Requirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research andpractice due to its importance to software project success. Its interdisciplinary nature, thedependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline diffi-cult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, todemonstrate which practically relevant RE problems exist and to what extent they matter.Motivated by this situation, we initiated the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineer-ing (NaPiRE) initiative which constitutes a globally distributed, bi-yearly replicated family of surveys on the status quo and problems in practical RE. In this article, we report on thequalitative analysis of data obtained from 228 companies working in 10 countries in variousdomains and we reveal which contemporary problems practitioners encounter. To this end,we analyse 21 problems derived from the literature with respect to their relevance and crit-icality in dependency to their context, and we complement this picture with a cause-effectanalysis showing the causes and effects surrounding the most critical problems. Our resultsgive us a better understanding of which problems exist and how they manifest themselvesin practical environments. Thus, we provide a first step to ground contributions to RE onempirical observations which, until now, were dominated by conventional wisdom only.