Aims, Objectives and Questions in a Proposal
Four words get used as though they were one, and the supplied material formally defines only some of them. What it does supply is a constraint on the questions that turns out to be more useful than any of the definitions.
What one component puts into a single section
That is a compact instruction carrying three separable deliverables. The purpose says why the study exists. The questions say what will be answered. The aims say what the study is trying to achieve, and the source ties them back to the other two rather than letting them float.
The full component table and its thirteen rows are set out at Components of a Research Proposal. This page stays inside one row.
THE FOUR TERMS, AND HOW MUCH THE SOURCE SAYS ABOUT EACH
| Term | What the source states | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Stated "clearly and succinctly", and "expressed in the broader context" | No length, no form, no worked example, and no test for succinct |
| Research questions | "Outlines key research questions"; they are "usually What, How, Why, or What if"; they "should be few, so that the focus is manageable" | No number, no criterion for few, and no rule about sub-questions |
| Aims | "Aims relate to purpose and questions" | Aims are never defined, and the nature of the relation is never specified |
| Objectives | Named twice — the week's own stated objectives include deciding on "aims, objectives/outcomes", and a later instruction says to "develop your aims and objectives" | Never defined anywhere in the supplied material, and not a row in the component table |
The first two columns reproduce the supplied teaching source. The third column is this page's reading of what the source does not cover.
The chain, and where the source stops
The material sets an order. In settling on your research question you are told to revisit the first four elements of the research process, then to keep narrowing until the idea can be stated as one thing.
- Select a topic
- Review literature
- Conceptualise
- Define the research question
- Develop aims and objectives
The last link in that chain is stated outright: "When you have the properly conceptualised research statement or question(s), the next step is to develop your aims and objectives." Aims come after the question, not before it, and not alongside it.
That ordering has a practical consequence. Aims written before the question is settled tend to be aims for the topic rather than for the study — worthy, broad and unattached to anything you will actually do.
The purpose statement: succinct, then situated
"Clearly and succinctly" and "expressed in the broader context" pull in opposite directions, and that is deliberate. The first demands compression; the second demands that the compressed statement be placed against something larger than itself.
Two moves in one component
The succinct statement
What this study is for, in a form a reader can repeat back after one pass. If a colleague who has read only this sentence cannot tell someone else what you are doing, it is not yet succinct — it is short.
The broader context
The same purpose placed against the state of knowledge, the practice, or the organisational situation it belongs to. This is what stops the purpose reading as a personal preference. The same demand appears in a different form in the ethics application, which asks you to place your aims in the context of existing research or practice.
"Should be few, so that the focus is manageable"
This is the most useful sentence in the component, and it is easy to read past. It is not a style preference. A research question is a commitment to obtain a particular body of evidence, analyse it and report the result — inside a fixed word count and a fixed schedule.
Questions multiply for social reasons rather than intellectual ones. Each interested party gets one. Each interesting thing you noticed during the literature search gets one. The set grows and nothing in the design grows with it.
Tests for whether a question belongs in the set
What, How, Why or What if
The source names four opening words and hedges the list with "usually", so it is a pattern rather than a closed set. A question opening "To what extent" or "Which" is not ruled out. What the four stems do is signal, before any method is named, what kind of answer is being promised.
WHAT EACH STEM COMMITS YOUR DESIGN TO
| Stem | Kind of answer promised | What the design then has to deliver |
|---|---|---|
| What… | A state of affairs — what is the case, what exists, what varies | A defensible way of counting or characterising. The work is in the instrument and the sampling, not in the argument |
| How… | A process or mechanism — how something is done, how it came about | Access to the process itself: observation, records that captured it, or people who were there while it happened |
| Why… | An explanation — causes, reasons, motives | The most expensive stem. Either a design that can rule out rival explanations, or an interpretive account that is explicit about not claiming to |
| What if… | A consequence of a change that has not been made | A model, a hypothetical treatment, or a testable prediction. This is the stem that most often turns into a hypothesis |
The four stems are the source's. The mapping in columns two and three is this page's analysis, drawn from the same material's distinction between descriptive, explanatory and evaluative work.
Mixing stems inside a small set is normal and often good — a what question that establishes the state of affairs, followed by a why question that explains it. Mixing them without noticing is not. The categories behind these stems are worked through at Descriptive, Explanatory and Evaluative Research, and the what if case leads directly to Formulating and Testing a Hypothesis.
Aims, objectives and the one-to-one pairing
The source's only statement about aims is that they relate to purpose and questions. It gives no form and no count. Since objectives are never defined at all, the useful move is to look at what examined work actually does with them.
One of the five works surveyed for this library — a portfolio thesis built from three papers — pairs them explicitly. Every set of research questions is immediately restated as a matching list of objectives in infinitive form, one objective per question, in the same order: to recognise, to investigate, to explore.
A research question
- Written from the reader's side: what they will know at the end
- Interrogative, and answerable by evidence
- Silent about method — it states the debt, not the repayment
- Few in number, because each one is a separate commitment
An objective, as the examined work writes them
- Written from your side: what you will do
- Infinitive form — to recognise, to investigate, to explore
- One per question, in the same order as the questions
- Traceable into the design section, where the doing gets specified
The value of the pairing is diagnostic. If a question has no matching objective, nothing in the study answers it. If an objective has no matching question, you are doing work nobody asked for. Both defects are visible in five minutes and invisible without the pairing.
