Honours dissertation - advice on failing because of study design
I’m currently finishing my psychology honours dissertation and I’m having a bit of a crisis on whether I'll fail because of my study design.
It’s a fairly simple, completely online study using self-report measures, and I’m worried about things like demand characteristics, participants potentially figuring out what the study is testing, and whether people actually took the study seriously.
I obviously can't change the study at this point, so my question is more about how much this matters for the dissertation overall.
If the study design has some genuine limitations, can strong writing, a good theoretical rationale, appropriate analysis, and a thoughtful discussion of the limitations make up for it to some extent? Or is a fundamentally mediocre study design going to cap the mark regardless of how well the dissertation is written?
For anyone who has marked or completed an Honours/undergraduate dissertation, I’d really appreciate some honest perspectives. I’m probably catastrophising because I’m at the end of the process, but I genuinely can’t tell anymore whether my study is reasonably acceptable or just objectively bad lol.