64 5 The Introductory Chapter
current theory, but not here. In summary, a ‘Statement of the Problem’ or ‘Motiva-
tion for the Study’ generally contains four parts:
- A brief history of the issue at hand (‘Since the early 1950s, there has been ...’).
- A recent increase of the issue (‘Recently, however, an increase in the ...’).
- Dissatisfaction with current knowledge (‘To date, however, the lack of ...’).
- An identification of specific set of factors (‘In particular, a focus on ...’).
Aim and Scope of the Study
Alastair was examining discrimination against the burakumin, an underprivileged
group in Japan whose ancestors were outcasts because they worked in the unclean
leather and butchery industries. He couldn’t work out what he was trying to do in
the whole project, even though he had written the background chapters and had
prepared a paper for an international journal based on one of them. The following is
the research aim he had written.
The aim of the research is to establish which groups of mainstream Japanese continue
to harbour anti-burakumin attitudes, analyze what those attitudes are and why they have
remained extant, and to investigate which political measures are needed to solve the
problem.However, he had actually announced four aims in the same sentence:
- To establish which groups of mainstream Japanese continue to harbour anti-
burakumin attitudes. - To analyze what these attitudes are.
- To determine why they have remained extant.
- To investigate what political measures are needed to solve the problem.
What was the real aim? Almost certainly it was the last one. The other three were
steps in the research method. He knew that he would not be able to make any sug-
gestions about how ‘the problem’ could be solved unless he knew where it lay,
and why it had persisted from the 1870s to this day. His problem statement would
need to outline the problem step by step: that the Japanese government had for-
mally declared these people to be outcasts in the 1870s; that their outcast status had
become entrenched by custom until after World War II and that, as a result, they
were discriminated against in education, employment, social welfare, and marriage;
that the government passed legislation in 1969 to attempt to bring the social status
of these people up to mainstream norms; but that, despite this, discrimination, al-
though not as marked and no longer government policy, was still quite persistent.
Thus the ‘problem’ was to find what an enlightened government might do next.
Alastair needed to state that his aim was to solve this problem, not to tell the reader
how he was going to solve it. The first three of his ‘aims’ should not appear until
his research design chapter (see Chap. 7). And, having identified the problem, he