In UTM’s thesis format, Chapter 1 consists of five main sections namely Background of Study, Problem Statement, Objectives, Scope of Study and Significance of Study.
In this write-up, we will focus on the Problem Statement section. In fact for new researcher, I would recomment preparing your research proposal starting from this section. This could help for those who are wondering what should go to Problem Statement and what to be included in Background of Study.
The reason for writing Problem Statement first is rather straightforward. Assuming that you are new to research or in the case where you are working as part of a research team, you will usually have a research topic assigned to you. This also works if you are the one who proposed the research topic.
You will then proceed with literature reviews on the topic. As you go through all the tonnes of research articles, you will gained understanding on research work performed with regards to the field. We will talk about what do we want to achieve in this first stage of literature review later.
The point is that after making the first (or may be more) round(s) of literature review, you will have a rough idea what people are working in your field. Next you will need to SYNTHESIZE the idea of the research articles that you have found and PROPOSE YOUR OWN IDEA of what to be added on (or improve) on top of these previous studies. This is your Problem Statement!
Here you see that the flow of idea in writing the Problem Statement section is rather natural, provided that you have a reasonable understanding on what is going on in the field. You will discussed:
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what people have done,
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what are the limitation(s) and
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what you think should be done to address this issue.
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There you go – the gist of what should be in this section. After reading this section, one should be able to gather information on the progress in the field leading to what is the problem that you want to solve.
One important thing not to be missed – you must have citations in the Problem Statement section!
Personally, I think this is extremely important. The reason is because you want to propose a work. And this work is not going to be a stand-alone thing. But it is rather a continuation of what others have done.
So if you don’t include citations, then readers would not be able to appreciate the progress in the field and more specifically in your work. It is going to be hard to make a mark on the novelty part of your study. You cannot claim that all of what you plan to do is novel. But rather you defend the novelty of your work through proper citation.
To conclude, I suggest that you write the Problem Statement part if you find it hard to start. Yet, you need to have at least some minimal literature review process before proceeding with this – but this is kind of to be expected, right. And lastly, do not forget to include the references in this section.
