Samples of Issues and Problem Statement (Graphic)
The following research is taken from a website. This is just an example or
sample to make you understand how issues and problem statement are
written.
The orange coloured texts are an introduction.
The black coloured texts include the issues in a very well written form.
The blue coloured texts are IN TEXT CITATION (which is a must to show that
you had obtained your issues from documented or written sources).
The red coloured texts are to explain and clarify on why is the researcher so
determined to carry out this research – the researcher need to explain this in
order to address the issues that she or he had included in the previous
paragraphs.
The effect of billboard design specifications on driving: A pilot study
RESEARCH ISSUES AND PROBLEM STATEMENT
Decades of research on the effects of advertising billboards on road accident rates, driver
performance, and driver visual scanning behaviour, has produced no conclusive findings. We suggest
that road safety researchers should shift their focus and attempt to identify the billboard
characteristics that are most distracting to drivers. This line of research may produce concrete
guidelines for permissible billboards that would be likely to reduce the influence of the billboards on
road safety. The current study is a first step towards this end.
The effect of advertising billboards on crash rates, driving performance, and allocation of attention
while driving has been explored over the last seven decades, yet no convincing conclusions have been
drawn. During the 1950s-1970s, the presence of billboards was shown to correlate with higher
accident rates (Ady, 1967; Holohan et al., 1978; Rusch, 1951; Staffeld, 1953). However, more recent
studies have found only minimal correlations (Smiley et al., 2005) or no correlation at all between the
presence of billboards and accident rates (Izadpanah et al., 2014; Yannis et al., 2013).
Over the years contradicting findings regarding the effect of billboards on speed were reported. For
example, Horberry et al. (2006), found that visually loaded settings with multiple elements, including
a greater number of advertising billboards, yielded decreased mean speed. A similar effect of
billboards was also reported by Edquist and Johnston (2008). Recently, Marciano and Yeshurun (2012)
showed that although overall visual load decreased driver speed, the presence of billboards yielded
increased speed.
Other studies explored visual attention drawn to billboards using eye trackers in the field or in a driving
simulator. These studies attempted to assess visual scanning behaviour as a reflection of attention
allocation. For example, a field experiment conducted by Herrstedt et al. (2013) showed that drivers
glanced at a billboard at least once in 69% of all drives and at least twice in about 50% of all drives.
Some researchers claim that these short durations imply that billboards do not distract the driver's
attention to a dangerous degree. For example, in a recent literature review Decker et al. (2015) found
that the time spent looking at the roadway ahead was not affected by the billboards' presence and
that the driver can regulate attention allocated to the billboards when driving demands increase.
This research is one step in a long journey towards classifying various characteristics of advertising
billboards according to their effect on drivers' performance and on the risk of accidents. The ultimate
goal of this research is to lay initial foundations for regulations concerning advertising billboards. In
this study, we focused on billboard characteristics such as percentages of text versus graphics, text
size, and the number of colours, logos, and information items………
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
This research, which is focusing on billboard design is carried out to meet the objectives, which are:
i) to define clusters of billboards classified according to their design specifications.
ii) to examine their effects on the performance of two different driving-related tasks − a tracking task
and a colour-change identification task.