This week was extremely challenging. I personally had a hard time completing this week’s assignment as well as a team assignment. There were many things happening at once. Frankly, I believe that having two assignments at once shouldn’t take place, since it requires much individual effort and team effort to complete everything in a timely manner. Moreover, we also need to understand that most of the students at The University of Phoenix are full-time employees and parents, as well. In my case, I was going crazy as my schedule at work has changed. So, I was working 9.2 hours for the whole week. Additionally, I was a team leader for this week’s assignment. Summing up, it was just a tough week for me.
On the other hand, this week I devoted most of my time learning about dissertation. I visited the UoP library to get a dissertation for this week’s discussion. This opened my eyes to the many worlds of dissertation that is offered to the students during this program. However, there is one certain thing that I have discovered for myself - you cannot find the problem and purpose statement that easy.
During the time I was reviewing some of the problem statement from my peers, I became fully aware of some common and major mistakes such as failure to clearly identify the methodological approach in the problem statement, failure to use the correct verbiage such as “the problem is”, and finally, I learnt how to make proper citations. In fact, Hernon and Metoyer (Hernon and Metoyer-Duran, 1993 and Metoyer-Duran and Hernon, 1994) discovered nine attributes that respondents related to problem statements (Hernon & Metoyer-Duran, 1993, pp. 82–83):
1.Clarity and precision (a well-written statement does not make sweeping generalizations and irresponsible statements);
2. Identification of what would be studied, while avoiding the use of value-laden words and terms;
3. Identification of an overarching question and key factors or variables;
4. Identification of key concepts and terms;
5. Articulation of the study's boundaries or parameters;
6. Some generalizability;
7.Conveyance of the study's importance, benefits, and justification (regardless of the type of research, it is important to address the “so what” question and to demonstrate that the research is not trivial);
8.No use of unnecessary jargon; and
9.Conveyance of more than the mere gathering of descriptive data providing a snapshot.
References
Hernon and Metoyer-Duran, 1993P. Hernon, C. Metoyer-Duran Problem statements: An exploratory study of their function, significance, and form Library & Information Science Research, 15 (1993), pp. 71–92
