The Seedling School of Law and Governance, Jaipur National University, Jaipur, organized a three-day FDP on ‘Qualitative Research Methodology: Foundations and Data Analysis’ from 18th-20th May’2022 at its campus. The key resource persons for the FDP were Dr. C.S. Sharma, Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), Delhi University and Dr. H.K. Dangi, Professor, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. About thirty participants including faculty members and research scholars attended the program.
The FDP began with a warm welcome to the participants and the resource person, Dr. C.S. Sharma. Thereafter, Prof H.M. Mittal gave a welcome address and apprised the participants about the program objective. Dr. Sharma started the session with the basics of research. He talked about the motivation behind doing research and asked the participants to share their motivations behind doing research. He then talked about the philosophical background of research and briefed about the three schools of thought – Traditional, Modern, and Pre Modern view. Thereafter, Dr. Sharma discussed about epistemology and ontology of qualitative research. Moreover, he explained the difference between constructivism and interpretivism. Later, he explained the usage of these philosophical theories in research. Dr. Sharma concluded the session by discussing the Ground theory approach of research.
The second day of FDP started with the discussion on interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) by Dr. C. S. Sharma in which he discussed about the role and importance of IPA in analyzing the personal experiences of the users. Further, he mentioned that it is the most appropriate qualitative approach to provide detailed examinations of participants’ experiences. Dr. Sharma also conducted a brief exercise wherein participants gained hands-on experience of manually identifying codes, categories, themes and concepts from qualitative data. The second session of the day was conducted by Dr. H. K. Dangi wherein he described how to conduct the qualitative research through NVivo software and differentiated the manual and mechanical experiences of qualitative research. Further, he gave an overview of the NVivo software and explained in detail its features and their usage. In the last session, he discussed how to conduct the content analysis using NVivo software.
All three sessions on Day 3 were conducted by Dr. H.K. Dangi. He started the first session by explaining Thematic Analysis through various examples and then demonstrated it using NVivo software. Later, he conducted a practice session for participants to gain practical experience on thematic analysis using the software. In the second and third sessions, Dr. Dangi followed the same approach while explaining Sentiment Analysis and Image Analytics with NVivo software. The practice sessions in all three sessions triggered a lot of queries by the participants which were well answered by Dr. Dangi. The program concluded with valediction, certificate distribution, and a group photograph.
The program was a great learning experience for the participants as they not only acquired the knowledge on various facets of qualitative research but also gained the conviction to apply those learnings in their research domains. Overall, the program was highly appreciated by the participants who expressed their willingness to attend such programs in the future as well.