ACE 745: Problem Statements and Research Questions (IUP)

hello in this video we're going to talk about writing problem statements and research questions if you recall in the video on getting started with your research project we talked about how you conceptualize a research project and I indicated in that video that the process of conceptualizing a research was really 90% of the battle if you have a good plan you're likely to have a good research project in the end there are some specific tools that we can use to aid us in that conceptualization process now in that video on getting started we talked about balancing the ideas of your issues your sample and your methodology and working back and forth amongst those three things until you were able to refine those into a solid idea that you could move forward with to investigate in this video we're going to look at a couple of specific tools that we can use to aid in that process and really help us bring that conceptualization from some sort of a nebulous idea down to something very specific and tangible that we'll be able to actually look at for a research project there are three specific tools really that really will help us and that's problem statements research questions and hypotheses now hypotheses are technical in nature and a little bit complicated so we're going to save that for another time and in this video we're going to look specifically at writing problem statements and research questions what I want you to remember if you don't remember anything else from this video what you remember is that problem statements and research questions are the most important part of any research study these are the heart of the research study and they it's critical that you have have them clearly conceptualized and written in such a way that they will provide you with guidance for doing your research if they're not clear if they're vague if there's a contradictory or conflicting information then that's the way your research study is going to end up this is like your road map it's like your GPS to get you through this research process so spend some time with this think about it work at it because if you get this right the rest of your research project really will fall into line by using these tools let's start with looking at the problem statement the problem statement is a big overarching statement about what the intent of your research is so as a big overarching statement it's not going to have all the detail in it it's just going to have the general idea now the problem statement is typically made up of three components what I call the teapots the verb and the key words and phrases a teapot stands for the purpose of this study and it's a good way to start any problem statement so your problem statement will start out the purpose of this study is followed by a verb of some sort is to describe compare evaluate and then you're going to identify the key words and phrases that is what groups of people you're going to compare describe or evaluate and what issues you're going to research as well selecting this verb let's focus on that for a second this is critical getting the right verb is really important there's a whole lot of verbs you can choose from but the verb implies what you're going to do in the research it really implies your method so if I say the purpose of the study is to describe some something about some group of people then that really implies that I'm probably going to give them a questionnaire or I'm going to collect some demographic information or I might interview them ask them their opinions about something see how the word described implies a certain kind of method if I say the purpose of this study is to compare Group one to group two or method one to method two or this program to that program then it implies a little bit more complex study that in fact I'm going to have to have some way of collecting data from at least two different groups or two different programs or two different teaching methods or whatever it is I'm going to compare and then has some way of comparing the data that I collect from those two different groups if I say that the purpose of the study is to evaluate a program now that's even more complex because not only am I going to collect some sort of information about a program that might be complex to generate in the first place I'm going to then have to compare that information that data that I collect to to some sort of criteria for success so if I'm going to say that I'm going to evaluate the effectiveness of a program it really means that I'm going to look at a program and determine if that program meets certain criteria that we could make it that we could then say it was a successful program if I say that the verb in my problem statement is to determine the cause of now that's an even more complex kind of study so if I want to know does of this reading method teaching students to read in a certain way cause them to have higher test scores they're in better performance and and better reading skills now that implies I have to set up an experimental study in order to be able to understand the cause and effect relationship between the the teaching method about reading and ultimately some sort of performance indicator about how well they're actually reading so you have to check that to select that word that verb you're going to use in your problem statement with a lot of care and think about what just exactly what is it that you intend to do now the last part of the problem statement is what I call the key words and phrases this is also referred to as the variables that you're going to study and in and with these what you're going to do is you're going to identify typically two things the groups of people that you're going to be looking at and the issues that you're going to be researching about those groups of people now there's other ways to write problem statements and there's other configurations and the key words and variables don't always identify those two things depending upon the issue that you're you're researching but we're going to stick with that example so that we can do a more in-depth understanding of how this whole process of writing a problem statement works so now let's look at an example here of a problem statement to see what we're talking about the example that I have is that the purpose of this study is to describe and compare the attitudes and performance of male and female graduate students regarding required research courses at IUP now as you will note there are two verbs in this problem statement describe and compare this implies that we intend to do both of these things in our research study in this case we're going to describe the attitudes and performance for both male and female graduate students and then we're going to compare these two things between male and female graduate students so let's think about how we might set up a research study with this problem statement in mind now if we were going to do a quantitative research study that is we were going to try to measure attitudes and performance then that's one approach or we could also do a qualitative research study where we're going to try to get some sense of attitudes and performance from the perspective of the students themselves for our example let's focus on the quantitative approach right now and follow that through and and we can look at the the qualitative kind of approach in another venue when you think about