Presenting your problem as a RESEARCH problem is one of the most important tasks early on in a thesis or dissertation.
You have to convince your readers – your supervisor(s), panel and examiners – that your problem is researchable, i.e., that it is a RESEARCH Problem.
Van de Ven (2007), provides 4 essentials for you to do this:
- First, you need to state from whose perspective you’re viewing the problem. For example, suppose the problem you’re addressing is the 4-day work week. In that case, you need to specify that you’ll be examining it from the perspective of managers of work teams in a particular environment, or from the perspective of highly paid millennials quitting their jobs.
- Second, you need to describe the social, or real-world, significance of addressing the problem. For example, the importance of addressing the management problem of the 4-day work week, or the effect of the 4-day work week on the resignation problem.
Now, up to this point, the problem is still anecdotal. It is not yet scholarly. So, right now, it could well be described in a newspaper article or popular magazine, rather than in an academic thesis or journal. And, unfortunately, this is where some students end their description of the problem.
But to make the problem a RESEARCH problem, we need to move to Van de Ven’s third and fourth criteria as follows:
- The third criterion is to identify some way of addressing, diagnosing, or resolving the problem. For example, you could use productivity to address the team management problem, or the work-life balance to diagnose the millennial resignation problem.
- Fourth, the way you address or diagnose the problem must be based on the theoretical literature. For example, for the management problem, you could specify a theory (or part thereof) on best practices from the productivity literature, or for the millennial resignation problem, a theory on work-life balance. Your theory could also be a simple framework suggested in previous research.
Using these four criteria, you will have described a RESEARCH problem – a problem painted in a scholarly context that is researchable.
Besides being a requirement at postgraduate level, the benefits of introducing theory are immense. But that’s a topic for my next post.
Would you like help with identifying your research problem?
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