A Statement of Intent allows you to consider how your work will be valuable to a specific research field, as the statement contextualizes your work and ensures that you seek to ethically and responsibly contribute to that field.  Ultimately, this statement is a summative paragraph about your research’s value to you and those who are involved with the issue. It can also be called a Statement of Purpose, allowing you to state exactly how you want to approach the issue along with demonstrating to your peers how and why you are concerned with the research issue.
A Statement of Intent is a statement of your goals and interests within the research issue. This step should be self-reflective so that you, and ultimately others, know exactly why you have chosen, researched, and found sources about this issue and how you anticipate it will benefit the wider academic and scholarly communities. Perhaps the worst feeling as a researcher is to be writing and researching about a topic for which you have no passion and know has no lasting value. Think carefully about your research interests and ideas, and you’ll hopefully have little issue avoiding those pitfalls.
For many residential classes at Liberty, you will have the chance to explain why you picked an issue during in-class discussions; however, since we are operating within an online format for this course, this Statement of Intent allows you a chance to understand how you plan to use this issue to contribute to your academic field.