How to Choose a Research Method for a Wellbeing or Resilience Dissertation

Choose your research method by looking at the verb in your research question. If you want to measure how much wellbeing or resilience people have, or whether two things are related, a survey fits. If you want to understand how people experience it, interviews fit. If you want to know whether a programme changes wellbeing or resilience, you need an intervention study with a sensible comparison.

One correction before you start. A survey and an interview are ways of collecting data. An intervention is something you introduce and then evaluate, so it needs a research design, not just a method. That is why “survey, interview or intervention” looks like three equal options and leaves so many students stuck. Below we show how the three fit together, with example research questions, the scales you are likely to come across, and the ethics points your supervisor will check.

Start with what your research question is asking

Your question asks	Best-fit choice	What you collect	Example research question
How much, or how are these linked?	Survey (cross-sectional questionnaire)	Scale scores from many participants	Is perceived social support associated with resilience scores among first-year undergraduates at one UK university?
How do people experience or make sense of it?	Semi-structured interviews	Interview transcripts, analysed thematically	How do postgraduate taught students describe recovering from a failed assessment?
Does a programme change wellbeing or resilience?	Intervention study with before and after measures and a comparison group	Scores at two or more time points	Does a four-week resilience workshop change Brief Resilience Scale scores among second-year students, compared with a waiting-list group?
Does it change, and why?	Mixed methods, for example a survey followed by interviews	Scores plus interview accounts	Which students report the largest change in wellbeing after a peer mentoring scheme, and how do they explain it?

These example questions are ours, written to show the pattern, not taken from published studies. Our guide to dissertation research question examples by method and level shows how to phrase your own. If you do not have a topic yet, our list of positive psychology dissertation topics is a good place to narrow one down.

Survey, interview and intervention are not three equal choices

Virginia Tech’s library guide puts the difference simply: research design and research methods are closely related but not the same, and a good design makes sure the data you collect can answer your question. In a dissertation that means you name the design first and the methods second.

• Survey: a method, usually quantitative. You ask a set of standard questions and analyse the scores.
• Interview: a method, usually qualitative. You ask open questions and analyse what people say.
• Intervention: a programme or activity you deliver or evaluate. It needs a design, such as before and after measurement with a comparison group, and the data inside it still come from surveys, interviews or both.

So a dissertation on a resilience workshop might use an intervention design, with a survey at the start and end and interviews afterwards. When you write it up, explain why you chose that approach and why you did not choose another. Sheffield Hallam’s library guide to the methodology section frames it as exactly that: why this method and not something else, and how the choice helps answer your research questions. You can read it in Sheffield Hallam University’s methodology guide.

Decide what you mean by wellbeing or resilience first

Your method follows from your construct, and neither word means one thing. The OECD’s 2025 update of its guidelines on measuring subjective well-being describes three components: life evaluation, affect and eudaimonia. In plain terms, that is how satisfied people are with their lives, how they feel from day to day, and whether they feel their lives have purpose. The Office for National Statistics asks four separate personal wellbeing questions and its guidance says it is not appropriate to combine them into one score. You can see both in the OECD guidelines on measuring subjective well-being and the ONS personal well-being user guide.

Resilience has the same problem. The Brief Resilience Scale defines it as the ability to bounce back from stress. A systematic review of resilience training trials found that some studies treated resilience as a trait or as a bundle of resilience factors and used instruments that did not suit the question. If your question is about recovery from a specific setback, a bounce-back measure fits. If it is about how students cope over a whole year, interviews may capture it better. Write your definition in one sentence and choose the method that matches it, because markers will ask why the two line up.

When a survey is the right choice

Choose a survey when your question is about levels, differences or relationships and you can reach enough people. Surveys tend to produce relatively short answers, which makes scores easier to compare across participants, while interviews produce longer, richer responses but take more time, as the Virginia Tech guide notes. For a taught degree with a firm submission deadline, that trade-off often decides it.

Validated scales you are likely to meet

Use a validated scale instead of writing your own questions. Examiners will want to see that your measure has been tested, and you can report the original source in your Harvard reference list.

Scale	What it measures	Format	Worth knowing
Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS)	Mental wellbeing, with positively worded items	14 items, plus a 7-item short form	Both versions are described as robust in educational settings; the 7-item version saves time, and the 14-item gives a fuller picture
ONS personal wellbeing (ONS4)	Life satisfaction, feeling things you do are worthwhile, happiness yesterday, anxiety yesterday	Four single questions, each scored 0 to 10	Not combined into one score; ONS publishes UK estimates for the same questions, so you can compare your sample with national figures
Brief Resilience Scale (BRS)	Ability to bounce back from stress	6 items, 5-point scale, averaged	Reported reliability of .80 to .91 across four samples, two of them student samples
Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC)	Resilience as a broader set of coping qualities	25 items scored 0 to 4; 10-item and 2-item versions are also authorised	Licensed, so request permission before use

Take each scale from its owner, not from a website that reprints the items. The University of Warwick describes the 14-item and 7-item WEMWBS versions and asks users to register or obtain a licence. The BRS comes from Smith and colleagues’ 2008 paper in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. The CD-RISC is proprietary, and the PhenX Toolkit entry for the CD-RISC notes that it needs a licensing agreement. Published dissertations show which scale students used and how they justified it, and our guide to how to read a published dissertation for method and measures shows what to look for.

