CHANDIGARH: A six-day basic Qualitative Research Methodology Workshop organized by Indian Council of Social Science Research, North West Regional Centre began at P.U. Campus here today. The workshop is attended by young teachers and research scholars from varied social science disciplines. The participants are from neighbouring States of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Chandigarh.
The workshop began with an introductory session in which Prof. Bhupinder Brar, Honorary Director of ICSSR and Dean University Instruction welcomed the participants and emphasized on the significance of qualitative method in social science research which otherwise is dominated by quantitative methods. He said that the idea is not to give privilege one method over other but the choice of method depends on the research problem.
The Coordinators of the Workshop, Shalina Mehta, Professor of Social Anthropology and Pampa Mukherjee, Associate Professor of Political Science, gave an overview of the training programme, highlighting the issues to be covered- ethnography, grounded theory, content analysis, values in research, visual study , qualitative data analysis among others. Mr. P.K. Saini, Deputy Director of the Centre also welcomed the participants and proposed a formal vote of thanks.
Resource persons specialized in qualitative research methods, both outstation and local have been invited to take several sessions for this programme. Some of the outstation resource persons are Vinay Srivastav, Professor of Social Anthropology, Ujjwal Singh and Sohini Guha from Delhi University, Shyam Narayan Lal and Suman Jamwal from Jammu University, Sankar Chowdhury from UNICEF and Hilal Ahmed, Centre for the Studies in Developing Societies., Delhi.