Draft your Purpose of the Study
Topic 3: Background and Introduction

The Purpose of the Study illustrates what the study will do, which should reflect the statement of the problem. The purpose also discusses how you will conduct your study and the kinds of comparisons you will make. The most essential component to the purpose of the study is introducing the Research Questions and Hypotheses (if applicable) of your study.

As you draft your Purpose of the Study, consider the following:

• Broadly, a component of the purpose of the study is to describe what the study will do and should include reference to the areas defined in the statement of the problem.
• Generally, a component of the purpose of the study is to provide a discussion of how the various areas are interrelated as well as serve to generate research questions that arise as a result of examining the discrete areas of the literature on the problem.
• Specifically, a component of the purpose of the study is to introduce your Research Questions and the theory that will serve as the lens for examining your problem. 
  • What are Research Questions (RQ)? 
  • How do the RQs address the focus of your research problem? 
  • What will the study do? 
  • How will you conduct your study? Will you make comparisons? Will you do something else?
  • What theory and/or model will you use to explain why things happen?
    

Doctoral students have often started the dissertation process by declaring that they want to do a quantitative or qualitative study or that they are going to use a certain survey or interview protocol before they have considered the research question they will be answering. Like the adage of putting the cart before the horse, determining a research design or approach or method of data gathering before knowing the research question can result in frustration, a mismatch between research question and design, and, ultimately, fail to answer the question or yield usable data.

The purpose of a research question is to learn something about a phenomenon, problem, or entity in a refined way. Considering you are likely to research a domain or area that has been researched before, there are multiple points thorough which you can examine this problem.

The goal of the RQ, then, is to ask it in a way that indicates the specific angle(s) you want to examine. Consider the following:

• What is the influence of television on teenage behavior?

This indicates a specific domain (television) and population (teenagers) and phenomenon (behavior).  But, think about all that would have to be considered due to its generality.

• What aspects of TV would we examine? Sitcoms, dramas, commercials, soap operas, public TV, cable, movies of the week, and etc.?
• What demographic of teenager? 13-15? Rural? Urban? Suburban? Ethnicity? Socioeconomic status? 
• What about behavior? In school? Home? Both? In society? Positive behaviors? Negative behaviors?

Now, it is possible to answer the question as is, but it would demand a lot of time and effort to address all the possible variables that would need to be included in such a general question.

What if we refined it?

• What is the influence of cable TV dramas that depict violence and urban teenage boys compliance with school rules?

This one can still be edited, but notice that it specifies the domain (cable TV dramas) the population (urban teenage boys—can still refine this by SES or ethnicity) and the behavior (compliance with school rules).