How to Write a Problem Statement

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(classical music) - Hi everybody Dr. Guy White. And I am super excited that you are here about video for this video about "How to write a Problem Statement." I think by far this is one of the biggest questions I get for most candidates is "How do you write a Problem Statement?" Ironically it's probably the easiest to write and if you just know what you're doing. However I have to say in advance that this is kind of a loaded video because the reality is that until you actually have done a lot of the background work that is the you've done a true review of the literature, it's really not possible to write a great Problem Statement yet. Now it doesn't mean you have to write your literature review it just means that you have to have gone through the steps of collecting many, many, many sources and many, many, many quotes from those sources, such that you have the background knowledge necessary to write a really great Problem Statement. So this video is gonna be us about us talking about how to write a great Problem Statement, assuming that you've done all that great background work. I'm not gonna spend too much time to introduce myself, you probably know who I am. But if you don't know who I am, I love playing with my kids, that is what I want to do with most of my time. And yet the reality is that if you're sitting here and you're writing a dissertation or in my case I'm writing, doing lots of writing all the time. I have to make sure that I'm spending my time well such that I can get home and play with them. It's like I get to play when the work is done and chances are you're delaying life, you're delaying something such that you can get this dissertation done. So let's get this thing done right? So that way you can move on with your life and go on to wonderful things. My wonderful thing is that I've gone on to, I've written many books and I won't bore you with those titles but just to say that I've worked on many, many dissertation committees as a Chair and committee member. And so I'm highly qualified to give you the information that I am imparting to you here on this video and you are highly qualified to hear what I have to say. So thanks for joining me. So today we're gonna be talking about just three steps, three short steps this might be the shortest video I've ever done. And a Problem Statement in the end has to start with you doing the background work because until you've done a true review of the literature, it's really a complete waste of your time to attempt to write a Problem Statement. In fact it's a complete waste of time to really try to write a chapter one until you've really delved into the literature and gotten a lot of background knowledge about really what people are talking about around your topic. I am guilty, I was guilty during my dissertation writing of skipping the literature review step at first and man, I just kept trying to write chapter one and chapter one and just nothing was clicking and it was until a good friend of mine said, "Well you know you can't write a chapter one until you've really outlined a chapter two." And that was like a big, like light bulb for me. I'm like what does that mean? And for me what that came down to and what I tell all my candidates is really, you must first before you attempt to write a chapter one, I mean you might do a small sketch of it. But until, you can't write a chapter one until you have digested about a hundred works that is books articles et cetera. Other dissertations and you should be able to collect about 400 you should have collected about 400 quotes and organized them into a synthesis matrix, which I covered in one of my other videos about "How to write a literature review." And once you've collected those 400 quotes or so, I mean it's not an exact science but about that. You'll start noticing patterns and you'll have the language of your topic down and you'll have a lot of information about who is saying what. And what you're gonna see momentarily when we look at this Problem Statement itself is that, real Problem Statements have to be totally stooped in the existing literature, you can't just make it up. And so, what I just want to say is that, if you engage in a true lit review, you'll be saving yourself hundreds of hours of time by not doing all these rewrites of a fake chapter one that really isn't gonna go anywhere until you actually do the work of really researching the lit, going in there and finding out really what people wanna know about the subject that you're wanting to study. And I think there's a note there is that a lot of candidates go in to writing a dissertation with such a firm idea of what they want to write that they forget that they can't just simply go and justify that using the literature. They actually have to do a true search the literature and be open to the fact that my goodness, there might be something that those researchers are wanting you to examine, that is outside what you had in mind from the get-go. So I just wanna say that once you do that true lit review, you're in good place to start and if you haven't done that I mean go, I mean watch the rest of this video and then go back and look at my literature review video and do that first. So the second step in building a problem statement then is to understand what the chapter one structure actually looks like you know. You can and you probably have, if you're in this process, you've already looked at many dissertations, you might have looked at some kind of dissertation handbook and you have a general idea