One of the most important aspects of the methodology section is to relate what you’re writing to your own research.
Students frequently reproduce pages of textbook definitions of research concepts e.g., research approaches, sampling, reliability, validity etc., with virtually no reference to their own research.
Let me show you an example of how many students (unfortunately) describe the research approach in their methodology chapter. These students typically devote over a page describing the research approach as follows:
Paragraph 1: Qualitative research is defined as ….. (reference).
Paragraph 2: On the other hand, quantitative research is ….. (reference).
Paragraph 3: Mixed research is ….. (reference).
Paragraph 4: This study used the quantitative approach.
However, what your supervisor, advisor and other examiners really want to read is what approach you’ve used in your research, why you’ve used it, and whether you can justify it based on the theoretical characteristics of that approach as opposed to others. They don’t want to read long extracts from textbooks using descriptions with no relation to your study.
So how should you relate the description of your research approach to your study? How about this?
The research approach to the thesis was entirely quantitative, as opposed to qualitative or a mix of the two (references). It relied on a detailed statistical analysis of the quantitative responses of a large sample of respondents to an online questionnaire designed to measure ___. As is typical of quantitative research, the statistical results relied on psychometric analysis of the scores of a closed-ended measurement instrument of ___, modelling of responses reflecting ___, and on analysis of data designed to estimate ___. At no stage were these processes measured qualitatively using self-reports or open-ended responses as would be the case in research using a qualitative approach (reference). The quantitative approach of the present research is consistent with the methods used in the associated literature on …. (references). It stands in contrast to the qualitative and mixed approaches used in studies which aim to ___ with a focus on ___ (references).
Of course, you would adapt your writing to your own approach, flesh out the paragraph further, and perhaps split it.
The main message here is that the student has related the research approach to their study, and also briefly contrasted this against the theoretical characteristics of various other approaches.
The same style works for describing other aspects of the research, for example, sampling, reliability, validity, etc.
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