Dissertation Research Methodology Questionnaire

Your methodology section appears immediately after the literature review in your dissertation, and should flow organically from it.

Will you be conducting recorded interviews with your subjects, asking them to complete a written questionnaire, or observing them undertaking some activity or other?

Or will you avoid doing your own research with human subjects at all, and base your research on documentary evidence or a pre-existing data set? Is there reason to believe it can be generalised to other contexts, or is it highly specific to the particular location or cultural context in which you conducted your research?

A creative arts dissertation Many programmes in the arts offer the option of completing a creative rather than critical dissertation; that is, of submitting a piece of creative writing or a portfolio of artworks, rather than an extended critical project, for the dissertation component of the programme.

However, in virtually all cases, your creative project must be accompanied by a substantial critical essay (or introduction, or commentary) that theorises your creative practice.

Regardless of your level, your dissertation methodology will develop as you review the literature in your field and refine your initial research questions.

Your literature review and methodology will therefore develop in tandem with each other.

Critically engaging with one's own work is a notoriously difficult thing to do, which makes the development and adherence to a rigorous methodology especially important in this context.

You need to not only show that you're capable of detaching yourself from your own creative work and viewing it through an objective lens, but that you are able to see your own creative practice as methodology – as a method of creating work that is grounded in theory and research and that can be evaluated against clear target goals.

In addition to answering all these questions, you must satisfy your reader that you have considered all the ethical questions associated with your research.

Part of this, of course, entails obtaining sign-off for your design from the appropriate ethics bodies, but even then there might be aspects of your study – inviting subjects to relive episodes of grief and trauma, for instance, or broaching culturally sensitive matters within a particular target group – that some readers could consider contentious or problematic.