When writing your dissertation, you will need to divide your paper into sections to bring out a clear structure. A dissertation methodology is one of the significant sections of your paper. This section comes after the literature review section, and the ideas should flow naturally. Before writing the methods section of a dissertation, you must, first of all, define the research question and do a detailed review of other scholars’ perspectives concerning your topic. Still, you will need to review strategies used by the scholars to conclude the topic as you will analyze the methods they used to gather and present their data.
When conducting all these observations, you will be working along with your tutor as you plan how you will handle the research questions. You will basically be using the other scholar’s perspective concepts to understand how you will plan the whole research process, approach the dissertations and get to understand the reasons for approaching the dissertation in a particular way.
How to write methods section of dissertation step by step
Step 1. Explaining your choice of methods
The first step to ensuring you introduce the approaches you will use in your research. The reader wants to know the problem you are researching or investigating. Whatever the goal you have, what data will you use to achieve the objectives? Here, you determine whether you will need qualitative or quantitative data. Also, while explaining your dissertation research methods at this step, you need to determine if you will need primary data (collected by yourself) or secondary data (collected by someone else.
Step 2. Describing your research methodology dissertation
After explaining the research methods for dissertation, you now describe the exact details of the methods you intend to use. Under this section, there are:
- Quantitative methods – here, you explain how you measured your variables by including any tools or the different materials you used to get the data.
- Surveys – the survey method will require you to answer how, when, and where you did the survey.
- Experiments – with experiments dissertation methodology, you must explain the procedures, techniques, and tools you used to conduct the experiment. Ensure your reader can reproduce results with the information you give here.
- Existing data – if you are using existing data to describe your dissertation research methods, ensure you tell the reader the process you used to gather and determine relevant materials for your research.
Step 3. Describing the analysis methods
This is the third step towards ensuring your research methodology dissertation section is perfect. Now, you need to explain how you went on, processed, and analyzed the data.
Note: don’t go into details yet; just give the reader a tip of what you did to process and analyze your data.
Step 4. Evaluating and justifying your dissertation research methods
This is the final step of describing your research methods for dissertation. Of course, you need to explain to the reader why you chose the specific methods and why other methods couldn’t work out. Remember to give the limitations of the methods you preferred, but give reasons why the strengths of the methods outweighed the limitations.
Writing the methods section of a dissertation: top tips
Have you always had a hard time writing your research methodology dissertation? Well, consider the following tips:
- Always have a dissertation methodology chapter outline
An outline is a rough draft that will guide you when writing the final dissertation methodology section. The purpose of this outline is to ensure you don’t forget any information and that you present the information in a clear manner for the reader to understand.
- Read a dissertation methodology example
Another practical tip that will have you craft the best dissertation methodology is reading other samples from other people. Ensure to check different samples to weigh the similarity and to enhance the understanding.
Conclusion
Academic papers have a structured format students must follow. In your dissertation paper, the methodology section plays a significant role in shedding light on the reader.
