One of the most important event of a PhD journey is the PhD Viva. Although the questions in the Viva might highly dependent on the examiners, many general questions which might be adjusted in detail to your PhD topic can be prepared beforehand. In the context of the outcome of a PhD is to become an independent researcher afterwards these questions generally refer to
- Motivation - how/why did you choose this research topic (or why it is important/why we should care about it)
- Research setup - about details of dataset, experiment setup, evaluation setup, as well as limitations
- Impact/limitations - what's the impact of the output of the research, what's the limitations and how you will address this limitations (to see how you will extend your research in the future)
About how you chosed the research topic
- what are the reasons for doing this research?
- what is evident from past research?
- what new thing or idea does your research contribute to the literature?
Research methodology
- what are the rationales for your hypotheses?
- why did you choose that particular study design?
- what are your expected results?
- how much variability in your data do you expect to see?
- how much of an effect do you expect to see?
- what types of statistical procedures will you use?
- what statistic is suited for each hypothesis?
- what are your inclusion and exclusion criteria for subject selection?
- how have you controlled for those criteria?
- what are your study’s limitations?
- how do you plan to handle this problem? Statistically? Experimentally?
Potential/Future work/impact of your research
- how can the results of your proposed research be applied?
- why did you choose to measure those particular variables?
- how did you decide on the # of subjects?
- how much power does your study have?