The core objective of the workshop was to equip the research scholars with set of skills and capability to undertake the research effectively in the disciplines of social science and to turn completed research into publishable material of high quality in the form of articles, journals and books. This workshop is designed to offer the practical guidelines and direct the researchers through all the stages of research from identifying a research problem to the submission of a dissertation, report writing and research articles. The course intends to deal with variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods used in social science research. It also gives exposure to data analyses with the help of software package. By the end of the workshop, they were expected to develop conceptual clarity and practical knowledge to undertake quality research and writing good research papers field-reports and project proposals, etc. The workshop commenced, after the registration of the participants and introduction of resource persons.
Amity Business School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh organized Five Days Online Research Methodology Workshop on “Methodological Approach on Data Analysis” from 16th May 2024 to 20th May 2024 in virtual mode. The objective of this workshop was to enhance the conceptual knowledge and analytical skills of students, budding research scholars and academicians in the field of research. It was targeted towards understanding about research paper formation and questionnaire development with data types and data analysis techniques and interpretation of research findings along with preliminary understanding of Statistical Software, applying tests like Reliability, Regression and Factor Analysis by using SPSS software. The workshop also helped the participants to have a deeper understanding of research ethics and Plagiarism consequences.
More than 80 participants have attended the workshop. The participants were faculty members, research scholars and students from premium institutions such as Symbiosis Institute of Management Pune, North Eastern Hill University , B. V. Patel Institute of Management, Uka Tarsadia University, P. P. Savani Homoeopathic Medical College and Hospital, Galgotias University, Punjabi University, Patiala, Banasthali Vidyapith, IFTM University Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, GL Bajaj Institute of Technology and Management, Greater Noida, Panjab University Chandigarh and ABV-IIITM etc.
Faculty coordinators and Resource Persons of the workshop were: Associate Professor Dr. Pooja Jain, Assistant Professor Dr. Gunjan Dwivedi and Associate Professor Dr. Pranshuman Parashar, Amity Business School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh.
The entire workshop was conducted under the able guidance of Respected Prof. (Dr.) Anil Vashisht, Offg. Vice Chancellor AUMP & Director Amity Business School.
Day-wise detailed description is as follows:
Day 1
The first day focused on how to write research papers and Ph.D. thesis. The day commenced with a welcome address followed by an overview of the workshop objectives. Dr. Pooja Jain led the first session on the fundamentals of research paper writing, discussing the importance of research papers in academia, the structure of a research paper, selecting suitable journals, and common mistakes to avoid. Further, covered how to write compelling abstracts and introductions, effective literature review and citation management. Also, highlighting the differences between a research paper and a thesis, thesis structure, time management, and reviewing and editing processes. The day concluded with a Q&A session, allowing participants to discuss challenges and receive feedback, followed by a summary of key points and distribution of recorded session.
Day 2
This session was taken by Dr. Gunjan Dwivedi, Assistant Professor Finance, Amity Business School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh on 17th May 2024. She delivered her lecture on “Introduction of Data Types & Statistical Software”, in which she explained what is research, concept of data and types of data. She explained the qualitative and quantitative type of data with examples in detail. She discussed regarding nominal, ordinal and binary data in the qualitative/categorical data category while continuous, discrete, interval and ratio data under quantitative/numerical category of data. She also taught the importance of data in research and data collection methods. She stressed upon the fact that data collection method should be chosen carefully in relevance with research study. She detailed the primary data collection methods as interview, observation, survey, questionnaire and experiments. She described that survey and questionnaire should be understood in the right manner and the researcher should be aware about 5 Common Survey Mistakes that can spoil your data. The speaker also explained secondary data collection methods like literature review, Government and commercial databases, etc. The resource person also shows the practical steps that how secondary data can be fetched from world bank website. Parallelly shows the sample Questionnaire, excel sheet of collected responses and the process to shift it into SPSS Software for data analysis. She also clarified in detail about statistical softwares which can be used in quantitative and qualitative analysis like SPSS, Eviews, Nvivo, etc She also dealt with queries of research scholars regarding different problem while pursuing research and accurately guided them. This question answer session enabled clarifying some of the misunderstanding of various methodological issues in designing research paper and thesis.
Day 3
The third day of the research methodology workshop was focused on practical orientation which was taken by Dr. Pranshuman Parashar, Associate Professor, Amity Business School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh on 18th May, 2024. Firstly, the theoretical concepts related to Reliability Analysis were discussed in an elaborated and easy-to-understand manner in which the aspects related to Cronbach’s Alpha and its usage were discussed. It was followed by the application of reliability analysis on PASW Software in which the participants learned about the applications of test and its interpretation. Further, the concepts of Linear and Multiple Regression Analysis were discussed along with its purpose. The elaborated interpretation of the various tables i.e. model summary, Anova and coefficients associated with the tests was also explained. The participants were also provided the opportunity to ask their respective query at the end of the session.
Day 4
On day four, the theoretical concepts and application of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) were explained by Dr. Pranshuman Parashar. Initially, a brief revision of reliability and regression analysis was done to revive the concepts explained on day three. Further, the exploratory factor analysis’ theoretical concept was explained through the usage of various examples. The application of EFA on PASW software along with the interpretation of KMO & Bartlett’s test of sphericity, communality, factor loadings, scree plot and eigen values were explained in an elaborated manner. Lastly, all the queries related to EFA were answered in the most effective way so as to ensure that all the theoretical as well as practical concepts were understood by the participants.
Day 5
The session on 20th May 2024 was jointly handled by Dr. Pooja Jain and Dr. Gunjan Dwivedi.
The first half of the session was dedicated to Questionnaire Development. Dr. Pooja Jain began her lecture with a recap of the previous day and discussed how to prepare questionnaire, including scaling, designing unbiased questions and pre-testing questionnaires.
In the second half of the session, Dr. Gunjan Dwivedi summarize the four day’s discussion with a quick review and then delivered her lecture on ‘Research Ethics and Plagiarism’. She explained that why the research ethics and research integrity is important. She discussed the elements of research ethics like autonomy, beneficence, justice, confidentiality, etc. and suggested that in the process of conducting research, researcher should always follow research ethics. Further she discussed the concept of plagiarism, types, consequences and levels of plagiarism, tips for avoiding it and plagiarism tools. She emphasized that honesty is the best policy in the context of research.
At the end, both the resource persons allowed participants to ask their queries and clarified all the doubts of the participants. The workshop was wind-up with the valuable comments, appreciation and applause of participants. The participants proposed that they are grateful to Amity Business School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh for conducting this workshop and said that this was very helpful for the basic understanding of research by which they able to explored the intricacies of research methodologies with practical exposure. They requested that such workshops should be conducted in future also.