Methodology, methods and procedure sections
Postgraduate research usually involves collecting data and reporting it in your thesis. You explain how you collected the data, and under what circumstances, in the methods section. So how does methodology differ from methods, and how do they relate? Read on to find out.
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The ‘Methods’, or ‘Materials and Methods’, section is usually a short one in a research paper or thesis. It allows readers to:
- understand what you did, and learn about the methods, equipment and/or reagents you used and where you got them from
- precisely reproduce your experiment or study
- judge whether your results and conclusions are valid.
The methods section needs to be tightly and precisely written and follow a logical structure. The term ‘methodology’ is often used in the methods section and though these terms are sometimes conflated, they have different meanings.