7 Days Workshop concluded at PU
Seven days workshop organized by The Centre for Social Work, Panjab University on “The Need and Importance of Research Methodology in Social Sciences” from July 1st to 7th, 2021 concluded, today.
This was attended by the research scholars pursuing Ph.D and students doing Masters in Social Work. Dr Meenakshi Sharma, Scientist from the School of Public Health, PGIMER, Chandigarh was Co-coordinator-cum-resource person for the said workshop for these seven days.
While inagurating the workshop Dr. Rani Mehta, Chairperson, Department of Sociology, PU emphasized the importance of honesty and ethics in a good research. She shared the relevant Research Designs in social sciences along with their relevance. She focused on having regular workshops on such themes.
Dr Meenakshi Sharma during the duration of these seven days covered the thematic areas like meaning of Research, Objectives of research, motivation in Research, Types of Research and Approaches in Research, Research methods vs methodology
Meaning of Research, meaning of Research Design, different Research Designs, sampling and Qualitative methods of research.
She initiated the workshop by stating the meaning of research and its objectives and purpose. Further she discussed research problems and research statements. She explained all the concepts citing relevant examples.
While talking about research design Dr. Meenakshi explained the concept of a Research question, Hypothesis, Variables and different types of research design such as Observational, descriptive, cross sectional, analytical etc. Dr Meenakshi kept the session very interactive; she constantly asked questions and examples from the participants which made the session very interactive. Later on she explained the cross-sectional study, Case control study and Cohort Study.
She also discussed the sampling fundamentals, need for sampling and some sampling distribution. She also discussed Population, sample size, sample unit and sampling framework. She started with non probability sampling and then she explained the different types of Probability sampling.
Afterwards she took, the different methods of Data collection. She said that there are three types of data which we collected by tools: Facts, Knowledge and Judgments. Further she discussed the different types of tools for data collection such as: Obstractional form, structured observation guide and Questionnaire. After that she explained the components of data collection tools. She also explained the concept of open question, close question and semi open question with the suitable examples and also discussed how we can analyze the data from these open and close questions.
After that Dr. Meenakshi discussed the formulation of questions. She said that questions should go from general to specific or simple to complex. Further she said we should also take care of the confidentiality of the respondents or participants. At the end of everyday she clarified the doubts and queries of the participants.
Babita Sharma, Research scholar who attended the complete workshop said that “in the social sciences arena we deal with the behavior of people in their different roles. It deals with the systematic method of discovering new facts or of verifying old facts, their sequence, inter-relationship, causal explanations and the other related aspects, so such workshops are very important for our academic growth”.
Gaurav Gaur, Chairperson, Centre for Social Work coordinated the whole workshop and expressed his gratitude towards the resource person and all the students for their overwhelming response towards this workshop
