In the Background, you provide context to your research, so that people who have not studied your topic understand what your research is about. In this section, you explain theories, concepts, terms, and relationships between them, that are necessary for a reader to understand your work. This section may also include a bit of history if relevant.
What additional information do you need to provide so that the reader can understand your research report?
For most reports that you will write, you can assume that the reader is an IT professional just like you, but who has not familiar with this specific topic. You do not need to explain general IT knowledge, such as what an operating system is. Think back to when you just started this project: What knowledge on this subject did you not have at the time, which you did need to determine and implement your approach?
Related work
Part of the Background section can be Related work, if relevant. In this section, you can provide an overview of what has been done on this topic until now. What is already known? What does available work already show? What is the difference between your work and what has already been done?
For a good example of Related Work from an actual research report, see the article Promoting Player Empathy for People Living with Poverty, from building block 1.1.2 “Choosing your approach with the DOT Framework”.
As an example for the Curiosity course: Suppose you are researching the types of players in your class. As part of the Background, you explain what types of players you mean (for example, based on Bartle's taxonomy of player types). As for Related work, it might be interesting to show existing research on the distribution of player types, for example in a certain country or on a certain platform. The difference with your research will be that you will look specifically at your class as a target group. Perhaps the distribution of player types is comparable to this existing work, but it could also be quite different, as your classmates are all HBO-IT students!
State of the art
Within the Curiosity course, we are mainly doing research to familiarize ourselves with the domain of game development, but for more standard IT research (as part of the development of a product) it is always wise to take a good look at the state of the art. What existing solutions are already available? Can you reuse parts of it? What is already known from these existing solutions, such as problems you have to watch out for? What is and what is not suitable for your specific situation?