A key part of your dissertation or thesis is the methodology.

This
is not quite the same as methods.
The methodology describes the broad philosophical underpinning
to your chosen research methods, including whether you are
using qualitative or quantitative methods, or a mixture of both, and
why.
You should be clear about the academic basis for all the choices of research
methods that you have made. 'I was interested' or 'I thought...' is not enough;
there must be good academic reasons for your choice.

What to Include in your Methodology

If you are submitting your dissertation in sections, with the methodology
submitted before you actually undertake the research, you should use this
section to set out exactly what you plan to do.
The methodology should be linked back to the literature to explain why you are using certain
methods, and the academic basis of your choice.
If you are submitting as a single thesis, then the Methodology should explain what you did, with any
refinements that you made as your work progressed. Again, it should have a clear academic
justification of all the choices that you made and be linked back to the literature.

Common Research Methods for the Social

Sciences
There are numerous research methods that can be used when researching
scientific subjects, you should discuss which are the most appropriate for your
research with your supervisor.

The following research methods are commonly used in social science, involving
human subjects:

Interviews
One of the most flexible and widely used methods for gaining qualitative
information about peoples experiences, views and feelings is the interview.
An interview can be thought of as a guided conversation between a researcher (you) and somebody
from whom you wish to learn something (often referred to as the informant).
The level of structure in an interview can vary, but most commonly interviewers follow a semistructured format. This means that the interviewer will develop a guide to the topics that he or she
wishes to cover in the conversation, and may even write out a number of questions to ask.
However, the interviewer is free to follow different paths of conversation that emerge over the course
of the interview, or to prompt the informant to clarify and expand on certain points. Therefore,
interviews are particularly good tools for gaining detailed information where the research question is
open-ended in terms of the range of possible answers.
Interviews are not particularly well suited for gaining information from large numbers of people.
Interviews are time-consuming, and so careful attention needs to be given to selecting informants
who will have the knowledge or experiences necessary to answer the research question.
See our page: Interviews for Research for more information.

Observations
If a researcher wants to know what people do under certain circumstances, the
most straightforward way to get this information is sometimes simply to watch
them under those circumstances.
Observations can form a part of either quantitative or qualitative research. For instance, if a
researcher wants to determine whether the introduction of a traffic sign makes any difference to the
number of cars slowing down at a dangerous curve, she or he could sit near the curve and count the
number of cars that do and do not slow down. Because the data will be numbers of cars, this is an
example of quantitative observation.

A researcher wanting to know how people react to a billboard advertisement might spend time
watching and describing the reactions of the people. In this case, the data would be descriptive, and
would therefore be qualitative.
There are a number of potential ethical concerns that can arise with an observation study. Do the
people being studied know that they are under observation? Can they give their consent? If some
people are unhappy with being observed, is it possible to remove them from the study while still
carrying out observations of the others around them?
See our page: Observational Research and Secondary Data for more information.

Questionnaires
If your intended research question requires you to collect standardised (and
therefore comparable) information from a number of people, then questionnaires
may be the best method to use.
Questionnaires can be used to collect both quantitative and qualitative data, although you will not be
able to get the level of detail in qualitative responses to a questionnaire that you could in an
interview.
Questionnaires require a great deal of care in their design and delivery, but a well-developed
questionnaire can be distributed to a much larger number of people than it would be possible to
interview.
Questionnaires are particularly well suited for research seeking to measure some parameters for a
group of people (e.g., average age, percentage agreeing with a proposition, level of awareness of an
issue), or to make comparisons between groups of people (e.g., to determine whether members of
different generations held the same or different views on immigration).
See our page: Surveys and Survey Design for more information.

Documentary Analysis
Documentary analysis involves obtaining data from existing documents without
having to question people through interview, questionnaires or observe their
behaviour. Documentary analysis is the main way that historians obtain data
about their research subjects, but it can also be a valuable tool for contemporary
social scientists.

Documents are tangible materials in which facts or ideas have been recorded. Typically, we think of
items written or produced on paper, such as newspaper articles, Government policy records, leaflets
and minutes of meetings. Items in other media can also be the subject of documentary analysis,
including films, songs, websites and photographs.
Documents can reveal a great deal about the people or organisation that produced them and the
social context in which they emerged.
Some documents are part of the public domain and are freely accessible, whereas other documents
may be classified, confidential or otherwise unavailable to public access. If such documents are
used as data for research, the researcher must come to an agreement with the holder of the
documents about how the contents can and cannot be used and how confidentiality will be
preserved.
See our page: Observational Research and Secondary Data for more information.

How to Choose your Methodology and Precise

Research Methods
Your methodology should be linked back to your research
questions and previous research.
Visit your university or college library and ask the librarians for help; they should be able to help you
to identify the standard research method textbooks in your field. See also our section on Research
Methods for some further ideas.
Such books will help you to identify your broad research philosophy, and then choose methods which
relate to that. This section of your dissertation or thesis should set your research in the context of its
theoretical underpinnings.
The methodology should also explain the weaknesses of your chosen approach and how you plan to
avoid the worst pitfalls, perhaps by triangulating your data with other methods, or why you do not
think the weakness is relevant.

For every philosophical underpinning, you will almost certainly be able to find
researchers who support it and those who dont.

Use the arguments for and against expressed in the literature to explain why
you have chosen to use this methodology or why the weaknesses dont matter
here.

Structuring your Methodology

It is usually helpful to start your section on methodology by setting
out the conceptual framework in which you plan to operate with
reference to the key texts on that approach.
You should be clear throughout about the strengths and weaknesses of your
chosen approach and how you plan to address them. You should also note any
issues of which to be aware, for example in sample selection or to make your
findings more relevant.
You should then move on to discuss your research questions, and how you plan
to address each of them.
This is the point at which to set out your chosen research methods, including their theoretical basis,
and the literature supporting them. You should make clear whether you think the method is tried and
tested or much more experimental, and what kind of reliance you could place on the results. You will
also need to discuss this again in the discussion section.
Your research may even aim to test the research methods, to see if they work in certain
circumstances.
You should conclude by summarising your research methods, the underpinning approach, and what
you see as the key challenges that you will face in your research. Again, these are the areas that you
will want to revisit in your discussion.

Find more at: http://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/dissertation-methodology.html#ixzz3tS3PPf8A