Working on your honours research project can feel overwhelming — there are so many moving parts happening at the same time: developing your research questions, reading literature, planning your methodology, collecting data, writing, referencing, and editing.
This page provides practical, academically grounded tips to help you manage your project step by step. Each tip is short, focused, and designed to keep you moving forward.
By this stage of your honours journey, you should already have developed your research questions. However, it is common for supervisors to suggest further refinement to ensure your questions are clear, focused, and academically rigorous.
Tip of the Day: Strengthen Your Research Questions
When developing or refining research questions, remember that they must be academically rigorous and guide the direction of your study. A good research question is not only interesting — it must also be researchable.
Academic strategies to improve your research questions:
Ground them in literature: Review recent studies in your field to ensure your question addresses a genuine gap or builds on existing scholarship.
Use the FINER criteria: Questions should be Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, and Relevant.
Check alignment: Make sure your question matches your research objectives, methods, and the data you can realistically access.
Be precise: Avoid vague wording. For example:
Instead of “How does technology affect learning?”
Refine to “What impact does the use of EndNote reference management software have on postgraduate students’ efficiency in writing their literature reviews at UJ?”
Remember: A strong research question is the compass of your project — it keeps your literature review, methodology and analysis on track.
Please click on the image below for more tips on how to strengthen your research questions.
