RES 6013 Module 2 Problem Statement and Research Questions Example

When New Nurses Leave Small Rural Hospitals: A Problem Statement, Purpose Statement and Research Questions for an Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Study

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6013: Research Methods

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

Module 1 chose pragmatism for a dissertation about new nurses who leave the three small hospitals where I coordinate the nurse residency program. A topic, though, is not a problem. Ellis and Levy (2008) warned that novice researchers often begin with an interesting subject and only later discover that no clear, documented problem lies beneath it. This paper turns my topic into a problem statement grounded in evidence, writes a purpose statement for the design I plan and drafts research questions that follow from both.

From Topic to Problem

My topic is new nurses quitting before their first anniversary. Narrowed, it becomes a problem: newly licensed registered nurses leave small rural hospitals in south Georgia within twelve months of hire, so often that staffing and budgets suffer, and no one knows why. The narrowed version names who is affected, where, what is happening and what is missing. It also avoids the most common mistake in problem statements, which is to state a solution as the problem, as in saying that the hospitals lack a mentoring program. That may be true, but assuming it would build the answer into the question before the study begins.

Problem Statement

The general problem is that a large share of new registered nurses do not stay with the employer that first hires them. In a national panel study following new nurses from the start of their careers, nearly 18 in every 100 had left that employer inside twelve months (Kovner et al., 2014). Every early exit forces the hospital to pay again to advertise, hire and train someone new and places extra shifts on experienced staff.

The specific problem is that small rural hospitals appear to lose new nurses at even higher rates, yet the reasons have not been studied in hospitals of their size. Across the three south Georgia hospitals in this study, each with fewer than 60 beds, 14 of 52 newly licensed nurses hired from 2023 through 2025, or 26.9%, left within their first year, according to the system's human resources records. The best-known comparison of rural and urban settings, by Baernholdt and Mark (2009), found that work environment and unit characteristics were associated with turnover in both, and that rural hospitals could improve retention partly by offering more educational opportunities. Their national sample, however, included only hospitals with 99 to 450 beds, leaving out the small hospitals that serve much of rural Georgia. What is not known is why newly licensed nurses leave hospitals of this size, and which of those reasons are common enough for leaders to act on.

Why the Problem Matters

The problem matters to three groups. For the hospitals, each lost new nurse represents months of orientation and preceptor time without a return. For the communities, small hospitals are often the only source of emergency and inpatient care for a county, and short staffing can lead to diverted ambulances or closed beds. For nursing education, programs that prepare graduates for rural practice need evidence about what helps those graduates stay. A study that explains turnover in this setting could guide residency design across similar hospitals.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this exploratory sequential mixed methods study is to understand why newly licensed registered nurses leave small rural hospitals in south Georgia during their first year of practice and to determine which of the identified factors are associated with first-year departure. In the first, qualitative phase, interviews with both stayers and leavers will explore their experiences of the first year. In the second, quantitative phase, a survey built from the interview findings will be given to newly licensed nurses across small rural hospitals in the region, and their employment status at one year will be recorded. The phases will be integrated by using qualitative themes to build the survey and by interpreting the quantitative results in light of the interviews.

Population and Setting

The population is registered nurses within twelve months of first licensure who work at small rural hospitals in south Georgia, defined here as hospitals with fewer than 100 beds in counties the federal government classifies as rural. The qualitative phase will draw participants from the three hospitals where I work, including nurses who left within the past two years and can still be reached. The quantitative phase will widen the setting to small rural hospitals across the region so that the survey sample is large enough for analysis and the findings are not tied to one system's culture. Recruiting nurses who have already left is the hardest part of the plan, and Module 4 will address it.

Research Questions

Each phase needs its own question, and a mixed methods study needs a third question about how the phases fit together.

Qualitative question: How do newly licensed registered nurses describe their experiences during the first year of practice in small rural hospitals, and how do those who left explain their decisions?

Quantitative question: Which factors identified in the qualitative phase are associated with first-year departure among newly licensed registered nurses in small rural hospitals in south Georgia?

Integration question: To what extent do the quantitative results confirm, extend or contradict the reasons that nurses described in interviews?

Key Terms

Three terms need fixed definitions so that both phases measure the same thing. Newly licensed registered nurse means a nurse who passed the licensure examination no more than 12 months before hire and has no prior registered nurse employment. First-year departure means leaving the hiring hospital for any reason within 12 months of the start date, which follows the employer-based definition Kovner et al. (2014) discussed, though it counts transfers to another hospital in the same system as staying. Small rural hospital means a hospital with fewer than 100 beds in a rural county, a cutoff chosen to capture the hospitals left out of earlier research.

Checking Alignment

Alignment means that each element follows from the one before it. The problem names an unexplained high turnover rate in a specific setting. The purpose promises to understand the reasons and test which ones matter, which matches the two halves of the gap: why nurses leave and which reasons are common. The qualitative question asks how and why, suited to interviews; the quantitative question asks which factors are associated with an outcome, suited to a survey and statistical analysis; and the third question cannot be answered unless both sets of results are read side by side. The quantitative question deliberately uses association rather than cause, because a survey of this kind cannot support causal claims.

Questions Considered and Rejected

Two drafts were set aside. The first asked whether a mentoring program would reduce turnover, which assumed a solution and would require an intervention study. The second asked what percentage of new nurses leave small rural hospitals, which the hospitals' own records can answer without research. Rejecting them sharpened the final questions, which ask what is not known and cannot be answered without a study.

Conclusion

The problem is a first-year turnover rate of about 27% in small rural hospitals whose reasons have not been studied, documented with local records and set against national research that leaves out hospitals of this size. The purpose statement and three research questions follow directly from that gap. The next step is design: Module 3 will justify the exploratory sequential design in detail.

References

Baernholdt, M., & Mark, B. A. (2009). The nurse work environment, job satisfaction and turnover rates in rural and urban nursing units. Journal of Nursing Management, 17(8), 994-1001. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2834.2009.01027.x

Ellis, T. J., & Levy, Y. (2008). Framework of problem-based research: A guide for novice researchers on the development of a research-worthy problem. Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 11, 17-33. https://doi.org/10.28945/438

Kovner, C. T., Brewer, C. S., Fatehi, F., & Jun, J. (2014). What does nurse turnover rate mean and what is the rate? Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 15(3-4), 64-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527154414547953