Methods chapter mistakes committees pick up most often

The methods chapter is one of the most technical parts of a thesis, and one of the most questioned at the defense. Here the committee examines not what you did but why you did it that way. The eight mistakes below can be used as a checklist when you reread your own chapter.

1. The design does not fit the research question

This is the most basic mistake and the most expensive one, because it is hard to fix late. If a thesis asking a causal question tries to answer it with a cross-sectional survey, or a study asking "how do they experience this?" relies only on closed-ended scales, it will be among the committee’s first questions.

• Does the verb in your question (affects, is associated with, explains, experiences) say the same thing as your design?
• Have you written a sentence or two on why you did not choose the obvious alternatives?
• If you use mixed methods, is it clear how the qualitative and quantitative parts contribute to which question?

2. The sample is not justified

Describing who your sample is is not enough; you also need to say why these people, why this number and how you reached them. In quantitative studies, committees expect to see how sample size was determined (for example through a power analysis). In qualitative studies, explain the logic of participant selection and when and why you stopped collecting data. If you used convenience sampling, do not hide it; discuss openly how it affects the generalisability of your results.

3. Validity and reliability of the instrument are not shown

If you used a scale, state where it came from, who developed it, how it was adapted to another language or culture and what validation work supports that adaptation. Reporting the reliability figure from the original study is not enough; report how the instrument performed in your own sample. If you built your own form or interview protocol, describe how it was developed, whether experts reviewed it and whether you piloted it.

4. Analysis assumptions are missing

Every statistical test rests on assumptions: the shape of the distribution, equality of variances, independence of observations. The committee will ask "did you check the assumptions before using this test?" Briefly state which assumptions you tested, how, and what you did if they were violated (a transformation, a non-parametric test, a robust method). How you handled missing data and outliers also belongs here.

5. Not enough detail to reproduce the study

A good methods chapter contains enough detail for another researcher in your field to repeat the study the same way. Commonly omitted points:

• Dates, setting and procedure of data collection (who administered it, how long it took, how it was distributed)
• Software and version used, and the order of the analysis steps
• Data cleaning decisions: how many participants were excluded and why
• In experimental studies, the assignment method and the instructions given to each group

6. Ethics approval is not mentioned

For a study involving human participants or personal data, the methods chapter should state that ethics approval was obtained, which committee granted it and its date or reference number. Briefly describe how informed consent was obtained and how the data are stored. Which studies need approval and how it should be reported in the thesis differ between institutions, so check your own graduate school’s and ethics committee’s rules.

7. No demonstrated rigour in qualitative work

In qualitative theses the committee wants to see that the findings are more than the researcher’s impressions. To show this:

• Describe the coding process concretely: how codes emerged, how you arrived at themes, how many people coded.
• State which strategies you used for trustworthiness, such as member checking, a second coder, thick description or an audit trail.
• Discuss your position as a researcher openly, and how it may have affected data collection.
• Show how quotes are spread across participants, so it is clear that every theme is not fed by the same two people.

8. Limitations are glossed over

A generic sentence like "the study had time and budget constraints" is not a limitation. The committee wants to see whether you noticed in advance which conclusions your design restricts: who the sample leaves out, the bias that self-report measures can introduce, how a cross-sectional design limits causal interpretation. After each limitation, add a sentence on how it affects the interpretation of your findings; you will reuse those sentences in the discussion chapter.

How to test your own methods chapter

At the end of each subsection, ask "why?" and check whether the answer is actually written in the text. Then imagine handing the chapter to someone who has not read the rest of the thesis: could they repeat the study using only this chapter? If you are still at the proposal stage, answering most of these questions now will save you work later; the thesis proposal checklist helps with that. To see what kinds of methods questions come up at the defense, see the thesis defense questions guide.

tezkeys reads your methods chapter together with the rest of the thesis: it marks mismatches between question and design, unjustified choices and inconsistencies between numbers in tables and in the text on your own text, with severity and location. It also lists the methods questions your committee is likely to ask and what a good answer should cover. The report is AI-generated, can be wrong and does not replace your supervisor; see what it looks like in the sample report.