How to write the method chapter of an empirical paper

The four parts of the method chapter, what must appear in each, and the mistakes supervisors flag most often.

The method chapter answers one question: exactly what did you do, in enough detail for another researcher to repeat the study. It's written in the past tense and, in quantitative research, usually has four parts.

1. Participants

How many participants there were, and how they were recruited (convenience sample, snowball, random sample).
Inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Relevant demographics: age (mean and standard deviation), gender, education, and any characteristic that matters for the research question.
How many participants were excluded from the analysis, and why.

The study included 150 undergraduate students (68% women), aged 19–34 (M = 24.3, SD = 3.1). Participants were recruited through a social-media advertisement.

Template and full example: How to write the participants section.

2. Measures

For each questionnaire or measurement tool:

The name of the tool and who developed it, with a reference.
The number of items, the response scale and an example item.
How the score is calculated, and what a high score means.
Reliability in the current study (for example Cronbach's alpha), not only in the original study.
If the tool was translated, how.

A template for describing a questionnaire: How to write the instruments section.

3. Procedure

Ethics committee approval.
How the study was administered: online or in person, on which platform.
Informed consent, anonymity, and how long it took.
In an experiment: what each group saw, and how participants were assigned to groups.

Examples for an online survey and an experiment: How to write the procedure section.

4. Data analysis

Which software you used.
Which analyses you ran, and to test which hypothesis.
How you handled missing data and outliers.

Common mistakes

Mixing method and results. The method chapter describes what you did. What you found belongs in the results chapter.
Measures without reliability. Almost every supervisor will ask for reliability in your sample.
Inconsistency. The number of participants in the method chapter must match the number in the results tables.
Mixed tenses. The method chapter is written in the past tense: "participants completed", not "participants will complete", which belongs in a research proposal.

In qualitative research

The structure is similar, but the emphasis differs: how interviewees were chosen and why, the interview guide, how interviews were conducted and transcribed, the method of analysis (for example thematic analysis), and the researcher's position in relation to the field.