Research methodology
Academic integrity
This guidance supports planning and revision of your own work. It does not offer ghostwriting, invented sources, or a guarantee that a journal will publish a manuscript.
Name the tradition you are working in only if you can say what it commits you to. A paragraph that lists qualitative and quantitative as badges, without a decision, does not help a reader. Describe the materials, the steps, and the reason those steps can speak to the question.
Include the awkward parts: refused access, a changed site, a question that proved too large. Methodology is also an account of judgement. It is not a place to borrow a famous design you did not carry out.
A practical sequence
- Restate the question the method must serve.
- Describe materials and steps in order.
- Say what the method is poor at seeing.
- Separate what you did from what you hope to do later.
Examples
- “Interviews were used because the question concerns how teachers explain a routine, which observation alone would not phrase for them.”
