16 September 2026 · 8 min read
Students plan their thesis around writing time and are surprised by fieldwork. In practice the write-up is the predictable part: data collection is where a Nepali thesis loses a month, and almost always for one of three reasons — permission that took longer than expected, a response rate far below what the sample size calculation assumed, or data that came back unusable.
If your data comes from inside an organisation — a bank, a hospital, a school, a ward office, a factory — you need a request letter from your campus and a response from them, and neither moves at your deadline's pace. Start this before your proposal is finally approved rather than after, because the letter costs you nothing if the design changes.
If permission is refused, that is information, not a disaster — but only if you learn it in month one. The same refusal in month four means redesigning the study with no time to collect anything.
The sample size your calculation produced is the number of usable responses you need, not the number of questionnaires to distribute. Students routinely distribute exactly the calculated number, get a fraction back, and end up analysing a sample too small to support the test they proposed.
Report the rate honestly whatever it turns out to be. A 46% response rate with the limitation acknowledged is a normal thesis. A rate quietly inflated to look respectable is a question you cannot answer at viva.
A pilot is the cheapest insurance in the whole process. Give the questionnaire to eight or ten people from your population, sit with them while they fill it in, and watch where they hesitate. You will find at least one question that reads clearly to you and ambiguously to everybody else, and one that nobody can answer because the option they need is missing.
For Nepali-language fieldwork, pilot the translated version, not the English original. Translation shifts meaning in scaled items particularly — the distance between “agree” and “strongly agree” is not the same distance in every rendering, and a scale that behaves differently in the field is a reliability problem you will meet in the results chapter.
Record with permission, and ask for that permission on the record at the start. Transcribe as you go rather than in a block at the end — twelve interviews transcribed in the final week is a genuine reason theses miss deadlines, and transcription of a Nepali-language interview into English analysis takes longer than anyone budgets.
Keep field notes separate from transcripts: what you observed, what surprised you, what the respondent said after the recorder stopped and gave you permission to use. Those notes are what make a findings chapter read like fieldwork rather than a list of quotes.
Back up the same day, in two places, and keep the raw data untouched — all cleaning happens on a copy. A lost laptop in month five with the only copy of 180 questionnaires is a story every supervisor in Kathmandu has heard more than once.
Keep the filled questionnaires, the consent records and the permission letters until after your viva. Departments occasionally ask to see them, and “I have the data file” is a weaker answer than a box of forms.
Related:
If you are at the planning stage, send your objectives and your population — we will tell you where this particular design is most likely to stall.