First, it is a common temptation to prolong the exploration phase by finding more and more interesting things and straying away from what was once regarded as the possible focus. Either you or your supervisor could be guilty of this. In some cases, it might be you who is putting off having to make a commitment to one line of enquiry because exploration and realising possibilities is enjoyable and you're always learning more. In other cases, it could be your supervisor who, at every meeting, becomes enthusiastic about other possibilities and keeps on suggesting alternatives. You might not be sure if this is just sharing excitement with you or if you are supposed to follow them all up.

Either way you need to stop the proliferation of lines of enquiry, sift through what you have, settle on one area, and keep that focus before you. It could even be a good idea to write it up on a poster in front of your desk. Unless you have this really specified in the first place, with the major question and its sub-questions, and you know exactly what you have to find out to answer these, you will never be focused and everything you find will seem to be 'sort of' relevant.

You have to close off some lines of enquiry and you can do so only once you decide they are not relevant to your question. We continually meet students who, when we ask, "So what is the question you're researching?", will answer, "My topic is such and such and I'm going to look at x, y and z". Sometimes further probing from us will reveal that they do indeed have a focus, but many times this is not so. Thinking in terms of your topic is too broad. You need to think, rather, of what it is you are investigating about the topic.

Questions force you to find answers; topics invite you to talk about things.

Focus after data collection

Then, at a later stage, you could find yourself surrounded by lots of data which you know are somewhat relevant to your project, but finding the ways of showing this relevance and using the data to answer your question could be a difficult task. Now you have to re-find your focus to bring it all together.

Again, it is your research question and sub-questions which will help you to do this because your whole thesis is basically the answer to these questions, that is, the solution to the problem you presented at the beginning. This may strike you as a very simplistic way to view it. However, approaching it in this way does help to bring the parts together as a whole and get the whole to work. We even recommend that, to relate the parts to each other and keep yourself focussed , you could tell yourself the story of the thesis.

Making a deliberate attempt to keep focused will help you to shape your research and keep you motivated.