Prof. Akhtar Siddique, former head of NCTE (one of the Regulatory bodies of the Government of India) in his inaugural lecture talked about the importance of education and how education is understood from different perspectives by scholars from different disciplines. While speaking on the linkage between the progress in society and research, he emphasised that knowledge exploration is possible only through scientific research. Prof. Mirza Asmer Beg from the Department of Political Science, AMU shared his experience of how many research scholars complete their research work without an understanding of the fundamentals of doing a research. However, he recognized that research methodology has been a neglected area in the discourse of teaching at higher education levels. As a result, students are not much confident of carrying out research and fall into a trap of adopting a convenient approach of completing a research work rather than seriously exploring new areas of research.

The technical session on Research Methodology started with a discussion on fundamentals of doing a research by Dr. G. C. Pal. First of all, he pointed that the quest for understanding social reality and human behavior is at the root of methodological concerns. He explained the importance of two key concepts such as ‘research’, and ‘methodology’ to enable participants to understand the basics of any research in social science. It was pointed that research is more than an understanding of set of skills; it is a way of thinking. It is about questioning something to find answers that would add to the advancement of a profession and also solution of practical problems in life. However, in order to reach at answers, there is a need to understand some guiding principles to govern research questions- both theoretical and practical. While speaking on essentials of a research, he pointed that researcher should take into consideration key issues such as ‘importance and usefulness of research’ and ‘contexts of research’ and ‘processes of doing a research’.

Before focusing on the research process, the speaker highlighted on important characteristics of a social science research. It is nothing but exploring relationship and causality between two or more factors in a systematic manner. Further, it Is verifiable, evidenced-base, critical and cyclic in nature. While drawing attention towards the cyclic nature of the research, he emphasized that majority of social science research are evolved from a theory or knowledge base or social experiences; and the outcomes of a research very often lead to further research. In the process of repeated research, the research questions are systematically studied and various methods of doing research are also reexamined and refined.

The speaker elaborated on important operational steps of doing a research such as formulating a research problem, specifying objectives, conceptualizing research design, collecting information from target groups, analyzing data and writing report. As each step requires some basic knowledge which researchers should acquire for successful completion of their research work, the speaker rightly raised a relevant question before the participants such as “How much they are well-versed with the required knowledge that each step involves?”, This question in fact again brought the basic purposes of the workshop into the floor. Against this backdrop, the speaker explained various issues which included- ‘formulate research problems/questions and objectives’; ‘designing a research, methods of data collection, various types of sampling design, processing and analyzing information and principles of scientific writing of a report.

The discussion in fact evoked a lot of questions among participants to which the speaker tried to explain with research based evidences. Relevant academic interventions were also made from other experts and academicians. Participants were also provided with opportunities to respond to each other’s queries. This question-answer session in fact enabled clarifying some of the misunderstandings of various methodological issues.

Following the mid-day break, second session of the workshop focused on quantitative and qualitative research with a special focus on survey research. Dr. Pal spoke about the quantitative and qualitative research as two broad methodological approaches for ‘doing research’. He covered basic differences between these two approaches on various methodological parameters. It was concluded by saying, although it is true that there are disciplines that lend themselves predominantly either to qualitative or to quantitative research, neither one is markedly superior to the other in all respects; and one research cannot be solely a quantitative or qualitative. In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition by most disciplines in the social science that both types of research are important for a good research study. In several researches, we need to combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The research problem itself determines whether the study is classified as quantitative or qualitative.

As a part of quantitative research, the importance of survey method in the contemporary research and its implications were discussed in detail. The speaker pointed that the basic survey procedure as used in the social science is made up of a combination of techniques borrowed from various disciplines. The survey approach has been one of the more popular and dominant social research methods mainly due to the development of sampling techniques as they enabled inferences to be made about a population from the sample of population. However, survey could be conducted on topics where respondents would be willing and able to respond the research questions.