Okay guys, forgive me for this one- but even my thesis chair is not really able to answer this question for me so here it goes. My chair doesn't give a rats ass about formal methodology, but the school is really pushing it this year b/c its trying to raise its academic profile.
I'm writing a thesis on the effect of regional political interests on US and Chinese activities in Afghanistan. The purpose of my thesis is to figure out why the two countries can't seem to work together to contain extremism, even though they have so many interests in Afghanistan. My hunch is that yes, they do have many shared interests in Afghanistan but their regional interests are more important and those regional interests preclude real cooperation in Afghanistan.
I'm going to write my thesis by reading a ton, including books and academic journals as well as relevant respectable newspapers and magazines in English as well as some of the regional languages (I'm a military linguist, this is a military funded course). Then I'm going to synthesize what I have read with my own (well supported) ideas so it'll qualify as a graduate level master's degree thesis. I'm using qualitative analysis based on review of the extant literature.
The problem is, I don't know how to handle the methodology section. We were forced to take a "how to write a thesis" class but the professor was really into grounded theory using quantitative data so it was basically worthless to me. For the most part, I'm not writing using "data" (he spent hours upon hours counting tank officer graduation statistics from the 1920s... fun). I'm taking the existing secondary literature as my "data" and mixing it with my own ideas and coming up with something. I'm not using alternate futures or case studies.
Any ideas how I can describe or otherwise handle this methodology issue?