How to Write a Problem Statement and a Purpose Statement for Your Thesis or Dissertation

The problem statement and the purpose statement are two of the shortest passages in your dissertation, and committees read them more closely than almost anything else. Every later decision is checked against them. If your sample, your instruments, or your analysis cannot be traced back to these two paragraphs, the study has lost its anchor.

Students often treat them as one thing, or write one and let the other follow loosely. They do different jobs. The problem statement says what is wrong or missing. The purpose statement says what you will do about it.

The problem statement

A problem statement has three working parts, and the order matters.

What is known. One or two sentences establish the situation with a source behind them. "Rural secondary schools in several countries struggle to keep qualified teachers" is a claim, and it needs a citation to earn a place in a dissertation.

What is not known or not working. This is the gap or the difficulty, and it is the center of the paragraph. It has to be specific. "Little research exists on teachers" is too wide to be a gap. "Studies of teacher retention have focused on urban districts, and the experience of teachers in remote schools has not been examined" names a population and a limit in the evidence.

Why it matters. Say who is affected and what follows if the problem continues. A reader should finish the paragraph convinced that leaving it alone has a cost.

Check the paragraph against one test. Can it be read without your topic being named and still describe something that needs fixing or understanding? "Teacher retention in rural schools" is a topic. A problem statement sounds more like a finding about the state of knowledge or practice.

Evidence carries the weight here. A problem resting on your own experience or on a single opinion piece invites the question "how do you know?" Cite government data, peer-reviewed studies, or institutional reports, and cite recent ones where the problem is a current one.

The purpose statement

The purpose statement is usually one sentence, sometimes two. It tells the reader what the study will do, by what approach, with whom, and where. Most programs teach a script, and many chairs expect you to follow it. A common qualitative form reads: "The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study is to explore how principals in rural public secondary schools in Nyanza County, Kenya, describe the practices they use to keep teachers." A common quantitative form reads: "The purpose of this quantitative correlational study is to examine the relationship between teacher workload and intention to leave among public secondary school teachers in Nyanza County, Kenya." The wording above is sample phrasing to show the pattern, so replace every element with your own.

Four elements should be visible in any version: the design, the verb, the focus, and the participants or setting.

The verb carries more than students expect. "Explore," "describe," and "understand" belong to qualitative inquiry and some descriptive designs. "Test," "compare," "predict," and "examine the relationship" belong to quantitative ones. A purpose that says "explore" but is followed by a survey with statistical tests will be questioned at the proposal.

How the two connect to the research questions

Read the three in sequence. The problem names a gap. The purpose says how the study responds to that gap. The research questions break the purpose into parts that data can answer.

Take the purpose above. Its questions might ask how principals describe retention practices, which of those practices they judge most effective, and what conditions they say limit them. Each question stays inside the purpose, and each can be answered by interview data. A question about teachers' salaries across the country would not belong, because the purpose does not reach it.

The mismatches that cost students time are predictable:

• A problem statement about teacher retention and a purpose statement about teacher job satisfaction. These are different variables, and the committee will ask which one you are studying.
• A purpose that names one population while the research questions assume another.
• A design named in the purpose that differs from the design described in Chapter 3.
• Terms that shift. If the problem says "turnover," the purpose says "attrition," and the questions say "retention," define each word or choose one.

Revising them

Write both statements early so that they guide the work, and revise them last. By the time your data are analyzed, you know what the study did, and the statements should describe that study and not the one you first planned. Any change must be carried through Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5.

Then give them to someone who has not read your proposal. Ask them to say, in their own words, what problem you are addressing and what your study does about it. If their version differs from yours, the statements are not yet clear.

Chapter 1 places both statements within the rest of the chapter, and our article on whether your introduction is doing its job looks at how the chapter builds your argument.

If you want an independent read on whether your problem, purpose, and questions line up, a chapter review gives written feedback and recommendations. The wording and the argument stay yours.