Confusing these three terms is one of the most common and most easily fixed mistakes in early thesis drafts. Once you understand what each one is actually doing, writing them becomes far more straightforward.
Research objectives: what you intend to achieve
Research objectives are broad statements describing what your study aims to accomplish. They are usually written as action statements, starting with a verb such as "to examine," "to evaluate," or "to determine." Objectives describe the destination of your research at a high level, without yet specifying the exact question you will ask to get there.
Research questions: what you are trying to find out
Research questions translate your broad objectives into specific, answerable questions. If your objective is "to examine the relationship between remote work and employee productivity," your research question might be "does remote work increase or decrease self reported productivity among software engineers." Questions are more precise than objectives and directly shape your methodology, since they tell you exactly what evidence you need to collect.
Hypothesis: your testable prediction
A hypothesis is a specific, testable prediction about the relationship between variables, and it typically only appears in quantitative research. Using the same example, your hypothesis might state that "employees working remotely report significantly higher productivity than employees working on site." A hypothesis must be precise enough that a statistical test can either support or reject it.
How the three relate to each other
Think of objectives as the widest lens, questions as the specific focus within that lens, and a hypothesis as your best guess at what the answer to that question will be. Not every study needs a hypothesis, particularly qualitative or exploratory research, but every study needs objectives and questions, since together they define exactly what your research is trying to accomplish.
Common mistakes students make with these three
The most frequent error is writing objectives and questions that say essentially the same thing in different words, which leaves examiners unclear on what additional precision the questions were meant to add. Another common mistake is writing a hypothesis that cannot actually be tested with the data or method proposed. Reviewing all three together, side by side, usually reveals these mismatches quickly.
Read your objectives, questions, and hypothesis aloud, back to back. If they do not sound like they belong to the same study, a reader will notice that gap immediately, before your findings even come up.
A quick example that ties them together
Objective: to investigate the effect of social media use on academic performance among undergraduate students. Research question: is there a significant relationship between daily social media use and grade point average among undergraduate students. Hypothesis: undergraduate students with higher daily social media use report significantly lower grade point averages than students with lower daily use. Notice how each statement gets progressively more specific and testable than the one before it.
Getting this trio right early in your proposal saves considerable revision later, since your entire methodology chapter will be built directly on top of it.