The purpose of a methods section is to get the reader to trust your data. You will need this trust because your data will, hopefully, constitute some of sort of challenge for either the currently accepted theories or the currently dominant practices in your area. That is, the reader is prepared to learn something from your analysis, and this will require a change in the way they see the world or what they propose to do about it. But don’t imagine your reader is a naively open-minded pushover. They came by their current theories and practices honestly, and they will only be won over when presented with solid results.

Your methods section is a preparatory argument for the solidity of your results. We might say that it preempts a certain kind of criticism. The more of a challenge your analysis poses for the current theory, the more skeptical your reader will be about the quality of your data. So you must explain how carefully you collected it and how scrupulously you analyzed it.

If you’ve done onsite