Narrowing and Defining the Problem

In one line

Narrowing is done by adding restrictions until the problem can be answered, and the statement of the problem is the paragraph that records where the restrictions ended up.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: narrowing a research problem consists in progressively restricting its scope by reference to subject matter, population, place, time and aspect, until the problem is small enough to be resolved by the evidence the researcher can obtain; the statement of the problem is the formal expression of the narrowed problem, setting out the context, the specific difficulty, its scope and the evidence that will resolve it.

The five dimensions on which to narrow

Subject matter. From legal aid, to legal aid at the pre-trial stage, to the duty to inform an accused at first production.

Population. From accused persons, to accused persons produced for remand, to those produced in one court.

Place. From India, to Maharashtra, to one district, to one court.

Time. From always, to the last five years, to six weeks.

Aspect. From everything about the duty, to whether it is performed, leaving why to a later study or to a subsidiary question.

A student should narrow on all five deliberately, and record what was excluded at each step, because those exclusions become the scope and limitations, chapter 1280.

A worked example: the five steps

Start. Legal aid in India.

Step one, subject matter. Not the whole of legal aid but the criminal side, and within it the stage before trial, because that is where Khatri and Suk Das place the duty, chapter 630.

Now: legal aid at the pre-trial stage.

Step two, aspect. Not whether the law is adequate, which is normative, chapter 1050, but whether an existing duty is performed.

Now: whether the duty to inform an accused of the right to free legal services is performed.

Step three, population and place. Not all accused persons in India, but those produced for remand in one named court.

Now: whether accused persons produced for remand in one named court are informed of the right.

Step four, time. A defined period, six consecutive weeks, with the dates stated.

Step five, operational definition. What counts as informed, chapter 1050: words addressed to the accused, in a language they appear to follow, stating that a lawyer can be provided at State cost, whether spoken by the magistrate or by a court officer.

The narrowed problem. Whether, in the remand proceedings of one named court over six named weeks, accused persons were informed, in the sense defined, of the right to free legal services at State cost.

Notice what narrowing did. It did not make the problem trivial. It made it answerable, and the answer bears directly on a right the Supreme Court created and on a trial's validity.