Substantive motivations: the what of the why

In your academic writing, and most frequently in your Methodology chapter, you are required to provide motivations: why you chose a particular theory, research design, method...

What your reader is looking for in your motivation is substance. It is not enough to say you chose a particular theory because your study aims to discover x; that is not a reason. What they want to know is

what is it about x and about your choice of design/theory/etc. that is relevant?

In other words, you are expected to match the elements (substance) of your study to the elements of the thing you have chosen. In the graphic below, you can see that set A (imagine it is your study) and set B (your study design) are composed of different elements (a perspective, a structure, an attribute of information) that they have in common.

For a strong motivation, you need to name the elements that they have in common and draw out the links between them.

Let's look at an example:

Context: you have just explained that you will be using an interpretivist paradigm and what the interpretivism is, and now you wish to motivate your choice. What you might say is:

This study seeks to [research objective] in [population], so the interpretivist paradigm is considered suitable for the study.

But this tells us nothing about why is suitable. You could have chosen any paradigm and said that it applies to any objectives and population; that would not demonstrate that you have thought clearly about your choice, and it does not substantiate your assertion, because there is no substance (elements) to it.

In addition, you have already told us what your research objectives are, and what your population is. Constantly reminding the reader of this becomes boring for them if you don't explain what it is about your objectives and population that is relevant in this specific context.

For a substantive motivation, you need to name and draw together the unique qualities or attributes of the respective objectives, population, method and paradigm, and compare them.

Interpretivism's view that our understanding of reality is socially and individually constructed [as you would have just described and referenced] supports the study's objective of uncovering social media users' motivations, which are inherently subjective and constructed through the complex interplay of individuals' emotions and social influences [which you would have described and referenced in your theory section].

This study's qualitative methods [already described and referenced], which aim to discern the individual subjective reality of participants and their own interpretations of their actions, rather than their quantitative use of social media, also motivate the choice of the interpretivist paradigm, because interpretations and subjective reality are not quantifiable measures.

You can see how the sections highlighted in red summarise the relevant points in what you have already covered about the paradigm, objectives, methods and aims, and the commonalities link those details, rather than assuming that the reader is going to interpret that for themselves.

The first process is analysis, in which you break down the concepts into their common constituent parts, and the second process is synthesis (bringing together).

Motivations for your theoretical and methodological choices should generally follow this pattern of analysis and synthesis, to demonstrate your level of insight and your ability to analyse and synthesise information.