Aim and Objectives

Aims:

• Are broad statements of desired outcomes, or the general intentions of the research, which 'paint a picture' of your research project
• Emphasize what is to be accomplished (not how it is to be accomplished)
• Address the long-term project outcomes, i.e. they should reflect the aspirations and expectations of the research topic.

Once aims have been established, the next task is to formulate the objectives. Generally, a project should have no more than two or three aims statements, while it may include a number of objectives consistent with them.

Objectives are subsidiary to aims and:

• Are the steps you are going to take to answer your research questions or a specific list of tasks needed to accomplish the goals of the project
• Emphasize how aims are to be accomplished
• Must be highly focused and feasible
• Address the more immediate project outcomes
• Make accurate use of concepts
• Must be sensible and precisely described
• Should read as an 'individual' statement to convey your intentions

Aims and Objectives should:

• Be concise and brief.
• Be interrelated; the aim is what you want to achieve, and the objective describes how you are going to achieve that aim.
• Be realistic about what you can accomplish in the duration of the project and the other commitments you have
• Provide you and your supervisor(s) with indicators of how you intend to:
  .
• approach the literature and theoretical issues related to your project.
• access your chosen subjects, respondents, units, goods or services.
• develop a sampling frame and strategy or a rationale for their selection.
• develop a strategy and design for data collection and analysis.
• deal with ethical and practical problems in your research.

Aims and Objectives should not:

• Be too vague, ambitious or broad in scope.
• Just repeat each other in different terms.
• Just be a list of things related to your research topic.
• Contradict your methods - i.e. they should not imply methodological goals or standards of measurement, proof or generalisability of findings that the methods cannot sustain.

The title of your research should explain in sufficient detail what you are doing so that potential readers can decide if this is relevant to their interests. For example, imagine yourself looking through previous reports/papers/theses to check for ideas and material you could use. Would your project title be a good enough guide to attract your attention?

The title for your research should be a clear and precise description of the topic. A title can be phrased as a question or hypothesis (though it doesn’t need to be). A title should specify sufficient detail so that places, organisations, subjects are readily identifiable. A title should use appropriate phrases to specify the nature of the investigation e.g. “differences between….”, “relationship of ….”, “quantify …”. Do not use vague phrases e.g. “look at”, “study”, “research into”. A good title will help you be clear in your own mind about what it is you are doing and will therefore help decide methodologies, statistics, etc.

Preparing a good title means:

• Having the most important words appear toward the beginning of your title
• Limiting the use of ambiguous or confusing words
• Breaking your title up into a title and subtitle when you have too many words, and
• Including key words that will help researchers in the future find your work.

Reference

http://www.erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/theme4/research_design.html