Working towards a full draft: Day 89

Methodology chapter done…almost. ALMOST!!! I’ve divided this chapter into two main sections: the rationale for the methodological approach that I used and the research report, which is  a descriptive, transparent account of the data generation phase.  I originally set out to write my thesis in a linear fashion, beginning with the introduction and moving onto my literature review section.  However, in practice, I ended up writing this chapter first because it was the most conceptually concrete section of my thesis in that it’s presenting what I actually did to generate the data for this thesis.  In other disciplines the emphasis on methodology may be less pronounced but in my field, education, how I generated (as opposed to collected or gathered) the data is just as important as what I did with it.  The coherence between my method of data generation and the type of data I ended up with is vital.

So, in a very real sense, this was the easiest chapter to write because it is largely descriptive.  I managed to hammer this out and am now in the stage of editing the rationale I wrote a while back to make it more consistent with what I did.  It’s turning out to be more work than I expected.  I hope to have this last section done by the end of this week.