of what a chapter one involves. You know, what each of the sections are most likely, however I've definitely seen some candidates submit things that don't have all the sections required, so I do recommend that you get a list of all the sections required. I do have another video that I'll be posting shortly about this exact topic how to structure at chapter one. And in addition to that, I think that really what most candidates need to understand is that, you need to understand that there's some nuances in chapter one and if you know what the nuances are, if you know the goals of each section, you'll have understanding of where your writing is supposed to be headed over time. So let's look at that specifically. So a chapter one, I'm sure you've heard it is like a funnel and not really dwelling there too long but just to say is that you know, the first sentence of your dissertation is something very about it's a general statement about a topic you're interested in and that's in the background section this first section called The Background section. And your Background section needs to start with a very general poignant situation in the world. I like saying that, some people say it starts with the general topic and that sounds really boring. I mean really the reason you're writing this dissertation and you're focusing on the research that you're considering is because something important is happening in the world and you are interested in that. So you wanna start your Background section, sometimes there's a separate introduction section. But you start the Background section by talking about, what is this poignant situation in the world at large and really using a set of logical statements, logical paragraphs, you're presenting us why we should care about this topic and you're narrowing us down very slowly to a more and more specific problem that will be discussing. So I guess the way to put it is that whole Background section is about getting our feet wet, telling us that there's this interesting situation in the world. And then logically telling us, what's the big deal about this thing? Why do we need a focus on this? And then that gets us down to the Problem Statement and the Problem Statement answers that question, why do we need to focus on this, right? And the Problem Statement itself has three parts and I'll be talking about that momentarily but in basic, basically it starts out by telling us, what the problem is in one sentence, what is the problem? What do we know about it? What don't we know about it? And what our researchers telling us that we should know. Now for me as a dissertation writer this last sentence here so like life-changing, what researchers want us to know. Most candidates go into a dissertation, thinking that they're gonna need to write something about something they care about. And that's part of the reason we go and we write a dissertation is we care about the topic. But the key is we have to find something that researchers want us to research. And that's what you have to do is you have to find something that researchers want us to research. And so in this next slide, set of slides here, you're gonna see exactly what you need, so that way you can know what you're looking for when you're doing that literature review. So that way you know what should you be looking for in gathering to support this great dissertation idea that you have. Now the Problem Statement itself is just a precursor to the Purpose Statement and the Purpose Statement provides a specific study that addresses a very narrow sliver or part of the problem. And I guess the way to look at this is that there's a lot of problems out in the world and your study can't focus on those large set of problems, it has to focus on a very narrow, narrow problem. And then your study itself really only looks at a very small part of that problem as a whole and so I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that your Purpose Statement itself is super narrow. I have another video you can look at about how to write a Purpose Statement. But just to say is that what we're trying to do is go from very general down to very narrow and the way to do that is by understanding how each one of the sections play off one another. So for example when we write a Problem Statement it can be quite easy but we have to do that background work and once you've done that background work so check this out. This is what a Problem Statement actually looks like, so first of all everyone has a different style when it comes to writing these things you know, your Chair is gonna have an opinion, your University might have an opinion but when I look at all the dissertations throughout all of you know academia right now at least in the humanities you know, in the social sciences you know, education and so on. What I'm seeing is that most of them come in this flavor of three paragraphs, there's three paragraphs, is the paragraph about what we know, the paragraph of what we don't know, and the paragraph about what they as in the researchers want us to know. So this first paragraph starts out by making a very direct statement. It says the problem is and it in one sentence you need to be able to encapsulate the problem that your dissertation is focusing upon. And then the rest of that paragraph is focused about, focused on providing many, many, many examples, I guess the way to put it is, we're trying to show a synthesis, many authors together, what are many authors saying that we know about the problem? What do we know about this problem that you're presenting? And then you wanna talk about what we don't