Your aims are the beating heart of your research project, and your write-up. Whether you are conducting an exploratory study or a hypothesis testing one, whether qualitative of quantitative, you are trying to do something in your research, and specifying what that doing is is the key that holds your project together.
Wherever you are in a research project, try specifying exactly what your aims for it are, for instance:
In this project… I am trying to discover how clients’ experience preference work
In this project… I am trying to find out if school counselling is effective
In this project… I am trying to assess the psychometric properties of the Goals Form
In research, the aim is to always find something out, so it’s always possible to also reframe your aims as a question:
How do clients’ experience preference work?
Is school counselling is effective?
What are the psychometric properties of the Goals Form?
Framing it either way is fine. But it’s essential that your aims and your questions match, and it’s generally helpful to be aware of both forms as you progress through your research.
If you’re struggling to articulate the aims of your research, ask a friend or peer to ‘interview’ you about it. They can ask you questions like:
‘What are you trying to find out?’
‘What’s the question that you are asking?’
‘What do you want to know that isn’t known up to this point?’
‘What kind of outcome to this project would tell you it’s been a successful one?’
Trying to articulate your research aims/questions isn’t always easy, and it’s generally an iterative process: one that develops as your research progresses. Sometimes, it’s a bit like an ‘unclear felt sense’ (from the world of focusing): you kind of ‘know’ what the aim is, but can’t quite put it into words. It’s on the tip of your tongue. That’s why it can be helpful to have a colleague interview you about it so you can try and get it more clearly stated.
Another way into this would be to ask yourself (or discuss with peers):
‘What might be meaningful findings from my project?’
For instance, with the research questions above, meaningful findings might be that ‘clients find it irritating to be asked about their preferences’, or that ‘the Goals Form has good reliability but poor validity?’ Of course, you don’t want to pre-empt your answers, but just seeing if there are potential meaningful answers is a good way of checking whether your question makes sense and is worth asking. If you find, for instance, that you just can’t envisage a meaningful answer, or that the only meaningful answers are ones that you already know about, it may mean that you need to rethink your research question(s). There needs to be, at least potentially, the possibility of something interesting coming out of your study.
You may have just one aim, you may have more than one aims. A few aims is fine, but make sure there aren’t too many, and make sure you’re clear about what they are and how they differ. Disentangling your aims/research questions can be complex, but it’s essential in a research project to be able to do that: so that you and whoever reads your research knows what it’s all about, and what your contribution to knowledge might be.
If you find it difficult to articulate your aim(s), it may be that, at the end of the day, you’re not really sure what your research is about. That’s fine: it’s a place that many of us get to, particularly if our research has gone through various twists and turns. So it’s not something to beat yourself up about, but it is something to reflect on and see if you can re-specify what it is, now, that you’re trying to do and ask, so that you can be clear. This may mean turning away from some of the things you’ve been interested in, or some of the questions that you were originally asking. It can be sad to let go of aims and questions; but it’s generally essential in ensuring you’ve got a nice, clear, focused project—not one where you’re going to be lost in a forest of questions and confusion.
If you specify your aims but can’t rephrase them as questions that’s also worth noting. That may be an indicator that really what you are trying to do is to prove something, rather than conducting a genuine inquiry. For instance, you may find that your aim is, ‘to show that people living in poverty cannot access counselling?’ or ‘to establish that female clients prefer self-disclosure to male clients’. If that’s the case, try and find a way of re-framing your research in terms of an open question(s): one(s) that you genuinely don’t know the answer to. It’s so much more powerful, interesting, and meaningful to conduct research that way. Indeed, if you’re struggling to articulate your research question, one really valuable question to ask yourself is:
‘What is the question that I genuinely don’t know the answer to?’
And ‘genuinely’ here does mean genuinely. If you’re pretending to yourself that you don’t know something so that you can show it anyway, then that’s likely to become evident when you write up your research. So really see if you can find a question that you genuinely, really genuinely, can’t answer at this point—but one that you would really love to be able to. That’s a fantastic place to start research from.
Once you’ve got your beating heart, write it up on a stick it note and put it on your wall somewhere or put it on your screensaver. Keep it in mind all the time: the aims of your research and the questions you’re asking. When you’re interviewing your participants, when you’re doing your analysis… keep coming back to it again and again. It’ll keep you focused, it’ll mean that you keep on track, and it’ll keep you with a clear sense of where it is you want to go and what you are trying to do.
If you deviate, that’s fine, we all do that. Just like in meditation, notice you’re moving on, then try and bring yourself back. Or, if you really can’t bring yourself back to your aims/questions, then it may be that they need to change. That’s fine in a research project and it does happen but, again, be clear and specific about what the aims and questions are changing to, and make sure that the rest of your project is then aligned with those new directions. What you don’t want, for instance, is a Literature Review asking one set of questions, and then a Results section that answers an entirely (or even slightly) different set of aims.
And when you write up your thesis or research paper, start with your aim(s)/question(s). Often people put them towards the end of the Literature Review (i.e., just before the Methods section), but you can also put them earlier on in your Introduction. Write them down just as they have been formulated as you’ve progressed: clear, succinct, a line or two for each. If there’s more than one, write them down clearly as separate aims/questions. You probably don’t need to give them in both formats and you could use different formats in different places: for instance, they could be stated as aims in your Abstract and Introduction, then as questions just before your Methods section.
Once you’ve got those aims/questions stated, you can build all the other parts of the research and write-up around it. For instance:
Literature Review section: You can structure this by the questions you’re asking, with different sections looking at what we know, so far, in relation to each question.
Interview questions: In most instances, the questions you ask your participants should match, pretty much exactly, your overarching research questions. So if you are interested in how clients experience preference work… ask them. No need to faff about with indirect or tangential interview questions: just go into the heart of what you really want to know, and have a rich, complex, multifaceted dialogue about it.
Results section: Whether qualitative or quantitative, you can present your findings by research question: So what did you find in relation to question a, then in relation to question b, etc.
Discussion section: This, too, can be structured by research question—though I would tend to do this in the Discussion or in the Results (not both), so that the sections don’t overlap too much with each other.
Limitations: Don’t just say what’s good or bad about your research: say how the answer you got to your questions might have been biased by particular factors, and what that might mean.
Abstract: When you come on to write this, make sure your aims/questions are clearly stated, and then clear answers to each question are given.
Being clear about your research aims and questions, and focusing your research around them, may seem obvious. It may also seem pedantic or overly-explicit. But it’s key to creating a coherent, focused research project that—as required at master’s or doctoral level—makes a contribution to knowledge. It can be hard to do; but working out, for yourself, what you are trying to do and ask is a key element of the research process. Research isn’t just a question of mucking in, generating data, and leaving it to your reader (or your assessor) to work out what it all means. You need to do that: to guide the reader from question(s) to answer(s), and to help them see how the world is a better-understood place (even if it’s just a little better understood) for what you have done.
Acknowledgements
Photo by Bart LaRue on Unsplash
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