Problem Statement

Problem statement for a thesis

The problem statement of MSc thesis defines the setting, focus and purpose of the work. The key questions that should be answered by a reasonable problem statement can be summarized as follows [1]:

• Problem statement
  • Research questions: What do we want to know?
  • Unit of study: About what?
  • Relevant concepts & theory: Meaning of key terms; What do we know already?
  • Research goal: Why do we want to know?
• Research design
  • What are we going to do to answer the questions?
• Validation of the design
  • Is this going to answer our questions?
• What actually happened
• Analysis of results
• Interpretation

Depending on the topic and type of the thesis, there may be several additional questions that need to be answered. A good set of guidelines for work containing some form of evaluation can be found in the paper linked above.

When planning and carrying out your MSc work, it is important to understand what a reader would expect from such work. The theses should exhibit the application of the principles of repeatability, reproducibility and rigor [2], and it is recommended to plan for appropriate measures during the definition of the problem statement.