Writing the Problem Statement
A problem statement is where an organisational irritation becomes a knowledge claim. The supplied source is blunt about where the real difficulty sits — not in finding a problem, but in choosing one and stating it once.
The difficulty is choosing, not finding
That inversion contradicts how the difficulty usually feels. Most people approaching a research project describe themselves as short of a topic. The source says the opposite: you have several, and the work is elimination.
For a practitioner the surplus is unusually large. A mid-career delivery professional carries years of observed dysfunction, unexplained variance and contested practice, almost any of which could seed a study. That abundance is why accept and reject quickly is stated as a skill — a candidate held open for weeks is one that has not been tested.
The three jobs the statement has to do
Three separate demands, and the third is the one most often missing. Explaining why the problem exists is not the same as explaining why it is worth addressing, and the outline asks for both in the same element.
WHAT EACH OF THE THREE ELEMENTS CONTAINS AND HOW TO TEST IT
| Element | What it contains | The test |
|---|---|---|
| The problem or gap | One statement naming what is not known, in a field, about a defined population or setting | Could a reader say what would count as filling it? If not, it is a topic, not a gap |
| The context in which it arises | The historical and current research in the field, plus the practical or organisational conditions that make the question live now | Does the context explain why this is a question at all, rather than merely describing a setting? |
| Reasons why it exists, and the justification | An account of how the field came to have this hole in it, and a case for closing it | Are you offering a reason the gap exists — neglect, novelty, contested findings, changed conditions — or only asserting that it does? |
The elements are the source's; the contents and tests in the second and third columns are this page's unpacking.
The longer thirteen-row component table takes a different approach and has no standalone problem statement at all. There the problem lives inside the background and rationale components, where background provides context and "may problematise the current status quo", and the rationale persuades the reader the study is needed. The two structures are compared at Components of a Research Proposal.
A gap in knowledge, not a problem at work
This single sentence is what separates a research problem from a delivery problem, and it is where most practitioner proposals need the heaviest rework. The justification is required to come from the literature. Not from a business case, not from an executive's frustration, not from the observation that your organisation handles something badly.
None of that material is wasted. An organisational problem is good evidence that a question is worth asking, and it is what the context element is for. It cannot carry the justification alone, because a proposal's claim is about knowledge rather than performance.
An organisational problem
- States that something is not working well here
- Is evidenced by internal experience, data or complaint
- Is resolved by a decision, an intervention or a policy change
- Is bounded by the organisation that has it
- Succeeds when the situation improves
A research problem
- States that something is not known in the field
- Is evidenced by what the published literature does and does not establish
- Is resolved by evidence that changes what can be claimed
- Is bounded by a population, setting and period you have defined
- Succeeds when the answer holds whether or not you like it
Converting the left column into the right one is the actual work of this section, and the raw material for it comes from reading. The source supplies a set of questions to put to the literature while doing exactly that.
- What are the authors of those journal articles saying about the topic?
- What is known about the topic?
- What issues and aspects have been thoroughly explored?
- What issues, aspects and questions do the authors recommend for further research?
- What issues are yet to be explored, and is there one among them that you could or should explore?
The fourth question is the most immediately productive, because a recommendation for further research is a gap that somebody in the field has already agreed exists. The mechanics of finding, testing and stating a gap — including the false gaps that will not survive review — belong to Identifying the Gap in the Literature. What this page is concerned with is what happens to the gap once you have one: how it is written as the problem statement of a proposal.
Problem statement, research statement, research question
The supplied material uses several terms here and does not always keep them apart. The distinctions are worth holding, because a supervisor asking for one will not accept another.
FOUR TERMS AND WHAT EACH ONE IS
| Term | What it is | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Problem statement | A statement of the gap in current research, with the context it arises in and the reasons it exists | An element of the proposal; in the longer component table it is absorbed into background and rationale |
| Research statement | The idea for the project stated in one statement — the declarative form of the same thing | The output of refining, and the alternative the source offers to a question |
| Research question | The same idea stated interrogatively, usually beginning What, How, Why or What if | Its own element in the shorter outline; part of purpose and aims in the longer one |
| Conceptual framework | In one part of the supplied material, the research statement or question itself, containing all the key concepts in the project | Defined differently elsewhere in the same dataset — see the note below |
Constructing the question itself — the interrogative form, the nine tests the source puts to it, and what to do when it will not compress — is handled at Deciding Your Research Question. This page stops at the statement of the problem, because that is the element a proposal is assessed on.
The one-statement discipline
One statement or question. Not a paragraph, not a set of related concerns, not a statement with a subordinate clause carrying a second study. This is the hardest instruction in the proposal material and the most useful, because compression is diagnostic: a problem that will not fit into one sentence is usually more than one problem.
Four things have to survive the compression. If any of them is missing from the single sentence, the sentence is shorter than it should be rather than tighter.
What must still be in the sentence after compression
- The unknown — what specifically is not established
- The population or setting the unknown applies to
- The condition or relationship in question, not just the subject area
- Enough of the context that a reader can see why it is not already answered
What may safely be dropped is everything explaining why you personally care, everything describing your organisation, and every qualifier hedging the claim. Those belong in the context and justification elements around the statement, not in the statement itself.
A worked reduction
From an observation to a problem statement, in four passes
The observation
Lessons-learned reviews are held at the end of most projects here, and nothing appears to change afterwards. At this stage it is a complaint, not a problem — no population, no unknown, and no reason to think the field has anything to say.
After the literature check
The published work establishes that post-project reviews are widely conducted and widely reported as underused, and several authors recommend further work on what happens to the outputs after a review closes. The complaint now has a field behind it and a recommendation to build on.