How many participants do you need?

There is no single number. Sample size depends on the analysis you plan, including the effect size you want to detect, the power, the significance level and the type of test. A tutorial article on sample size and power analysis with the free G*Power software explains the steps. Ask your supervisor which analysis your module expects, run the calculation, and report it in your methodology chapter. If you cannot reach the number, say so as a limitation.

Be ready to explain what a survey cannot do:

• A one-off survey shows a snapshot, not change over time and not cause.
• Self-report scores depend on how participants see themselves on the day.
• People who choose to respond may differ from those who do not.
• Scores tell you how much, but not why.

When interviews are the right choice

Choose interviews when your question asks how or why, and when a small number of detailed accounts will answer it better than many short scores. Most dissertations use semi-structured interviews: you prepare a topic guide, but follow what the participant says. Adapt questions like these to your own research question and clear them through ethical approval first:

• Can you tell me about a time on your course when things felt hard? What happened?
• What, if anything, helped you keep going?
• How has that experience changed the way you handle pressure now?

Sample size depends on your analysis, so check with your supervisor. For interpretative phenomenological analysis, The Psychologist’s methods article reports that Smith, Flowers and Larkin suggest roughly three to six participants for an undergraduate or master’s project, while stressing that sample size must be judged study by study. You can read the British Psychological Society’s article on interpretative phenomenological analysis. For thematic analysis, Braun and Clarke’s resource site at the University of Auckland explains their reflexive approach, which treats the researcher’s subjectivity as part of the analysis.

A resilience paper shows why choices need justifying. In a 2023 qualitative study of resilience in people with chronic pain, Zelčāne and Pipere combined thematic analysis, narrative analysis and the critical incident technique, using each to answer a different question: what resilience looks like, how it unfolds, and why changes happen. The lesson for a student project is that every added method must earn its place. One well-run analysis usually serves a dissertation better than three thin ones. For a UK example, the University of South Wales thesis in our list of wellbeing and resilience dissertations interviewed eleven counselling psychologists and built a grounded theory from the accounts.

Plan for the costs. Recording, transcribing and coding take time. A small sample cannot be generalised. And wellbeing topics can prompt distress, so your ethics application should say how you will pause or stop an interview and signpost participants to your university’s wellbeing or counselling service.

When an intervention study is the right design

Choose an intervention design when your question is whether something works, for example a workshop, a course, a mindfulness app or a peer support scheme. The key design question is “compared with what?” NHS Employers’ guidance on evaluating staff health and wellbeing programmes says a before and after study is a valid way to assess impact if you are aware of its limitations, and that process evaluations look at how an intervention was delivered. The UK Government’s Magenta Book guidance on impact evaluation lists designs with no comparison group among the weaker ways of attributing change to a policy, and describes a well-matched comparison group as the stronger option. Read both: NHS Employers on evaluating a wellbeing programme and the Magenta Book guidance on quality in impact evaluation.

Put simply, scores that improve after a programme show change, not that the programme caused it. Here is what each design lets you claim.

Design	What you do	What you can claim
Before and after, one group	Measure participants before and after the programme	Scores changed. You cannot say the programme caused it
Before and after with a comparison group	Compare participants with similar people who did not take part, such as a waiting-list group who receive the programme later	Stronger evidence, but it depends on how well the groups match
Randomised controlled trial	Allocate participants to groups at random	The strongest evidence of cause, but usually beyond what a single module allows, so ask your supervisor
Process evaluation	Interview or run focus groups with participants and staff about how the programme ran	How and why it worked or did not, not whether it caused change

Be modest about resilience claims. A meta-analysis of 11 randomised trials by Joyce and colleagues found a moderate positive effect of 0.44 and concluded that programmes combining cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness appear to help. The authors also noted small samples and that improvement was detected only through change in self-report scores. None of the studies tested how participants coped when later adversity occurred. A wider review by Chmitorz and colleagues of 43 randomised trials raised concerns about definitions, instruments and designs, and proposed assessing resilience as change in mental health in relation to stress. The full texts are open: the Joyce et al. review in BMJ Open and the Chmitorz et al. review in Clinical Psychology Review.

