Twenty questions you will be asked in your viva

Examiners are testing whether the work is yours and whether you understand it. Almost every question reduces to one of these twenty.

About the study as a whole

1. Summarise your thesis in two minutes.
2. What is your original contribution?
3. Why does this research matter, and to whom?
4. What would you do differently if you started again?

About the literature

5. Which paper influenced your study most, and why?
6. Whose work does your finding contradict?
7. What is the most recent work in this area, and does it change your position?

About the method

8. Why this research design and not another?
9. Why this sampling technique?
10. How did you arrive at your sample size?
11. Why this instrument? Did you adapt it, and how did you validate the adaptation?
12. What did you do about common method bias?
13. Why this statistical test rather than the obvious alternative?

About the results

14. Explain this table to me.
15. What does this coefficient mean in practical terms, not statistical ones?
16. One of your hypotheses was not supported. Why do you think that is?
17. Could this relationship be explained by something you did not measure?

About the limits

18. What are the limitations of your study?
19. Can your findings be generalised? To what?
20. What should the next researcher do?

How to prepare

Write your answer to each of these, out loud, and time yourself. Two minutes maximum per answer. Then have someone who has not read your thesis ask them in a random order. The gap between what you think you know and what you can say under pressure is always larger than expected, and the only way to close it is rehearsal.