Thesis or Dissertation Chapter 3: What to Include and How to Write It

Every paragraph in Chapter 3 answers one question from your committee: why did you do it that way? The chapter describes your procedure, but description alone does not satisfy them. They want to see that each decision was reasoned and that the design can answer your research questions. In many programs this is the chapter that has to be approved at the proposal stage, so it is also the one most likely to hold up the beginning of your data collection.

The sections depend on the type of study and the institution. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods designs call for different content, and many programs supply a template. Use yours.

What the chapter covers

Begin with a short restatement of the purpose and research questions to tie the chapter back to Chapter 1.

Design and rationale. Name the design, whether a case study, phenomenology, survey, experiment, or correlational study. Then say why it fits your questions. The reasoning is the section. A named design with no justification leaves your committee to supply the justification themselves, and they will not do it in your favor.

Researcher role. In qualitative work, state your relationship to the participants and the setting, and how you managed your own assumptions.

Population, sampling, and sample size. Say who the study concerns, how you chose participants, and how many took part. Explain why that approach and that number suit the design. The most common difficulty is a small sample, which our article on justifying a smaller sample size addresses.

Instruments and data sources. Describe the interview protocol (our guide to thesis and dissertation interviews covers it), questionnaire, test, or documents you used and where they came from. For an existing instrument, report what is known about its reliability and validity in comparable settings. For one you built, say how you checked that it measured what you needed.

Procedures. Explain how, when, and where you collected data, and how long it took.

Analysis. Show how you moved from raw data to findings. In a qualitative study, that means your coding and how themes were built. In a quantitative study, it means the tests you ran and why each one fits your data and questions.

Quality. Quantitative studies speak of validity and reliability. Qualitative studies speak of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Use the vocabulary of your tradition, and describe the steps you took.

Ethics. State how you obtained consent, protected confidentiality, stored data, and gained approval from your institutional review board or ethics committee. Our articles on getting IRB approval and what to write about it in this chapter cover both stages.

If your program puts limitations and delimitations in this chapter, they go near the end, followed by a short summary that leads into Chapter 4.

Making the chapter defensible

Go through the chapter decision by decision. For each one, ask what you chose, what else you could have chosen, and why yours served the study better. Back the reasoning with methodological sources and not only with your own account of what you did.

Map each research question to a data source and an analysis step. A study whose questions ask "how" and "why" but whose design is built to measure and compare will be noticed at once. If a question has no data feeding it, the design has a hole.

Write the chapter so another researcher could follow your steps. Where you cannot give detail, as when protecting participants, explain how you protected them. After data collection, revise the chapter to match what happened. If the plan changed, report the change and the reason. And describe only the quality measures you used. Claiming member checking or triangulation that did not take place is the kind of statement that unravels in a defense.

A frequent weakness is a chapter that reads like a methods textbook and says little about your study. The test is simple: could the paragraph appear unchanged in anyone else's dissertation? If it could, it needs your sample, your instrument, your reasoning.

Our article on methodology chapters that hold students back goes through the weaknesses in more depth. Chapter 3 sits between Chapter 2 and Chapter 4.

If you want a second opinion on whether your design and methods can answer your questions, our research design and methodology review gives a structured assessment of the concerns most likely to delay approval. The decisions stay yours.