Developing a dissertation research problem: A guide for doctoral students in human resource development and adult education
Ronald Lynn Jacobs · New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development · 2013
For most doctoral students, the dissertation represents the most gratifying, and perhaps the most challenging, phase of their academic programs.Until this point, students have focused mostly on the scholarly works of others.Now they have the opportunity through their dissertation to focus exclusively on which topic interests them the most.A review of the many doctoral programs in human resource development and adult education suggests that they vary widely in terms of their expectations for the dissertation.Some doctoral programs explicitly seek to prepare future researchers or academics, leading to the expectation that their students' dissertations will advance some theoretical model and likely use a sophisticated data-analysis technique as well.Other doctoral programs with a different focus might seek to prepare scholar-practitioners, leading to a different expectation for the purpose of the dissertation.These studies might examine some aspect of professional practice or a topical organizational issue, without a particular emphasis on building theory as an outcome.Regardless of the nature of the program, the one constant for all dissertations, and for all research for that matter, is the need to state the problem of the study based on the scholarly literature.Doctoral programs commonly require that students take a sequence of research courses that usually focus on how to carry-out a study.That is, the design, the methodology, and the data-analysis techniques, whether they be quantitative or qualitative in nature.Unfortunately, what is often omitted from most research sequences is an understanding of what constitutes a research problem in the first place and how to articulate the problem statement in a logical manner.Some might view such information as being of lesser importance, considering all the various tasks that a dissertation requires.In fact, the problem statement serves a critical foundational role for all research.What value is a study that uses the most advanced research methodology, such as structural equation modeling, but the reason for actually doing the analysis remained uncertain?Or what value is a study that assumes the reader understands the problem as well as the author?How to communicate the research problem demands more than good writing skills alone, though New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development, 25 (3) 104this aspect is an essential competency.For many students as emerging scholars, constructing the problem statement often presents an intellectual challenge of a new sort, apart from designing the study and analyzing the data.This article has four purposes.First, the article discusses the role of the problem statement in doing research in human resource development and adult education.Second, it discusses the various bases for deriving problems for doing research.Third, it presents a four-part logical system, or syllogism, for constructing problem statements.Finally, the article discusses the implications for attending to the problem statement.