The gap, stated
What is not established is the mechanism: existing work documents that review outputs are underused, but not what determines whether an output is taken up. That is a statement about knowledge rather than about performance, and it is bounded — it names the unknown, not the irritation.
The compressed statement
It is not known what determines whether the recommendations produced by end-of-project reviews are adopted in subsequent projects within a single delivery organisation. One sentence, carrying the unknown, the population, the relationship in question and an implied boundary — and the organisational complaint has moved into the context element where it belongs.
Note what the fourth pass did not do. It did not add the researcher's motivation, name the organisation, or promise an improvement. The same content could be stated interrogatively; the source treats a statement and a question as equally acceptable end points.
How problem statements fail
SIX FAILURE MODES AND THEIR REPAIRS
| The failure | What it looks like | The repair |
|---|---|---|
| The organisational complaint | Describes a deficiency in one workplace and offers internal frustration as the justification | Move it to the context element and find what the literature does not establish about the same phenomenon |
| The solved problem | States a gap the field closed some time ago, usually because the search stopped at the first few results | Extend the literature check; if it is genuinely answered, reject the topic quickly and move on |
| The compound statement | Two or three problems joined by "and", each of which would need its own design | Choose one. The others become future research, not scope |
| The foregone conclusion | States the answer inside the problem — the phrasing presumes what the study is meant to find | Restate so a result you would dislike is one of the possible outcomes |
| The unbounded gap | No population, no setting, no period; "little is known about" with nothing after it | Add the boundary. An unbounded gap cannot be filled by any study, so it cannot justify yours |
| The asserted gap | Claims nothing has been written on the topic without showing what was searched | Show the search, or reframe the gap as contested findings or an untested context rather than absence |
The failure modes are a synthesis for this page. The source names the requirement — a problem statement justified in light of the literature and reduced to one statement or question — and does not catalogue the ways it goes wrong.
Before it goes into the proposal
Problem statement pre-flight
- It is one statement or one question, and you can say it aloud without notes
- It names what is not known, not what is going wrong
- The justification cites the literature, and you could point to the specific works it rests on
- The context element explains why the question is live now, and carries the organisational material
- You have offered a reason the gap exists, not only an assertion that it does
- A candidate problem you rejected can be named, along with why you rejected it
- A result you would not have liked is among the possible outcomes
- Your aims and objectives, when you write them, are recognisably answers to this statement
Once the statement holds, two things follow directly from it. The literature that justified it becomes the proposal's review, treated at The Literature Review in a Proposal; and the refining questions about method and access — where the data is, whether you can get to it — are the subject of Refining Your Topic Before the Proposal.
What to carry forward
- The difficulty is choosing, not finding. If you have rejected nothing, you have chosen nothing.
- The problem statement is a statement of the gap in current research, and it must be justified in light of the literature.
- An organisational problem is evidence, not justification. It belongs in the context element.
- The outline asks for three things: the problem, its context, and the reasons it exists with the case for addressing it.
- Explaining why the gap exists is a separate demand from explaining why it is worth closing. Most drafts do only the second.
- Compress to one statement or question, and check the unknown, the population and the relationship all survive.
- The term "conceptual framework" is used in two incompatible senses in the supplied material. Ask which one is meant.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a problem statement and a research question?
They carry the same content in different grammatical forms, and the source treats them as alternatives: you should be able to state your idea in one statement or question. The problem statement is the declarative form and sits alongside the context and justification in the proposal; the question is the interrogative form, usually opening with What, How, Why or What if.
Can my problem statement come from a problem at my own workplace?
The observation can, and often should — it is evidence that the question matters and it belongs in the context element. The justification cannot. The source requires the proposal to be justified in light of the literature and what that indicates about the state of knowledge in your field, so the workplace problem has to be converted into a statement about what is not known.
Does the proposal need a separate problem statement section?
It depends which of the two outlines in the supplied material you are following. The shorter nine-element outline lists the statement of the problem or gap as its own element. The longer thirteen-row component table has no such component — the problem is carried by the background section, which may problematise the status quo, and by the rationale. Check with your supervisor.
How long should a problem statement be?
The compressed form is one statement or question. The surrounding elements — context, and the reasons the problem exists together with the justification — are longer and the source sets no length for them. What matters is that the statement itself has not absorbed material that belongs in the elements around it.
What if the literature has already answered my problem?
Reject it and move on. The source treats this as a skill rather than a setback: you need to be able to accept and reject a topic quickly. A partly answered problem is often still viable if the existing answer was established in a different population, setting or period from yours — but that has to be stated as the gap rather than left implicit.
References and source attribution
- Trochim, W. M. K. 2006, Research Methods Knowledge Base (http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/probform.php) — cited in the supplied source; the page cited addresses problem formulation.
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London — one of the general research methods texts cited across the supplied source.
- Naoum, S. G. 2013, Dissertation Research & Writing for Construction Students, 3rd ed., Routledge — cited in the supplied source as the reading on topic selection.
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford — cited in the supplied source as a general methods reference.
- The supplied teaching source: consolidated weekly teaching notes and slide material on developing a research proposal, which supplies the framing of the problem as one of choosing rather than finding, the requirement to justify in light of the literature, the nine-element proposal outline and the one-statement instruction.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Turn this workplace problem into a research problem statement about what is not known.
- Compress my problem statement to one sentence without losing the population or the unknown.
- Does my problem statement presume its own answer? Show me where.
- Draft the context and justification elements that should sit around this problem statement.
- Give me the reasons the gap I have identified might exist, and tell me which of them I can evidence.