Qualitative Reseach Design in Social Sciences

During the meetings of the mandatory postgraduate seminar Methodology for Designing Qualitative Social Research, the process of designing and implementing a qualitative research will be presented in detail. The aim is to make the distinction between the epistemological priorities, methodological techniques and the process applied in a positivist-type research and the corresponding assumptions and choices of an empirical qualitative research. Initially, after presenting the concept of science and what are the overall characteristics of a scientific research, the tradition of positivist sociology and its proposals for social research will be briefly discussed (e.g. researcher-researched relationship, scientific idiom of the research, possibility of generalization, reliability and validity, ethical and moral issues, possibilities of practical application, etc.). Subsequently, the criticisms that are made of this research paradigm will be formulated and the logic of qualitative research will be thoroughly analyzed and how it is linked to specific questions, research designs and ways of empirically investigating everyday social life will be analyzed. More specifically, the steps of implementing a qualitative research project will be presented, from the initial conception of the research idea to the final implementation and publication of the research result. This cyclical process includes a discussion of how planning is done in qualitative research – and its various types – (e.g. ethnographic, narrative, phenomenological, case study, grounded theory, etc.), which phases the project in question includes, how the specific research questions are articulated and how the aims and objectives of the research are answered, through distinct methodological techniques. At the same time, emphasis is placed on the reflective, heuristic and dialectical nature of qualitative research methodology as well as on the ability to include not only "homogeneous" and "normal" cases, but mainly on the ability to highlight antinomies, contradictions, conflicts and ways of experiencing and managing specific situations (e.g. migration, chronic illness, unemployment, radical change of life plans, etc.). The possibility of combining quantitative and qualitative methodology in contemporary research design, the challenges, possibilities and limitations of corresponding synthetic projects are also discussed. The course aims to introduce postgraduate students to the basic issues of designing a qualitative research, as well as to the epistemological background of interpretive sociological reasoning. Through the discussion of application examples, various research designs will be analyzed and students will be introduced to the multiple techniques of collecting and analyzing qualitative social data and to the use of specific research techniques. The course is structured in the form of weekly lectures around the individual thematic units, based on the teaching material distributed to the students. In the context of the meetings, the legacy of interpretive sociology and the specific steps followed in the design of a qualitative research from the initial idea to its final implementation phase are presented. In addition to the foregoing, the ethical, deontological, epistemological, political and moral issues raised in qualitative research are presented in detail. In the lectures, extensive use is made of printed, visual and audio material from the fields of current events, but also from the past, depending on the topic under investigation (e.g. self-presentation, chronically ill people, unemployment, social stigmatization, social development, cohesion, migration, tourism, etc.). Through the creation of working groups, which study selected working texts published in Greek and foreign journals and books, the seminar will focus on issues of epistemology and methodology of research design in qualitative research and will highlight the heuristic and reflective dimension of qualitative research and the possibilities of its application. Furthermore, the research seminar will be linked to the content of the remaining seminars of the Master's Degree and students will present extensively issues arising from their own field research.