know and similarly you wanna present what all the authors together are saying that we don't know about this specific issue. And then finally what they want us to know, this paragraph this third paragraph in your problem statement section, talks about what researchers want us to find out about this specific problem. Now if you're been paying attention to my language, what you're hearing over and over again is that we have to know what researchers have said, what researchers are saying we don't know, and what researchers are wanting us to discover in studies like yours. And until we know that, until we know what researchers want and what they know, what they don't know, there's just simply no way you can write a problem statement. Because that's what this whole sections about, is about presenting what everyone else is saying that we know, what everyone else is saying we don't know and what they're saying we need to know and we need to study like in great dissertations like yours. So once you have that information, what I wanna do now is I wanna provide some auditing steps. I wanna tell you what are some marks of a great problem statement. And here they are; is that each paragraph should start with a logical statement that really just sets you up, sets up the rest of the paragraph. It really it's just telling us what the paragraph's about. So the example I get here is that numerous researchers have studied and studied, excuse me, I have a typo and error, oh my goodness, numerous researchers have studied transformational leadership in Fortune 500 companies. And then you imagine there to be three citations there. If it's in the second paragraph that paragraph what we don't know the paragraph might start by saying something like; "Despite all of our knowledge around the problem of ABC, researchers point out that there is much we don't know." And then you'd list in that paragraph what we don't know about this problem. If it was that last paragraph what researchers want us to know, you might say something like; "Recent contemporary researchers are urging us to research three key areas of this problem." Notice how specific that sounds and that's exactly what you want to hear in these opening paragraphs or just be or these paragraphs of the Problem Statement I should say. And each citation within these paragraphs should not be one-off single citations they should be many authors synthesize together. And I think this is a key here is that your Problem Statement section should showcase how well you've been synthesizing that literature, how much information you've gotten and the way you do that is you're showing what authors are saying alongside one another. What authors are saying together. Even if they didn't write together. You know that author A in 1990 said something and author B in 1995 said the same thing, that's strong writing and it's called synthesis. And that's what we want to have present here in this section in the Problem Statement section. And in the end, you should be able to read your Problem Statement. And then the next sentence that appears is your Purpose Statement and you should be able to say or your reader should be able to say "Oh I totally understand then why we're doing this study." Because your Purpose Statement in your Problem Statement are so carefully aligned. That it just makes complete sense that since the research, since we know this and we don't know this and researchers are telling us that we need to learn whatever, it's of course we would do this type of study and of course I'd read this Purpose Statement and that's what this would say. So I think the overall message here is two things number one is you need to do the background work of doing a great review of the literature, even if you've not written a literature review you should have lots and lots and lots and lots of quotes collected. Such that you can start getting a pulse on what researchers are saying about your topic and about what you're considering to be the the purpose of your study. And in addition to that I guess the second thing I'm saying is that this section is so step by step, it's one of the easier sections to write in your dissertation. All you have to do is have done the background work to actually get here. So in the end what I would just say is you know, go out there and faithfully conduct that literature review and think about the idea that you are walking every single day through this process and there is this mountain that you're climbing there is a... You're walking towards I don't know I feel like you're walking towards that horizon and there is hope over that horizon. There is the next step of your life, the next thing that you get to get to in your life over that horizon and what I would just say is keep walking folks. I'm so excited that you are watching these videos and that you're commenting, I so appreciate the replies to my emails and the comments you've been leaving. And man, just keep doing that and I promise you, if you keep commenting and replying to me like you are now, I'll keep making these videos. You're a blessing to me. Thank you so much. Have a great day, bye.
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Channel: Guy E White
Views: 147,172
Rating: 4.8901892 out of 5
Keywords: Problem Statement, Research (Industry), dissertation, how to write a dissertation, how to write a problem statement, how to write a literature review, how to write a purpose statement, the dissertation mentor, guy e. white
Id: CTH-AxR_OfM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 07 2014
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