Survey for Bachelor's and Master's Thesis: Here's How

Your research question is settled and your supervisor has agreed to an empirical chapter. Then comes the part that methods lectures rarely walk through in practice: how does that question turn into a questionnaire whose answers you can actually analyse?

You run a survey for your bachelor’s or master’s thesis in six steps: derive measurable characteristics from your research question, choose between a standardised and an open approach, write the questionnaire and its opening text, test both on a few people, collect answers over a fixed fieldwork period and analyse them afterwards. At the end you have a dataset and the five details that belong in your methods chapter.

📌 At a glance

• Your research question decides the method, not your deadline.
• 385 usable responses cover 95 per cent confidence, plus/minus 5 points.
• Consent under the UK GDPR needs no signature.
• The opening text names purpose, length and data handling.
• Fieldwork dates, sample and drop-outs go in the methods chapter.

When a survey suits your thesis

A survey suits your thesis when your research question asks about attitudes, judgements or self-reported behaviour, and when those answers cannot be pulled out of existing statistics, records or documents. If your work aims at figures the Office for National Statistics already publishes, or at data the UK Data Service already holds, your own survey is effort without return.

The second decision is about the form of the survey and your research question governs that too. If you want to know how widespread something is, or whether two characteristics hang together, you need many comparable answers and therefore a standardised survey. If you want to understand why people act as they do, you need a few long conversations. Doing both is possible and costs twice the time.

The table sorts the three cases that come up most often in student work.

What your piece of work is called depends on your university. Oxford’s guidance on theses and dissertations records that in the UK thesis is the term for undergraduate and doctoral work and dissertation the term for master’s work, and many British universities still call the undergraduate piece a dissertation. The requirements for the empirical part do not change with the name.

How the two approaches differ otherwise is set out in the comparison of qualitative and quantitative surveys. And whether your work needs an empirical chapter at all is the question before that: the guide to empirical research in a final paper works through it.

The process: six steps and a timetable worked backwards

A survey for a thesis follows six steps and the order is not a matter of taste. Each step settles what is even possible in the next one. Anyone who writes the questionnaire before the research question notices it at the analysis stage at the latest.

1. Sharpen the research question. From it you derive the characteristics you want to measure.
2. Turn characteristics into questions. Each characteristic gets one question and one answer format. How to go about it is set out in the guide to questionnaire design.
3. Write the questionnaire and the opening text. Both belong together, because the opening text decides your response rate.
4. Run a pilot. Five people from your target group fill it in and tell you where they got stuck.
5. Fix the fieldwork period and collect answers. Start and end dates are set in advance and written down.
6. Analyse and describe. First the figures, then the text in your methods and results chapters.

Work the timetable backwards, because fieldwork depends on other people and cannot be compressed. Take your submission date, subtract the weeks for analysis and writing and put the fieldwork period in front of that. For a coursework project, three to four weeks for the whole data collection is a realistic allowance, for a thesis with a larger target sample closer to six.

Approval belongs in the timetable as well. At many universities the questionnaire goes past your supervisor before it is sent out, and in some departments the research ethics committee signs it off too. Health and social care research follows a narrower route: the NHS Health Research Authority states that “Health and social care research applications from students working at undergraduate level are no longer being accepted for Research Ethics Committee (REC) review”. Which route applies to your project is decided by your university, not by this article.

💡 Tip

For projects that do go through the NHS Health Research Authority, the rule on students is explicit: “For undergraduate and master’s courses, the supervisor should always take the role of chief investigator.” Your supervisor therefore has to put their name and their time into the application, so ask for a slot before you fix the fieldwork period.

How many participants does your survey need?

The number of participants you need hangs on the population and on the precision you want to reach. At a 95 per cent confidence level and a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, 385 usable responses are enough once the population reaches one million or more. For 10,000 people the figure is 370, for 1,000 people 278.

The figures in the table hold for a random sample. Almost nobody writing a thesis has one, because participants decide for themselves whether to take part. A large sample then makes your analysis more precise, but not representative. The difference matters enough for a piece of its own: when a survey counts as representative works it through, and the guide to the sample explains the selection methods behind it.

In qualitative work the number counts differently. Saturation decides there: you keep interviewing until new interviews stop adding anything. How many that takes cannot be fixed in advance and belongs in the methods chapter as a justification.

Plan for drop-outs and for half-finished questionnaires. If you need 278 usable cases, you do not send the link to 278 people but to a good deal more.

The opening text and consent for your survey

The opening text of your survey names five things: who you are, what the study is about, how long it takes to fill in, what happens to the answers and that taking part is voluntary. It sits on the first page of the questionnaire and it is the point at which most people decide whether to carry on.

You often read that every participant has to sign a consent form. That is not what the UK GDPR asks for. Consent has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous, and it has to come as a clear affirmative action; Article 7(1) then requires you to be able to demonstrate that it was given. The Information Commissioner’s Office sets out in its guidance on consent that a positive opt-in is needed and that pre-ticked boxes, silence and inactivity do not count.

The second common misconception is about anonymity. If your survey genuinely collects no personal data, you need no consent for that data at all, because data protection law only covers information that relates to an identifiable living person. What matters is that the combination of age, course and year of study does not make anyone identifiable either. What belongs to that is set out in the piece on the anonymous survey and in the guide to data protection in surveys.

An opening text for your survey: an example to copy

The example below covers the five points in the order in which they are read. Replace the square brackets with your own details and cut whatever does not apply to your project. Write the short appeal you later post in groups and forums separately, because this text sits inside the questionnaire itself.

