Dissertation methodology chapter explained - through a cake recipe!
Your dissertation is a cake. Your methodology chapter is the recipe. In this blogpost, I’m going to help you banish your methodology anxiety by going through the recipe, the ingredients and the step by step process to write your methodology chapter.
(1) The recipe
The methodology chapter is essentially the recipe for your research study. It is a step-by-step guide, explaining how you did it.
By reading through your recipe – your methodology chapter – someone should be able see what you’ve done in your research. Why? This allows them to judge the QUALITY of your research because they can see whether the choices you made and the processes you followed to collect and analyse your data actually stand up to scrutiny.
The person grading your dissertation is not going to try and make your cake. They are there to judge your cake, to taste your cake, to say its beautiful or ugly. They are making a judgement about your research process and to be able to do that thoroughly, you have to provide them with all the relevant details about it. You can’t leave out any of the ingredients or steps and you can’t present them in the wrong order because that’s not going to make sense.
So, the recipe is vitally important. You need to make sure you have all the necessary ingredients and add them in the correct order. Lets take a look at what you’ll need.
(2) Ingredients
What needs to go into your methodology chapter? Here are your basic ingredients and the first letter or the ingredient gives us a clue as to what each section should be about.
Butter - The ‘B’ in butter stands for Big picture or context.
Sugar - The ‘S’ in sugar stands for Sampling.
Eggs - The ‘E’ in eggs stands for Extracting data – or collecting data.
Flour - The ‘F’ in flour stands for Figuring it out – data analysis.
Milk - The ‘M’ in milk stands for Moral and ethical issues.
Salt - The ‘S’ in salt stands for Shifts, changes and reflections.
Let’s take those ingredients one at a time and see what we need o do with each of them.
(3) Step by step
First in is the butter and the b in butter stands for Big picture, context. Remind the reader of the aims and objectives of the research. What were you trying to achieve and how did you set out to do this? What was your ontology and epistemology? Check out my other blogpost on what those are. How do your ontology and epistemology link in with the type of method you selected – qualitative, quantitative or both? Your methods should logically follow on from your ontology and epistemology, there should be a natural progression. There’s no need to go into tons of detail here, you’re just bringing the reader’s attention back to what you’re trying to explore, the general approach you’re taking to researching it and the type of techniques or methods you’re going to deploy to do that.
Next up, you add the sugar and the s in sugar stands for Sample. It’s highly unlikely you’ll manage to look at everything or everyone so you need to take a sample of them for your research. If you’re studying students experiences of part time work, you’re not going to be able to include all of the students in the world in your study, you’ll need a sample of them. How big or small was your sample? How did you choose them? Who or what was included or excluded? Where did you draw the line? Where did you find them? Why did you go about it in this way? What technique did you use to find participants or cases? Cluster, random, purposive, snowball sampling? Why?
The next thing to add are the eggs and the e in egg stands for Extract (or eggs-stract!) the data. Here we’re talking about data collection. How did you do this and why? Interviews, a survey, questionnaires, content analysis? Always link this back to your aims, objectives and research questions. There should be a consistent story that makes sense. So for example, if you wanted to explore the relationship between what people buy at the sandwich shop and how hungry they are, you’re not going to get what you need by doing an in-depth interview with just one person – you’d be better doing a survey of a larger number of people.
Next we add the flour and the f in flour stands for Figure it out – this is the section where you write about your data analysis. Once you’d collected your data, what did you do with it? What techniques did you choose to analyse your data and why? Thematic analysis, grounded theory, analytical statistics – what tests did you use? Again, always link this back to your aims, objective and research questions. How does your data analysis technique help you get answers to the questions you’re asking in your research?
Now, you need to add the milk, and the m in milk stands for Moral and ethical considerations. What did you do to prevent harm, ensure informed consent, address privacy & avoid deception in your research? If you were researching with people, how did you ensure they were okay with everything? If you weren’t dealing with 3D humans but you were dealing with data, cases, documents or artefacts, what moral and ethical issues were there?
Lastly, comes a pinch of salt, a bit of seasoning – the S represents Shifts, changes and reflections. Very rarely does a research project pan out exactly as you anticipated, we often have to make tweaks and changes to it. What did you change from your original plan? How did the research you ended up doing differ from the research you thought you would do? Why? What didn’t work out? Where did you have to pivot and change things to get your research done? Write about that here.
That is your methodology chapter, the recipe for your dissertation cake!
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