To Define a Problem

The word “problem,” in the context of research, defies the dictionary definition, which connotes difficulty, doubt, and hin­drance. While engaged in searching in new territory, that is, researching, a struggle involving difficulty, doubt, and hindrance is to be expected. But that is not what the word signifies. Instead, it serves as a loose definition to indicate a certain subject area or topic of intellectual interest with implied (but shifting) bound­aries, within which an exploration of, or cause-effect relation in, nature is expected. Using the analogy of hunting, the problem is the game animal, now showing, now hiding, always tempting; the researcher is the pursuer, the hunter, the tempted. Thus, any investigation or research is necessarily linked to a problem; the nature of the research is dictated by the nature of the problem.

Confining ourselves to science, we may think of two kinds of problems: those in pure (or fundamental) science, and those in applied science. Problems in pure science are aimed at getting a better understanding of certain segments of nature than we so far have, nature being meant to include all aspects of the ani­mate and inanimate world, including humans. Fragmented into many aspects, and each aspect having only ad hoc answers to several questions we may ask, there is ample scope for generating problems to engage several researchers. Almost always, more attempts to answer lead to more questions. Some answers may be obtained by careful observation of the particular aspect of nature as it operates, unaided or undisturbed to the extent possi­ble, by the observer. Such research tends to be theoretical. It may so happen that such observation can be better explained in terms of mathematical relations, a good example being the laws of planetary motion.

On the other hand, many of the problems of pure science, aimed at confirmation of hypothetical answers, as well as almost all problems of applied science and technology, are experimental in nature. In these, man creates a setup in which that segment of nature under examination is “fenced in” so that he can observe its behavior in reaction to several actions he can impose. Quite often, in such experiments, some kind of counting or quantita­tive comparison is involved, which we may call measurement. Most problems of applied science depend on observation, mea­surement, and the relation among events—qualitative, quantita­tive, or both. Hence, it is in such problems that experimental research gains significance. The numerous questions that we may ask about nature, most of them details in segmented domains, each constitute a problem. Some answers to ques- tions—“solutions” to problems—fortunately, we already have. But the yet-to-be-answered questions abound, and their number keeps increasing with no end in sight. Most of the questions in applied science are “use” based and, as such, out of the, say, hun­dreds of questions that can be asked about a particular subject, only some are significant from the viewpoint of current priori-ties; other questions are either unknown or can wait their turn to become problems.

Source: Srinagesh K (2005), The Principles of Experimental Research, Butterworth-Heinemann; 1st edition.