A methodology chapter has one real job: let a reader understand exactly what you did, in enough detail that they could follow the same steps if they wanted to.
What to include
- Research design or overall approach -- experimental, survey-based, a system-development approach, a case study, etc.
- Tools, materials, or systems used -- specific software, hardware, lab equipment, or frameworks, named precisely rather than generically.
- Data collection or implementation process -- how you actually gathered your data or built your system, step by step.
- Analysis approach -- how you processed or evaluated what you collected or built.
The detail level that actually works
Compare:
Too vague: "A survey was conducted among students."
Reproducible: "A structured questionnaire with 20 closed-ended items was administered to 150 students across three faculties, selected via stratified random sampling, over a two-week period in [month/year]."
The second version tells a reader exactly what happened -- the first leaves too much to guess.
The most common reason this chapter gets flagged
A methodology description that doesn't match what Chapter 4 later describes actually happening. If your methodology says you interviewed 30 participants but your results only discuss 22, that mismatch is one of the fastest things to draw a correction.
If your actual approach changed from your original plan
This happens often and isn't a problem in itself -- a brief, honest note about why (limited access, a better approach discovered along the way) generally reads better than silently presenting your final approach as if it were the original plan.
Where UniDraft fits in
UniDraft builds your methodology chapter around what you actually did, checked for consistency against your results chapter -- so the two never drift apart the way they can when written separately, weeks apart.