For a doctoral-level example of scale, a Queen’s University Belfast EdD thesis on curriculum-embedded resilience workshops for higher education students used surveys plus two post-intervention focus groups with 12 students. A dissertation project can borrow that logic at a smaller size: a short survey before and after, and a few interviews or one focus group afterwards. Our wellbeing and resilience theses list also includes a Bangor PhD testing positive psychology interventions in schools and universities and a UCL PhD on a two-week gratitude intervention.

Can you combine a survey and interviews?

Yes, if each part answers something the other cannot. A survey can show what people report, and interviews can show why. The University of Portsmouth’s library guide calls studying one question with more than one method triangulation and gives that survey and interview example. A health services research article on mixed methods integration sets out three basic designs:

• Explanatory sequential: the survey comes first, and interviews help explain the results.
• Exploratory sequential: interviews come first and shape a later survey.
• Convergent: both are collected in a similar timeframe, analysed separately, then compared.

The same article is on integration in mixed methods designs. The NIH’s best practices for mixed methods research ask for a clear rationale based on the study’s goals, and that is what your markers will look for too. Mixed methods also means two data collections and two analyses, so keep one strand small if your timeline is tight. The University of Portsmouth’s guide to understanding research methods covers triangulation and ethical approval in one place.

A practical way to decide

1. Circle the verb in your research question. Measure or relate points to a survey, explore or understand points to interviews, and change or effect points to an intervention design.
2. Define your construct in one sentence. Then choose a validated scale or a topic guide that matches it. Your literature review is where you find out which measures and designs earlier studies used.
3. Check you can reach participants. Decide who they are, how you will recruit them and how many you can realistically get.
4. Work back from the submission deadline. Fit recruitment, data collection and analysis into the weeks you have.
5. Match the method to the analysis you can do. Statistical analysis and thematic analysis need different skills and software, so be honest about yours.
6. Allow time for ethical approval. The University of Portsmouth says primary data collection, including any pilot study, needs an ethics form and approval before you start. The British Psychological Society’s code of human research ethics includes a section on student research, and you can read the BPS Code of Human Research Ethics if your project is in psychology.
7. Take the plan to your supervisor. The proposal is usually where you first commit to a method, and our research proposal help covers that stage.

How to justify your choice in the methodology chapter

Link four things in a row: your research question, your design, your methods and your measures. Then say why you did not choose the alternatives. Here is an example paragraph, written by us for illustration, for a survey-based project:

We used a cross-sectional online survey because the research question asks how strongly perceived social support is associated with resilience, which needs comparable scores from many students. Semi-structured interviews were considered, but they would have produced detailed accounts from too few participants to test an association. Resilience was measured with the Brief Resilience Scale because it assesses the ability to recover from stress, which matches the definition used in this study.

Keep the same chain in your limitations section, so the weaknesses you admit match the choices you made. Our guides on how to write the methodology chapter and on choosing a methodology for any subject cover the wider structure, and if you want a second opinion on your design, our dissertation methodology help is there for that.

Mistakes to avoid when choosing

• Treating survey, interview and intervention as three equal methods.
• Running an intervention with no comparison and then claiming it caused the change.
• Writing your own wellbeing questionnaire instead of using a validated scale.
• Using a licensed scale without checking permission.
• Claiming cause from a one-off survey.
• Interviewing more people than you can analyse properly.
• Combining methods without saying how the findings will be brought together.
• Leaving ethical approval until after you have chosen your recruitment plan.

Frequently asked questions

Is a survey or an interview better for a wellbeing dissertation?

Neither is better in general. A survey suits questions about how much or how things are related. Interviews suit questions about experience. Let your research question decide, then justify the choice in your methodology chapter.

How do you measure psychological resilience in a dissertation?

Most students use a validated self-report scale, such as the Brief Resilience Scale or the licensed CD-RISC. You can also explore resilience through interviews. If you are evaluating a programme, measure at more than one point in time.

What is an intervention study?

It is a study where you deliver or evaluate a programme, such as a workshop, and measure whether outcomes change. Because the programme is not a data collection method, it needs a design, ideally with a comparison group.

Can I combine surveys and interviews in one dissertation?

Yes, if you can explain what each part adds and how the results will be brought together. It doubles the data collection and analysis, so check it fits your timeline with your supervisor.

How many participants do I need for a wellbeing survey?

It depends on the analysis you plan. A power analysis, for example in G*Power, estimates the number from the effect size, power and significance level. Report the calculation, and note any shortfall as a limitation.

Do I need ethical approval for a wellbeing dissertation?

If you collect data from people yourself, expect to. Some universities, such as Portsmouth, require approval before any primary data collection, including a pilot. Check your department’s process and allow time for it in your plan.