'I Need Answers!' ... The Quest of the Research Problem

What problem do you wish to solve? What questions do you hope to answer? What pertinent knowledge do you want to uncover? What do you aspire to prove?

These are among the questions you will need to answer before you can write a "problem statement" for a proposal or research paper ... and certainly before you can begin writing the paper itself.

When most graduate students begin their journey, they have only a general idea in mind for their topic, e.g., "women's poverty in Senegal." The far more difficult task is to specifically define what they wish to discover about "women's poverty in Senegal." The purpose of a research paper or thesis is to answer a research question (or questions). Read the entire article on research problems...