Your aim or research question is one of twelve bullets in the IA rubric, and it is the one that quietly decides how the other eleven read.
Get it right and every later section has something to point back at. Get it loose and your methodology, your tool and your discussion all drift slightly, which is how a proposal ends up looking finished from the inside while sitting in the middle bands.
Aim or research question?
Students ask this constantly, and the confusion is fair, because every bullet in the criterion says "the aim or research question".
Same content, different grammar. One states what you intend to do. The other asks it as a question.
| Written as an aim | Written as a research question |
|---|---|
| To examine the relationship between peer support and school belonging among students who joined within the past year. | What is the relationship between peer support and school belonging among students who joined within the past year? |
Both are accepted, as long as it is clear and focused. Choose one form, write it properly, and make sure the rest of your proposal keeps pointing back at it.
Do not spend an evening perfecting the phrasing of both.
Your aim is not your problem
This is the most useful distinction on this page.
The problem is what is going wrong for your group. The aim is what you intend to investigate about it.
You can have a beautifully phrased aim attached to a topic with no problem in it, and that IA is still in trouble.
Try this. Read your problem, your population, and your aim out loud in that order. They should sound like one argument. If the aim introduces an idea the problem never mentioned, they have drifted apart, and the fix is to change one of them now rather than to write around the gap later.
Where the aim sits in your introduction
Your introduction ends with three moves, in order.
Name the gap your two studies leave. State the aim or research question: what you are investigating, and in whom. Signpost that implications for policy and practice come in the discussion.
Written out, that looks like this:
Neither study examines which features of the school day are associated with belonging during the first year after arrival. The aim of this investigation is to examine the relationship between perceived peer support, perceived teacher support and sense of school belonging among students aged 14 to 18 who joined an international school in Stockholm within the past twelve months. Implications for school policy and practice are considered in the discussion.
Three sentences. The gap makes the aim necessary rather than arbitrary, which is what turns a literature summary into a rationale.
Three weak aims, and what is wrong with each
| Weak | The problem | Stronger |
|---|---|---|
| To investigate the effects of social media on teenagers | No population, and broad enough to describe two hundred different studies | To examine the relationship between time spent on image-based social media and body satisfaction among girls aged 14 to 16 at one secondary school |
| To investigate stress in IB students and how schools might reduce it through changes to assessment scheduling and wellbeing provision | The recommendation has been stuffed into the aim | To examine the relationship between assessment clustering and reported stress among Year 12 IB students |
| To find out whether newly arrived students feel like they belong | Answerable with a yes or a no, so there is nothing to investigate | To examine the relationship between perceived peer support and sense of school belonging among students who joined within the past twelve months |
The second one is worth dwelling on, because it is a mistake made by people who are trying hard. Your recommendation belongs in the discussion. Putting it in the aim commits you to investigating something you have not designed a study for.
Which band are you in?
The descriptors for this bullet are unusually easy to self-check.
1 to 2. An aim or question exists but a reader is not sure what you are investigating, or it is far too broad. You are here if your aim could describe twenty different studies, or if it names a topic rather than a relationship.
3 to 4. Clear, but only partly focused. Usually the population is loose or the aim has drifted from the problem. You are here if your aim says "students" or "teenagers", or if it investigates something slightly different from the problem you opened with.
5 to 6. Clear and focused. A specific population, growing out of the problem, answerable by your own design. You are here if someone could read the aim alone and tell you who you are studying and what you want to know.
Two checks that move you up a band
Does your aim name a group narrow enough that a stranger would know whether it means them?
"Teenagers" fails. "Girls aged 14 to 16 at one secondary school" passes. "Students who joined within the past twelve months" passes, because the boundary is checkable.
Do the words in your aim appear in your problem statement?
If the aim introduces a variable, a construct or a population the problem never mentioned, they have drifted. This is the most common reason a competent-looking introduction sits at 3 to 4.
Make sure your own design can answer it
An aim you cannot investigate with the tool you are building is not a focused aim, it is an ambition.
Before you lock it, check three things. Your chosen method can produce evidence about the relationship you named. Your five draft items would actually generate that evidence. And the answer, whatever it turns out to be, would support the kind of recommendation you sketched in your discussion plan.
If any of those three fails, change the aim now. It costs a paragraph today and a rewrite in week three.
One thing not to reuse
Your aim must not repeat either of your two background studies. Same variables and same population as your background research is not allowed, even if you design your own tool.
You also cannot reuse an aim from one of your class practicals.
The last check
Write your aim on a separate line. Cover everything else in your proposal.
Could someone who has read only that sentence tell you who you are studying and what you want to know?
If yes, you are in the top band on this bullet. If they would have to ask a question, you now know which question, and that is your edit.
If you want the full sentence bank, band-by-band descriptors and a complete model proposal, that is what the PsychExcel Complete IA Handbook is built for.