measuring our two variables of attitude and performance now we have to have a way of coming up with some sort of numbers that we're going to use to measure those with this is called operationalizing the variables we can operationalize attitudes with some sort of a Likert scale questionnaire there might even be one already out there that we could go to the literature and find or maybe we're going to make up our own little questionnaire and and have a little questionnaire that we're going to ask some people some questions about their attitudes about taking research courses operationalizing performance that could be maybe a test score in the course or a score on a project but again it has to be some sort of numeric rating of the students performance that we can use to characterize how students do and ultimately be able to compare how the females and the males do in the course the other key words and phrases now remember our problem statement is the purpose of the study is to describe and compare the attitudes of performance of male and female graduate students in required research courses so we've talked about attitudes and performance but what about the other keywords graduate students required research courses those are things that we have to define and we have to make sure that we're specific about what we mean by those now that might seem kind of obvious or even silly at first to spend some time will graduate students a graduate student in a research course is a research course well yeah maybe but maybe not here's the thing do we mean all graduate students do we mean the graduate students that are on good academic standing or on probation do we mean international and domestic students demeaning students from all majors do we means older students and younger students so we need to we actually do need to think through specifically what group of graduate students were referring to here the second issue required research courses could be very also different majors have different kinds of research courses and so getting a common measure of performance across those research courses might prove to be very difficult a graduate research course in English master's program for example might be very different from a required research course in an education master's program okay so that's the problem statement three main elements the teapots the verb and your variables for your keywords and phrases the teapots is the purpose of the study is the verb describes the action what you're going to do and the key words and phrases describe who and what you're going to do that with now let's turn to the research questions in essence the research questions divide the problem statement into more manageable pieces that will actually form the way in the guide posts for you to conduct your research so if the problem statement forms the big overarching issue that you're going to investigate the research questions are the more specific issues that you're actually going to collect data about to try to answer notice that they're called research questions and they are written in the form of a question and what you're going to do is with the data you collect that data is going to try to answer what those questions asked so let's take an example now go back to our example with the the problem statement we talked about with describing and comparing attitudes and performance of male and female grad students and research courses and let's look at some sample research questions that might might flow from that problem statement now you'll notice on the slide that there are eight research questions and it's really going to be divided in the two parts the first six questions are going to be addressed are going to address the descriptive element in our research study so we talked about describe and compare in our problem statement and so the first six questions are about the describe part and the last two questions are about the compare partner problem statement so let's look at the first research question what are the attitudes of graduate students regarding the required research courses the the answer to this question will come from the questionnaire the attitude questionnaire that we're going to give to the students and it will be data aggregate data that will represent all graduate students in terms of their attitude the second question is similar except where it asks for data for performance for all graduate students so again we're going to use our performance measure whether a scores from a test or a project or final scores in the course or whatever and we're going to use that number two to describe all of the graduate students now questions 3 & 4 asked about the attitudes of males and females separately so in question 3 we're going to look at just attitude data for males and in question 4 we're going to look at just attitude female on data for females questions 5 & 6 are the same thing with performance data so question 5 asks us about the performance data for males and questions 6 the performance data for females finally when we get to question 7 & 8 we'll see that we're actually going to compare the attitude data between males and females in question 7 and we're going to compare the attitude de or the performance data between males and females in question 8 so thinking about all of this data that we're going to slice and dice and present in different ways it really all comes from two sources an attitude questionnaire and some sort of measure of performance in the research courses and all we've done with our 8 research questions is talk about how we're going to present that data in different ways for different groups of people to answer different questions and that becomes the nature of our reach questions that's why the research questions are so important because they really tell us what we're trying to accomplish with this study what data are we going to collect and how are we going to collect that data in order to be able to answer those questions so ultimately in this video we discussed problem statements and research questions and that these are really the basic tools you're going to use for conceptualizing your research it's necessary it's imperative to be clear about your problem statements and research question because if they're fuzzy or you're not clear for in its in some way about them then your the data that you collect will not you will not have a specific purpose and you will not be clear about the data that you're collecting and what what you're going to do with that data when I teach this in a classroom subject situation I always have the students repeat this after me I say it in and I make them repeat it they think it's silly but I think it's a great idea what I have them do is repeat this little phrase the problem statement and research questions are the most important part of a research study so what I want you to do now is I want you to repeat that with me as I say it again at the end of this video you ready all right let's go the problem statement and the research questions are the most important part of a research study all right thank you

Channel: Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Views: 172,544

Rating: 4.9089761 out of 5

Keywords: IUP, Adult and Community Education, Empirical Research, Problem Statements, Research questions, research, questions, adult, community, education, empirical, problem, statements

Id: Z1yJEOtLsb8

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2011