Thank you for taking the time. For my undergraduate dissertation at [university] I am looking at how students use learning platforms when they revise for exams. The questionnaire has 14 questions and takes about four minutes. Your answers are collected anonymously, no names, email addresses or IP addresses are stored, and the analysis only ever looks at all responses together. Taking part is voluntary and you can stop at any point. If you have questions you can reach me at [email address]. The survey runs until [date].

The time estimate in that text is the point where most is guessed and least is measured. Fill the questionnaire in once yourself with a stopwatch and give the number that comes out. An estimate that is too low costs you half-finished questionnaires later on.

⚠️ Note

As soon as you collect personal data, the text changes. The opening text then needs your lawful basis, how long you keep the data and how someone withdraws. The normal case in student surveys is anonymous collection and the exception is the personal one. Which requirements apply to you is decided by your course regulations and, in case of doubt, by your university’s data protection officer. This article is not legal advice.

Which survey tool is good enough for a thesis

A survey tool is good enough for a thesis if you can download the raw data in a format you can analyse, if the response limit sits above your target sample and if you know where the provider processes the answers. Everything else is comfort, and those three points decide whether your data collection can be used at all.

The export is where it fails most often. If you only ever see the answers as charts on a web page, you cannot work out a mean, cannot produce a cross-tabulation and cannot document anything in the appendix. So check before you start whether you get a CSV or Excel file, and download it once as a test while there are only three practice responses in the dataset.

Whether your project needs a data processing agreement with the provider is decided by your university. The normal case runs like this: as soon as a university stands behind the survey and personal data is processed, such an agreement is needed. The exception is a genuinely anonymous survey with no personal data in it. Your supervisor settles that question, at many universities together with the data protection officer.

At empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, EU hosting and the data processing agreement belong to the free plan, as do unlimited surveys and questions and 50 participants a month. Downloading the raw data, by contrast, starts with the Lite plan at 19 euros a month (as of September 2026). How the common tools differ otherwise is set out in the comparison of survey tools.

Analysing the survey and writing the methods chapter

Five details about the survey belong in the methods chapter of your thesis: the instrument, the mode of collection, the fieldwork period with start and end dates, the sample size and the sampling method. Drop-outs and incomplete cases come on top, because they are a result too and not a blemish.

Write those five details down while the survey is still running. Anyone who reconstructs them afterwards no longer finds the start date and ends up estimating the number of drop-outs. A short note each day is enough for that.

Checklist for the methods chapter

The list below covers what markers expect at this point. If a point is missing, what is missing is not a line but the traceability of your data collection. That is exactly what an empirical piece of work is judged on.

• The questionnaire appears in full in the appendix.
• The mode is named: online, on paper or in person.
• The fieldwork period appears with start and end dates.
• People invited and usable cases are reported separately.
• The sampling method is named, together with its limits.
• Drop-outs are counted and their handling is justified.

The analysis then runs in two stages. First you describe the data with frequencies, means and measures of spread, then you test relationships and differences. Which procedures come into question hangs on the level of measurement of your questions and is set out in the piece on data analysis methods. The difference between the two stages is explained in the guide to descriptive and inferential statistics.

Common mistakes in a survey for a thesis

Most problems with a student survey do not arise while the questions are being written, but in the decisions before and after. Four of them come up so regularly that they deserve a section of their own.

What these four mistakes have in common is that they can barely be repaired afterwards. Knowing them in advance saves you awkward questions when your work is marked.

The data collection starts before the research question

A questionnaire written without a sharpened research question asks a great deal and rarely hits the right thing. The characteristics are not derived from the question but from instinct, and at the analysis stage exactly the variable that would show the relationship is missing. So formulate the question and your hypotheses first and the items in the questionnaire after that.

The questionnaire promises anonymity and asks for an email address

A survey stops being anonymous the moment the same questionnaire asks for an email address for a prize draw. Every answer then hangs on an address, whatever the opening text says. Separating the two makes it clean: the thank-you page carries a second link to a form of its own in which only the address lands. The two datasets have no connection to each other afterwards.

Answers that do not fit the picture disappear from the dataset

Deleting answers afterwards because they contradict your hypothesis is research misconduct. The Concordat to Support Research Integrity (2025), in force since 1 April 2026, defines falsification in Annex A as “inappropriately manipulating and/or selecting research processes, materials, equipment, data, imagery and/or consents”. Something else is allowed: excluding cases that were clearly not answered seriously, where someone clicked a whole matrix identically or went through the questionnaire in 40 seconds. The difference lies in the criterion. It is set before you look at the results, applies to every case alike and appears with its justification in the methods chapter.

The fieldwork period is not documented

Without start and end dates the data collection cannot be placed in context, and that is exactly what you will be asked about. A survey on exam revision that ran over the summer vacation produces different answers from the same survey in the exam period. So note both dates on the day they fall and write down which part of the academic year the fieldwork sat in.

Conclusion

A survey for a thesis stands or falls on two decisions and both are taken before the first question is written: whether the research question calls for a survey at all and how many usable cases you need. Everything after that is craft and can be planned. Work the timetable backwards from your submission date and write the details of the data collection down while it is running.

What binds you in the end are your own university’s requirements, not general advice. Course regulations differ on whether your supervisor has to approve the questionnaire, whether an ethics opinion is needed and how the dataset is documented in the appendix. Settle that before the fieldwork period starts.

Where to go next

• Looking for the right question types? Open and closed questions compared
• Still short of participants? How to find survey participants
• Want to know what a survey costs? What a survey costs

Questionnaire ready, fieldwork period set?

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