Getting from an idea to one statement
The material is blunt about where the difficulty lies: "The problem should not be one of having no ideas; the problem should be in deciding on which idea to focus on for your research project." It then supplies two sets of questions to run against candidate ideas.
The refining sequence the source describes
Interrogate the literature
What are the authors saying about the topic? What is known? What has been thoroughly explored? What do those authors recommend for further research? What is yet to be explored, and is any of it something you could or should explore?
Interrogate the method others used
What methodologies did these researchers use? What data collection methods? Those two questions are asked of the literature you have already read, not of a methods textbook.
Interrogate your own access
Where would you conduct the research? Do you have access to a site or an organisation? What kinds of data would produce new knowledge here? Where is that data — in records and reports, or in the testimony of people you would reach through interviews or focus groups? Do you have access? And why would you gather it that way?
Accept or reject, quickly
"You need to be able to accept and reject a topic quickly." Every research idea needs to be properly defined and refined, and most of them will not survive the access question.
Compress to one thing
"At the end of this process you should be able to state your idea for your research project in one statement or question." One. Not a paragraph, not a list.
That single statement is where component 5 begins. The wider refining process is treated at Refining Your Topic Before the Proposal, and the question-formulation craft at Step 4: Deciding Your Research Question.
Checking the set before it goes in
Pre-submission check on purpose, questions, aims and objectives
- The purpose survives being read on its own, without the questions underneath it
- The purpose is placed against something larger than the study — a state of knowledge, a practice, or an organisational situation
- Every question opens with What, How, Why, What if or a defensible equivalent, and you know which kind of answer each promises
- The number of questions is small enough that your one design can answer all of them
- No question depends on data your access questions told you that you cannot get
- Each question has one objective, and each objective has one question
- Objectives are written as things you will do, in infinitive form, and every one of them reappears in the research design section
- The aims can be traced back to the purpose and forward to the questions without a gap in the chain
What to carry forward
- One component carries three deliverables. Purpose says why, questions say what will be answered, aims say what the study is for — and the source ties aims explicitly back to the other two.
- The purpose needs two moves: compressed, then situated in the broader context. A purpose that is only compressed reads as a preference.
- "Should be few, so that the focus is manageable" is the operative constraint. The test is on the focus, not on a number the source never gives.
- The four stems — What, How, Why, What if — each promise a different kind of answer and commit the design to different work. "Why" is the expensive one.
- Objectives are required and never defined in the supplied material. One examined portfolio thesis pairs them one-to-one with questions in infinitive form; that pairing is a diagnostic, not a rule.
- The order is settled: conceptualise the research statement first, then develop aims and objectives from it.
- Test each question by subtraction. If removing it changes nothing else in the proposal, it was never doing any work.
Frequently asked questions
How many research questions should a proposal have?
The source does not give a number. It says they "should be few, so that the focus is manageable", which makes the test a question about the project rather than about arithmetic. The practical version is whether the single design you have proposed can produce an adequate answer to every question you have listed, inside the word count and schedule you have.
What is the difference between an aim and an objective?
The supplied teaching material never defines either term, so there is no source answer. It says only that aims relate to purpose and questions, and instructs you to develop aims and objectives once the research statement is settled. One examined portfolio thesis treats objectives as infinitive-form statements of what the researcher will do, matched one per research question — a usable convention, but that document's, not a definition.
Do the questions have to start with what, how, why or what if?
The source says they are "usually" those four, which makes it a pattern rather than a rule. A question opening "To what extent" or "Which" is not excluded. The value in the four stems is that each signals what kind of answer you are promising before any method is named.
Should the purpose come before or after the research questions?
In the component table they sit in one section, purpose first, then questions and aims. A second, shorter outline in the same material separates them and places key research questions after methodology. Neither ordering is presented as correct; the component table is the one introduced as a checklist with an order.
Can I write my aims before I have settled the research question?
The source's sequence says no. It states that once you have a properly conceptualised research statement or question, the next step is to develop your aims and objectives. Aims written earlier tend to be aims for the topic rather than for the study, and they are difficult to trace into a design.
Where do these end up outside the proposal?
The aims reappear at the front of the ethics application, which asks for a short statement of aims followed by the need and value of the research with the aims placed in the context of existing research or practice. The questions reappear in the application's methodology part, which asks you to list them. Getting them right once saves writing them twice.
References and source attribution
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London — cited in the supplied source among the general research methods texts behind its treatment of question formulation.
- Naoum, S. G. 2013, Dissertation Research & Writing for Construction Students, 3rd ed., Routledge — cited in the supplied source, including its material on selecting and narrowing a topic.
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford — cited in the supplied source as a general methods reference.
- Quinlan, C. 2011, Business Research Methods, 1st ed., Cengage Publishing — cited in the supplied source; the origin of its account of the conceptual framework and the research statement.
- An edited volume of master's degree research projects in project management, 2018, academic publisher, 378 pp. — the exemplar volume from which the one-to-one question-and-objective pairing described on this page is drawn.
- The supplied teaching source: consolidated weekly teaching notes and slide material on developing a research proposal and on refining the research topic.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- My proposal has six research questions. Show me which ones my design can actually answer.
- Rewrite my purpose statement as two sentences — one compressed, one placing it in the broader context.
- Turn each of my research questions into a matching objective in infinitive form.
- Which of my questions is a Why question in disguise, and what would it cost me to answer it properly?
- Run the subtraction test on my question set and tell me which questions are not load-bearing.
- Compress my research idea into a single statement or question.