Skip to Main Content

Internship & Thesis Literature Research for AHF

This guide has been created to help students of the Academy for Hotel and facility Management with literature research during their internship/placement/thesis.

What are you going to research?: 5x W method

An easy way of defining and limiting your research topic is using the 5xW method.

You use 5 questions to define your research:

  • Who
  • What
  • Where
  • When
  • Why

You can use these 5 questions to make a general research question more specific, because it will help you define what you are going to research.

 

Example:

You want information about hospitality:

Who are you going to research or involve in your research ?: generation z, elderly, students, hotel guests, employees or a specific organization.

What do you want to know?: how to lower cost, improve efficiency, reduce waiting times, well-being of employees, employee turnover etc.?

Where are you going to focus your research on: a specific hotel? Care centres for the elderly in Noord-Brabant? Hospitals in the Netherlands?

When: how far will your research go back? How old may the information be to be usable for your assignment? 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?

Why are you doing this research? To spot bottlenecks? To point out possible improvements? To select a new product? etc.

How to formulate a research question?

If you know what you want to research you can start to formulate your research question. Check out the videos below for some inspiration on how to formulate your research question: the first video is in Dutch, the second is in English.