A dissertation methodology is a crucial chapter of your paper. This section defends your research approach, giving legitimacy to your findings and allowing for replicability of your research.
The methodology allows you to elaborate on why you preferred one research approach over another and to account for any adjustments you made in your study. Unfortunately, the methodology is often the most challenging part for students.
Read on for tips on writing a methodology in a dissertation and a breakdown of the structure and process for writing a dissertation methodology.
What is the methodology in dissertation?
A dissertation methodology is a chapter that defines the methods of research, data sources, research techniques, and sampling criteria. This chapter justifies your research techniques and explains why your approach was best suited to investigate your research objectives.
The information in this section allows fellow scholars to replicate your research and verify your claims. The section also offers the background study linking the gaps highlighted in your literature review to potential solutions.
How to write a dissertation methodology
Writing a research methodology dissertation may seem a daunting task for a first-timer. These steps should come in handy to help you cover all essential details and achieve the expectations for a good methodology.
- Review your approach
When writing your methodology, expound on the type of data you intended to collect. Data may either be experimental or descriptive. Regardless of your approach, you should provide a rationale as to why you settled for the approach used in your study.
- Justify your methods
How did you approach your research? Were there other options at your disposal? How were your methods best suited to analyse your research objectives? How did you recruit your participants? In what manner did you manipulate your variables? What gadgets were used?
Your methodology should address these questions and refer to the gaps identified in the literature review. Here, show how your methods can examine various hypotheses and why they are more accurate than other approaches that were at your disposal.
- Research techniques
This section should refer to existing studies to justify why your approach is the best way to analyse your thesis. Here, offer a research philosophy on how your research methods were reached based on the nature of the field.
- Look at existing dissertations
We recommend that you check out dissertation methodology examples to familiarize yourself with the recommended format and style.
Methodology dissertation structure
Some of the key elements of a methodology dissertation include:
- The research overview: this section highlights the gaps you identified during your research and the aims of your paper. When presenting the overview, indicate the problem(s) you ought to address and how your paper will seal the research gaps in your field.
- Research design: the design outlines the methods selected for your study and evidence that the methods used are acceptable in your field. You may also provide arguments as to why the methods you selected were better than other options and offer a rationale for your sampling strategy.
- Methods of data collection: list your approaches for collecting data and offer an account as to why you selected data for your research.
- Research limitations: discuss the results your research was not able to unveil and reasons as to why you were limited in this sense.
- Ethical considerations: were there ethical issues to be observed in your study? If so, explain how you met these considerations in your study.
- Data analysis: the analysis should outline the variables, missing data, and outliers yielded by your research. Also, highlight any equipment that was used to analyse your data and analysis on the validity of your results.
Final take
We hope that this guide on how to write a research methodology in a dissertation has helped you to overcome the challenges that were stalling your progress. Feel free to consult our team for a methodology for dissertation example to better your grasp on writing an outstanding methodology chapter.
