GB890 Unit 8 Purpose Statement Exercise Example

Three Drafts of One Sentence: A Unit 8 Purpose Statement Exercise for a Supervisor Safety Project

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB890: Doctoral Project I: Problem Statement and Background Research

Unit 8 Purpose Statement Exercise

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Corliss Baking Company and its plants are composite and illustrative; the methods sources cited are real.

Part One: The Problem Statement as It Stands

After the framework in Unit 7, the problem statement reads, with its key phrases numbered for reference: At Corliss Baking Company, over half of recordable injuries occur among associates within ninety days of placement (1), most of them agency temporaries (2), while shift supervisors raise safety mainly at orientation and in scripted shift-start routines (3). Published interventions show that supervisory safety communication can improve group safety climate (4), but they have been tested only in crews with stable membership (5). Whether supervisor-delivered feedback works in high-churn crews is unknown (6), and Corliss's leadership lacks evidence on whether such feedback, produced by its own safety staff (7), would change crew climate and near-miss reporting (8).

Part Two: Three Drafts

Draft one. The purpose of this project is to reduce recordable injuries across Corliss's plants by improving supervisors' safety communication.

*Diagnosis.* This draft fails for two reasons. First, the problem statement never claims the project will reduce injuries; it identifies a gap in evidence about climate and reporting (phrases 6 and 8). A purpose that promises an outcome the problem did not set up has added an element without a source. Second, recordable injuries are too rare to detect a change over one season at a few plants. Across the past three years, all five plants together averaged about 39 recordable cases a year combined, so two intervention plants over twelve weeks might expect only a handful. A purpose built around an outcome the study cannot measure invites a committee to ask what the project will actually show.

Draft two. The purpose of this project is to improve safety culture at Corliss through supervisor engagement.

*Diagnosis.* This draft names a construct, safety culture, that the framework never defined. The framework defines group safety climate narrowly, as what a crew jointly believes about its own supervisor's safety priorities, and deliberately separates it from broader culture. "Supervisor engagement" is equally undefined. The draft also omits the design, the population and the comparison, so a reader cannot tell what the project will do. And "improve" assumes the result.

Draft three. The purpose of this quasi-experimental project is to examine whether weekly feedback to shift supervisors on their safety conversations changes group safety climate and near-miss reporting in crews at two Corliss plants, compared with crews at two matched plants, over twelve weeks.

*Diagnosis.* This draft passes. Each element has a source in the problem statement, as Part Three shows.

Part Three: The Alignment Check

Quasi-experimental. The problem asks whether feedback "would change" climate and reporting (phrase 8), a question about effect that calls for a comparison; plants, not individuals, will be assigned, so the design is quasi-experimental rather than a randomized trial. Creswell and Creswell (2018) note that a purpose statement should name its design, and this one does.

The weekly feedback element. The intervention follows from phrases 3 and 4 and from the feedback procedure Zohar (2002) tested, and "produced by its own safety staff" (phrase 7) is reflected in the procedure, described in the protocol.

Changes. The verb is neutral. It allows for no change or a change in either direction, so the purpose does not presuppose its answer.

Group safety climate and near-miss reporting. These are the outcomes named in phrase 8, both defined in the framework.

Crews at two Corliss plants, compared with crews at two matched plants. The setting follows from phrases 1 and 2, and the comparison follows from the need to separate the feedback's effect from seasonal change.

Over twelve weeks. The period is set by the stretch of the year when Corliss runs neither holiday volume nor summer peaks, so that seasonal demand does not overwhelm the comparison.

A purpose that adds nothing the problem did not ask for is narrower than the project's ambitions, and that is exactly what makes it defensible.

What Draft Three Leaves for the Research Questions

The purpose does not name the moderating role of newcomer and agency status, which the framework treats as central. That role belongs in a research question rather than in the purpose sentence, because a purpose that tried to carry every relationship would become unreadable. The first research question will ask about the overall change; the second will ask whether the change differs in crews with larger shares of newcomers and agency temporaries. Shadish et al. (2002) caution that quasi-experiments must anticipate rival explanations, and the matched comparison plants are the design's main answer to seasonal and plant-wide change.

References

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). SAGE.

Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin.

Zohar, D. (2002). Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 156-163. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.1.156