Introduction

Abstract

The genesis of this work goes back to the time when I began teaching a course on Research Methodology to fellow (doctoral) programme students at NITIE. That was way back in 2003, a good 11 years ago. That was when the Applied Statistics forming half of the course was taken out at my insistence and began to be taught as a separate course in addition to the stream-specific courses in the first module, with the sole objective of strengthening the methodology part without neglecting the statistical tools/techniques widely used by research scholars. That my colleagues on the Board of Research concurred with my long-held view and agreed to such a change was a big step indeed, for it was only then that as the Chair I could convince the Director. Perhaps, by then it had become increasingly clear to all concerned that in most credit seminar presentations, there was confusion among students as between methodology and methods and that they took the latter for the former, thus came the opportunity to strengthen the research methodology course with some theoretical perspectives, especially from the logical and philosophical viewpoints associated with creation, dissemination and advancement of knowledge. It felt good to experiment with new topics like knowledge claims, formal logic, dialectics, theory, empiricism, positivism, phenomenology, quantitative and qualitative paradigms and models, verification and falsification modelling, etc. More importantly, the students seemed interested and receptive, often expressing the view that this was something totally new to which they were exposed to and that it would immensely benefit them in their research work. Yet, I would increasingly feel something was amiss, and this was despite the fact a significant proportion of the batch admitted happened to come with fairly sound academic background, albeit from diverse disciplines ranging from science and technology, economics, finance, behavioural sciences to social and management sciences, IT, environment, ergonomics, etc. Admittedly, their proposed areas/topics of research were as diverse; some entailing conceptualization, modelling, testing, others involving laboratory work, others relying on primary data obtained from fieldwork/surveys and yet others taking recourse to library research using published data sources. Further, some were quantitative in their approach, others were qualitative and some others adopted a mixed type. Also, the composition of the successive batches would change.