found it enlightening even for writing a statement of the problem at a doctoral level. This book is:
Méndez, C. (2001). Metodología. Diseño y desarrollo del proceso de investigación. 3rd. Ed. Bogotá: McGraw Hill
This author divides the Statement of the Problem into four parts. Symptoms, Causes, Prediction/Prognosis, Control to prognosis/prediction. Although, the author explains these parts with lots of details, what I usually tell students is the following:
Symptoms refer to what you see in the context that you may think is problematic; for example, you may notice students enacting violent behaviours in the classroom, including oral and physical and they seem to be increasing.
Causes are the reasons why those symptoms may be happening, for example, living in a violent home, lack of skills to communicate emotions properly, creation of cliques in the classroom, among others.
Prediction/prognosis refer to the worst-case scenario, that is, if the symptoms are not controlled, what is the worst that could happen. In the example given, violence may escalate to crime, affected students may drop out of school, and learning is affected because most of the time is spent in classroom management issues.
Control to prediction is what the researcher proposes to control the problem. It might not be the ultimate solution, but it is what s/he aims to try to see how it works for that particular situation and context. This control to prediction is the element in the description of the problems that takes us to posing the research question and establishing the research objectives.
So far so good… well, yes, but… for the section to be convincing it needs to have evidence supporting the claims. This means that if we state the problem is students’ violent behaviour, we need to demonstrate this is what we saw, probably by means of observations collected in video recordings or field notes. The same applies for the other sections, for example, a demographic analysis which shows violent behaviours at home, a classroom diagram which shows the cliques, or an interview showing students problems in conflict resolution. Some teachers, as my colleague Carolina[2] R. Buitrago does, call this stage the needs analysis stage. This needs analysis intends to determine, first, if the problem we identify is real, and second, if the control we are proposing is feasible.
Another way to support this section is by including previous studies which make similar claims to the ones we’re making; this is one of the reasons our professors ask for the section of State of the Art/Literature Review, that is, not only to become familiar with what has been said about the topic of our interest, but also because it is very likely someone is worried about the same things we worry about and which constitute our problem; and therefore, has studied the phenomenon and has come to conclusions that may support our concerns.
Finally, to close this section, as mentioned before, there needs to be a paragraph which re-states the control to the prediction, that is, the objective of the project – what it intends to attain – and which leads the reader into the operationalization of the problem, which is the research question and the sub-questions guiding the study, process that will be explained in a future blog post.
PD. On how to construct solid arguments, a good source to check is Section 3 in Booth, Colomb & Williams (1995) The craft of research[3].
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