Post your research questions and objectives

Having chosen an appropriate topic for your research, list all the questions that you'd like answered yourself and select the best ones. Once you determine what you know about the topic, you can do some preliminary general literature review to develop usable research questions.

Evaluate the quality of your research questions and the ease with which you should be able to answer them. Ask yourself:

1. Does the question deal with a topic which interests me enough to spark my own thoughts and opinions?
2. Is the question easily and fully researchable?
3. What type of information do I need to answer the research question? For example, to answer the research question "What impact has deregulation had on commercial airline safety?" will require certain types of information:
 Statistics on airline crashes before and after.
 Statistics on other safety problems before and after.
 Information about maintenance practices before and after.
 Information about government safety requirements before and after.
4. Is the scope of this information reasonable (e.g., can I really research a vast amount of projects developed over a span of 10 years?)
5. Given the type and scope of the information that I need, is my question too broad, too narrow or okay? The number of sources you find may help you discover this.
6. What sources will be able to provide the information I need to answer my research question (journals, books, Internet, government documents, people)?
7. Can I access these sources?
8. Given my answers to the above questions, do I have a good-quality research question that I actually will be able to answer by doing research?

Objectives must be set in relation to research questions, since they must refer to the way in which such questions are going to be answered. Objectives provide an accurate description of the specific actions you will take in order to reach your research aim. A general objective can be broken down into specific objectives, and the more precisely you formulate your specific objectives, the simpler it will be to define the type of study and which method(s) you will use in your further research.

Objectives consist of one single infinitive sentence and should be phrased in a way that makes it possible to draw a conclusion from within the scope of your project. They are usually headed by infinitive verbs such as: analyse, assess, collect, compare, describe, determine, develop, establish, evaluate, estimate, identify, etc.

Finally, a hypothesis is not a question, but rather it is a statement about the relationship between two or more variables. The hypothesis translates the research question into a prediction of expected outcomes and to be complete a hypothesis must include three components: the variables, the population and the relationship between the variables.

Adapted from: http://www.esc.edu/online-writing-center/exercise-room/evaluate-your-own-research-question/