Structure your dissertation methodology chapter with these six key headings
Nobody likes trying to figure out how to write up a methodology chapter. What goes where? When should you write about sampling? What about ethics? Where does data collection and analysis all fit in? Keep reading because I’m going to tell you!
In this blogpost, I’m going to give you six key headings to use to structure your dissertation methodology chapter: context, sampling, data collection, data analysis, ethical considerations, and changes and reflections.
CONTEXT
You should begin your methodology chapter with the context - the bigger picture.
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? There will be a question you want to answer or a title you want to explore, so go back to this now and tell explain how you went about researching that through your own study.
You don’t need to be massively specific here because you can say more in the sections that follow on from this. But you do need to describe who or what you studied AND how you studied them. Did you take a qualitative approach or a quantitative one? Mixed methods? What was your broader ontological or epistemological approach? Check out my recent video for an explanation of ontology and epistemology. I’ll also link to that in the description.
For example, you might have been trying to understand how young people use social media to find graduate employment. You wanted to investigate this, explain this and identify the causes. What factors influence young people’s use of social media in graduate employment? What patterns and trends exist? As such, you might have conducted an online survey of people who had graduated from UK universities since 2019.
2. SAMPLING
Next up, you describe how you went about choosing your sample.
All research projects are based on a sample because it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to access all of the people or all of the cases who are affected by the issues you are exploring. You need to access a proportion of those people or cases.
How big or small was your sample? What qualifying criteria were there for being included in your sample? 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? Was there a particular sampling method you used? Cluster, random, purposive, snowball sampling? Why was this the best approach to take given who or what you were studying?
3. DATA COLLECTION
Data collection is your third heading. What techniques did you choose to collect your data and why were they the most appropriate? What other approaches did you consider and decide not to use? Why?
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 the amount of sleep people get on a Sunday night and the type of coffee they buy at the coffee shop on a Monday morning, you’re not going to get what you need by doing an in-depth interview with open-ended questions with just one person – you’d be better doing a survey of a large number of people using data you can quantify and draw inferences from.
4. DATA ANALYSIS
After you’ve covered data collection, you need to outline your data analysis. Once you’d collected your data, what did you do with it? How did you make sense of it? What techniques did you choose to analyse your data and why were they the most appropriate? What other approaches did you consider and decide not to use?
Why? Again, always link this back to your aims, objective and research questions. How is your chosen data analysis technique consistent with your general approach to this piece of research? How does your data analysis technique help you get answers to the questions you’re asking in your research?
5. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Next, you need to describe your research ethics. What did you do to prevent harm, ensure informed consent, address privacy & avoid deception in your research? What information did you provide your participants with? How did you make sure this was accessible and relatable? What opportunities did you create for them to ask questions?
If you said people were free to withdraw from the research, how were they able to do this? If you didn’t have human participants and you were looking at documents or cases, what ethical issues emerged? Did you have to anonymise any of the documents, use pseudonyms, that kind of thing?
6. CHANGES AND REFLECTIONS
The last section of your methodology chapter should critically comment upon the differences between what you planned to do and what you actually ended up going.
Very rarely does a research project pan out exactly as you anticipated, we often have to tweak it when we’re in the middle of participant recruitment or data collection for example. The ability to reflect on that and write about it will give your methodology chapter the edge.
What did you do differently from what you planned? Why? Did any issues arise when you were conducting the research that you hadn’t anticipated? How did you deal with them?
One way of ensuring you keep on top of this is to regularly complete a reflective diary whilst you’re collecting and analyzing your data so you can look back over this when you come to write up the methodology and remind yourself of the things you altered as you went along.
So, for example, you might have tried to recruit participants through a snowball technique using a gatekeeper, but that gatekeeper let you down and stopped replying to your emails. Instead, you might have reached out to other people to help you or decided to find your own participants through Facebook groups for example. What didn’t work out? Where did you have to pivot and change things to get your research done? Write about that here.
And there you have the outline structure of your dissertation methodology chapter: context; sampling; data collection; data analysis; ethics and changes and reflections.
Top Tip!
There is one more thing you need to know about the Methodology chapter. Write it in the past tense! You shouldn’t write about what you’re going to do, you should write about what you’ve done. This is an accepted practice in social science research dissertations, and it kind of makes sense. By the time someone is reading about your methodology, you have completed your research, it’s done, it’s finished, so the past tense is the most appropriate one.
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