Scholarly DNP Project I

Research Problem and Purpose Statement Video Transcript

Brenda Luther: Welcome to one of the first webinars on developing your research problem and your purpose and all the statements that make up kind of an introduction to a literature review. SK2 is about a literature review and literature reviews start with a program, problem statement or purpose statement. This all starts before you begin your research question and as you see I kind of have three titles on this, but the end of it is preparing your argument, so think of yourself as doing just that. You're preparing your argument for what you're going to discuss in the literature review, the end all goal of SK2, so let's look at some definitions first.

Research problem, Houser states, it's the "statements of disparity between what you know and what needs to be known." We discover this through investigation of a literature review, so you develop a research problem statement and this is generally going to be your big purpose, is that you're defining what we know and then you can say, "Thus, this is what we don't know yet." Then you move into a research purpose, so you say, "Since we don't know this about the problem, here's the purpose of this study," and it's your description of the direction of your inquiry.

Before I begin, I want to tell you that I am using Houser as a text. Tappen is our text and I love Tappen, Janet Tappen. Is she Janet Tappen or is it Janet Houser? Can't remember. It's Janet Houser. Can't remember Tappen's first name. I like them both, but I purposely did this webinar and the following webinars with Houser just to give you a little bit broader view of how people, how nursing educators talk about nursing research and talk about specifically literature reviews here and preparing for a literature review.

The first thing we think about is our research problem and I bet you have that in your head already. The problem is the why. You first started addressing the problem, and really anybody would probably address the problem the way you are. Most likely, they're all going to see, "Here's the problem with nursing education," or, "Here's the problem with caring for children with physical disabilities," or, "Here's the problem of blah, blah, blah." So really anybody would see this the way you see it. It's most likely a problem that is well-known, but you want to outline it as kind of your setting. Then you're going to outline your research purpose and that's the what. That's when you start to describe your personal goals of research. Both of these are not huge statements, but they support each other. You want to look for clarity so that when someone's reading it, they understand what your setting is and what your general intent is and that you want to look for support.

Let's go into talking about just the research problem, the why. Houser tells us, these are declarations of gaps or disparities, what we know and what we don't know. It defines your area, your setting. It also gives a lot of importance of the problem so that your reader is intrigued by, "Okay, here's the problem. I didn't realize it was this large," or, "I didn't realize this many people were affected by this condition and I didn't realize these were the consequences of this problem." Those are the kind of things you want to show to engage people so that they care about what you're writing on. Typically this is a topic that is located in the beginning of the report as your introduction.

One little writing, power writing thought on this is that you really want to engage from the beginning. Lots of times we write kind of backwards and we write really broad, and you don't really know what our topic is until you get into the paragraph. Focus now with your first sentences just saying clearly, "A problem in nursing education lies in blah, blah, blah." Somehow start it right with your first sentences and then build to give why it's concerning, why it's important, what's the prevalence, what's the consequence.

Here's an example. This is just a statement, or I guess it's two statements, two sentences. It's not a whole paragraph, but we would start saying, "Families describe controlling the trajectory of their school-age child's obesity, complicated by blah, blah, blah." Then we say, "While national standards have been set, helping children be active at home is less researched." You can see in there, you know the setting, or we know the population. We're talking about school-aged children. We know the problem, obesity. We know some of the implications of it. We know that while national standards of physical activity are set, we don't know much about promoting activity at home. It's less researched and warrants investigation.

Let's look at this. What's known is in red. What's known is, and I would have cited this had I had more room on a PowerPoint slide for you, but what is known is that school activities complicate physical activity, lack of safe neighborhoods, busy home lives, so we know that. Where is a disparity? Well, we have standards that say children should be active, but we don't necessarily help children be active at home. What are some gaps? These kind of get redundant, but helping children be active at home is less researched. That was our problem. That kind of gives an overall problem. I still don't know from reading this what Brenda is going to research though, so let's look at how the purpose statement builds us to be more objective and clear.

That purpose statement more often brings in statements about what the methods of the study might be, the variables, the specific population. You probably could pick up some of these things from the problem statements in the introduction, but now you're going to move to one further more declarative, objective, concise, clear step. Did I double click? No, I didn't. Before I go on, introduction of the problem and the purpose is not the same as your research questions and this webinar is not about research questions, but your research questions are going to be articulated and based off of these, so you want to just show this logical argument forming. You know, "Here's the problem. Here's my purpose."

Let's move into a purpose statement. In the text below that's all multicolored, I have a purpose statement. I'm sorry I used a different topic instead of the childhood obesity, but in this purpose statement, "The objective of this descriptive study, which is the method, was to compare the frequencies bihourly turning (that was a variable under study) in critically ill tube-fed patients receiving mechanical ventilation (that's the population) in whom pneumonia (that's a variable) did or did not develop for three consecutive days of data collection study (that's a method again)." You can see how this one sentence is giving a lot of knowledge to the reader saying, "Okay, here's what Brenda is going to look at. Here's what she's going to do, a descriptive study." I'll go into that.

Here's what she's going to do, her methods. Descriptive study, data collection study. That's kind of repetitive and I took this directly out of Houser, so I really would word-craft this to come back and put data collection with descriptive, so I might say, "The objective of this descriptive doesn't through data collection was to compare." Variables under study are great, so there's lots of variables we're going to collect in the study in the end, but our major outcome variables are going to be to see how bihourly turning prevents pneumonia, so obviously we're going to have to measure those two things in various ways. The population in the setting is an implied in this one. I didn't have to say, "Within an ICU." We might do that later on when we get really specific in our methods, but right now it's implied, the population certainly stated. In the setting of an ICU is implied.

Now let's move to one more thing here, a general discussion about unbiased versus biased research statements. Sometimes we're declarative in a way that's actually biased. We want to say, "This study will be done to prove this." That really has a bias. You're already saying you're going to prove it and it implies that all your methods will be to prove it. You're really exploring. That gives you more validity, to say, "We're going to look at this. We don't know what the outcomes are going to be. We're certainly going to control as much as we can in this study to get some accurate results, but we're not going to be really pushy on the bias kind of statements."

This leads us, any time readers say, "Oh, they're going to prove this, so they're going to see it. If they're looking for it, they're going to see it and they're going to prove it," that really lends readers to question the validity of your methods or your beliefs, and were you really unbiased when you went into this? So just watch for how you word it to be the most unbiased you can. There's other things with bias I should just say, and Tappen definitely will guide you to it, as many other researchers will as well, but this is one way to look at bias in your problem statements, in your purpose statements.

Another thing that you want to explore is, does your purpose statement fit where you're going to launch to next, your research design? This is a little trickier to get into, but you can just kind of feel it as you go along and you can read about good fit. Your argument here, your problem and your purpose statement are kind of leading you to say, "Thus, we're going to do this kind of study." Definitely Tappen and Houser and others research texts will give you a good way to look at how your research design fits well with your research question. Research questions should really grow your research design.

I've got another topic here and you can see one statement says, "The purpose was to determine the direction and strength of the relationships between depression and independence." The other one says, "The purpose of the study was to measure the effects of depression." One might be, if you were doing a quantitative correlational design, you can see relationships has more with correlations than just measuring the effects, so a good versus a bad fit is a little bit of a slippery thing and you will come to that more in SKT2, but right now it's something to just think about, to look at what you're saying.

When you finally finish your problem and your purpose and you say, "Okay, the purpose of this study is to determine what?" it's going to lead you more to understanding what your design will be, but first you have to get ready for your research questions, so that will be another webinar. Thank you for tuning in to this one and hope it was helpful. Here's my data or my contact information, so please feel free to contact me. Thanks. Bye.