Generic viva questions

This file contains generic questions about your work, thesis, project, etc. and they are presented in this video:

To compile it, I split some sensible thesis questions into reasonable categories and then added good stuff from the top ten or so internet search results for "viva questions" on university and news articles. Many questions are very similar, but each with a particular spin to them.

I made this list before my PhD thesis, so much of it is geared in such a direction. If you're facing the same, then I also have the following recommendation:

Read your thesis a few times.
Research your examiners knowledge, perspective, interest and examination history.
Reread the thesis from the perspective of your examiners. During the exam, you may also ask the exam committee to rephrase questions.

Summary

Summarize your work in one or two sentences, for a person in your field.
Summarize your work in one or two sentences, for a layman.
Summarize your work. (You should be able to pile up a good summary from the abstract & conclusion section of your work.)
If a text, summarize each section of your work individually.
Summarize your (academic) contribution in your work, in one sentence.
Summarize your (academic) contribution in your work.
Summarize the secondary contents derived in the process of your work (e.g. papers with your name on them).

Field and Context

What are the subjects surrounding yours? (Draw a mind map?)
Who has had the strongest influence in the development of your subject area, on the theoretical respectively on the practical side? Justify the answer by summarizing their relevance?
What do you know about the history of [something relevant to your field]?
What are important ideas in your field?
What are the main issues and debates in your subject area?
What are the most recent major developments in your area?
What is the state of [techniques, methods, ...] in [area mentioned] above?
How do you expect [the area mentioned] to progress over the next five years?
What came before you? what research enabled you or "do you own"?
How does your work sit within the grand scheme of things?
What published work is closest to yours? How is your work different?
How did your thinking about this topic develop as you went through this research process?
Which field listed is of lesser relevance to your work, and why?
How does your work relate to [something mentioned above]?
What are important literature works in your field?
Which are the most important papers that relate to your work?
What are the most important references in your work? And why?

Topic choice

How did your research question(s) emerge? Where did it originate?
Is the research question addressing an issue from literature or from industry?
What is the (academic) motivation for this study?
What is your motivation for this study? What is your inspiration for this study?
What other related topics interested you and why did you choose the one you did?
How was the decision to choose this particular topic made?
How did the research focus change over time?
Why is the problem you have tackled worth tackling?
What were some of the difficulties you encountered and how did they influence how the topic was framed?
What main problems or issues did you have in deciding what was in-scope and out-of-scope?

Scope

Which main issues does your research address?
What is the idea that binds your work together?
What are your research questions?
What is the scope of the study?
Did you do a literature review and what was its focus?
Why was your topic not approached before you?

Expectation

What did you set out to achieve?
What was your hypothesis? What were your hypotheses?
What were you completely uncertain about?
What did you expect to find?

Theory

What are the fundamental assumptions underlying your work?
What theories or theoretical framework is your study based on?
What alternative theories could you have chosen?
Explain why you have not focused more on [other related theory] in your work?
What are your research variables?
What are important parameters in the topic your investigated?
How do parameters in other theories differ from the ones in the theory you used?
What parameters were neglectable in your research, and why?
Which parameters are especially crucial for your work in particular?
What are typical units/numbers/scales in the topic your investigated?
What are typical units/numbers/scales in your field?

Data

What are the main sources of data and/or evidence?
What is your data's quantity? Where could or should it be more extensive?
Did you have any problems with the data collection process?
Was there potential data you could not obtain?
Are there different data and evidence that you would have have liked to use?
What is your datas quality? Is it unquestioned?
Can you estimate the error range?
Does the data fit theory?
How did you establish the limits around the scope of your data collection?
To what extent do you think the data you collected were the most appropriate to answer your research question?
Are there any other data you (during your work) would have liked to collect?
Are there any other data you now wish you would have collected?

Methodology

What are the core methods used in your work?
Talk us through your analysis? Demonstrate competence with respect to those mythologies.
What were the crucial research decisions you made?
Why did you choose this approach?
What is your measurement instrument, if any?
What sampling methods did you employ?
How well did the study design work in practice?
Speak about its error analysis.
What are the limitations of your methods?
How did you establish the limits around the scope of your data collection?
How would your system cope with bigger examples? Does it scale up?
Did you encounter any problems with applying your methods?
What were the main ethical issues of conducting this research and how did you deal with them?
In terms of methology, how does your work compare with previous work?
How do other people in the field usually approach this differently?
What were your possible alternatives?
How well did the study design work in practice?
How can your research be done better if done a second time around?
Did you develop a method? How can it be improved in the future?
What were routes you tried and did not work?
What were some routes you did not try and why?
What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?

Process

What would you change if you were to conduct the study again?
Were there any surprises along the way?
What were things that went wrong?
Has your view of your research topic changed during the course of the research?
What advice would you give to a research student entering this area?
What developments have there been in this field since you began your PhD?
How has this changed the research context in which you are working?

Personal

What have you learned from the process of doing this work?
What is the most unsatisfactory part of the study?
What are you most proud of, and why?
Which part of the process did you enjoyed most and why?
How did doing this research change you as a researcher?
What do you plan to do with your research project after graduation?
Do you intend to carry on with this research?
Does what you did for your work relate to things you did before and after it?
Is your field going in the right direction?
With which people in your field would you want a conversation and why?

Findings and Evaluation

Summarize your key findings. What are the bottom line conclusions of your research?
What are all your findings?
Link your findings to your research objectives.
Which of these findings are the most interesting to you? Why?
What does your work tell us that we did not know before?
What surprised you about the findings?
Were there any surprises along the way of your research?
Are your results confirmable and/or replicatable?
Which aspects of your work do you intend to publish and where?
How generalizable are your findings?
What would you have gained by using another approach?
Would you have different results if you conducted the study in different contexts?
What do your results mean?
How do you know that your findings are correct?
How did you evaluate your main hypothesis?
How did you evaluate your work?
What are the uncertainties in the knowledge added?
In which ways can your work be interpreted?
How does the work compare with previous beliefs?
How do your findings relate to literature in your field?
Do your findings contradict any existing theories or findings?
Between your work and that of other authors, how do you explain the differences of findings, or estimations, or interpretations?
How has your view of your research topic changed?
How could you improve your work? Why did you not do it differently?
What is the main limitation of your work, and how could you address it?
What is/are the weakest part(s) of your work?

Value and Implications

To whom, and in what context, is what you did of value?
How does your study contribute to the body of knowledge?
What is your contribution to theory?
What is your contribution to research?
What is your contribution to related fields?
What is your contribution to industry?
What are the main achievements of your research?
In what way do you consider your work to be original?
Is there originality in topic or methodology?
Which propositions or findings would you say are distinctively your own?
What are the (most) original parts of your work?
What have you done that merits a PhD?
How do you think your work takes forward or develops the literature in this field?
How does your work enhance the state of the art in [your topic]?
Do you think your contributions will have a long-term impact?
What are the empirical, practical, and theoretical implications of your findings?
Who will be most interested in your work?
What is the relevance of your work to other researchers?
What is the relevance of your work to practitioners? How can your research study be put into practice?
Can your methods be used for future research by you or others and does this extend to related fields? How would the methods change?
What do you hope your PhD will accomplish?

Outlook

What areas would you suggest for future research? How would you hope that this research could be followed up and taken further?
How and why do you conclude this direction is a good choice, based on your findings.
How to continue to [your topic]?
How could your contributions generalize?
How to improve upon your research?
How would you start future research?
How long would it take to implement [something you suggest in your conclusion] and what are the likely problems you can see popping up?

Nikolaj-K/questions_to_ask_yourself.md