Seven Days Workshop On Research Methodology And Statistical Analysis Using IBM SPSS 10-16 June, 2014

1. Introduction 

Research Methodology is dynamic in nature and equips researchers with comprehensive outlook about the research. Research is about searching systematically for solutions to problems for which statistical device is required. To address c h a l l e n g e s & opportunities in the field of research a new software known as IBM SPSS has enabled academicians and researchers to obtain valuable information from the data. Before proceeding for survey & data analysis, basic knowledge on SPSS is vital. In its pursuit to promote research, the Centre for Research Innovation and Training, The IIS University, Jaipur organized a 7 Day Course on Research Methodology from 10 September to 16 June, 2014. The workshop aims to improve the research skills& competence amongst the researcher by strengthening their theoretical knowledge as well as by giving them the Hands-on training with SPSS, report writing etc.

2. Selection of Participants

About 500 brochures were dispatched to the various Universities, Colleges and the Academic institutions all over India. To invite the applications, information was also displayed on the website (www.iisu.ac.in).

The Course received on overwhelming response from the Research Scholars from all over India. In all about 100 applications were received, out of which 50 research Scholars were selected. While selecting the participants following issues were taken into consideration:

• First Come First Serve Basis
• Preference given to SC, ST and Minority
• The selection insured adequate coverage from different parts of the country. 

3. Course Content and the Faculty  :

The inaugural session of the course was graced by such luminaries from the field of education as Dr. Ashok Gupta, Vice-Chancellor, the IIS University, who gave the welcome address, Prof. Amita Sharma from Rajasthan University was the key-note speaker of the session, Dr. Subhash Garg, Dean and Director, CRIT, The IIS University, acquainted the august gathering with the aims and objectives of the course as well as the activities of CRIT and Dr. Raakhi Gupta, Rector & Registrar, The IIS University proposed a vote of thanks.

Eminent academicians from various Institutions of repute from all over India like

• Prof. Balwinder Singh Saini, Gurunanak Dev University, Amritsar
• Dr. Ajay Singh, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, Delhi
• Prof. Amita Sharma, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur
• Dr. Sanket Viz, Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak
• Prof. Girish Taneja, Lovely Professional University, Punjab
• And Prof. Nisha Yadav, The IIS University, Jaipur

Were the resource persons for the various technical sessions.

These experts apprised the participants on qualitative and quantitative research, focusing upon the research design, formulation of research problems, hypothesis Testing, sampling, types of sampling, correlation, regression usage of Dummy variables in regression .

The key Highlights of the course were :

• Hands on training with SPSS and Excel
• Discussion on application of various statistical tools

The course concluded with an extremely informative session by Prof. Gurjeet Singh, on “how to write an effective research report”. This concluding session was followed by a feedback session from the participants.

It was a learning experience for all. The contributions of various resource persons to the course were invaluable and of immense intellectual significance. (Appendix-1 : Detailed Time Table)

4. Write –up  on Practical Sessions/Field Trips etc 

Day 1

Day 1: started with registration of the participants from different states of the country .Registration was followed by the inaugural session. Dr. Ankita Chaturvedi, Workshop Coordinator, the IIS University welcomed the esteemed guest and the participants. Dr.Chaturvedi took the participants through the growth of IISU and emphasized the importance of research.

Dr. SubhashGarg, Dean and Director, CRIT highlighted the aims and objectives of the workshop. He also talked about CRIT and other upcoming sessions during the workshop.

The inaugural note was delivered by Dr. Ashok Gupta, Honorable Vice-Chancellor, The IIS University. Dr. Ashok Gupta focused on increasing scope of statistical analysis and application of SPSS in the field of research and also explained the role of CRIT in motivating the faculty and research scholars of the university.

The key note address was delivered by Prof.Amita Sharma, Dept of Statistics ,University of Rajasthan. Prof. Sharma in her address highlighted meaning, concept and need of research methodology.

The ceremony was concluded by Workshop Coordinator, Dr.Meenakshisharma’s Vote of thanks. Course Coordinators Dr. Ankita Chaturvedi and Dr. Meenakshi Sharma gave floral greeting and pleasantries to our esteemed guest.

The first session was addressed by Prof. Amita Sharma who highlighted the concept of Research Methodology and discussed Formulation of Research Problem. Then she explained the types of research. She also discussed the Methods of data collection. She then had a one to one session with participants and later addresses their questions and queries.

DAY 2

Session I

Day two of research methodology workshop session I commenced with interactive session by Dr. Amita Sharma from university of Rajasthan, Jaipur. The session focused on the ‘Types of Sampling and Sampling Theory“

The highlights of session were:

• What is sample and why do we collect it?
• The lecture focused on Sampling methods and its features.
• Talked about the sampling distribution, Statistic and Parameter.
• Sampling and Non sampling errors were discussed

Session II

DrAmita Sharma Continued her session. She discussed on hypothesis testing in detail. She started the discussion with types of research Hypothesis by describing the concept of Null and Alternative Hypothesis, Level of Significance, Type I and Type II Error, Critical Region, etc.

Further, she discussed the branches of Statistics- Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics, their need and applicability. She also explained the concept of Measures of Central Tendencies and Dispersion. She gave various examples to describe the concepts in detail. Later before winding up the session she answered all the questions been raised.

Session III

Dr. SanketVij, I.M.S.A.R from Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak conducted the third Post tea session. Dr. SanketVij gave the participants a glimpse as to how an idea of research can be generated and how to proceed with research. He highlighted the essentials of review of literature, Data cleanliness , Data normalization and Data editing.

He emphasized on the importance of the review of literature and how it is essential to conduct a good research work .Under following heads he covered up the entire session:

• How to increase the quality of research by referring various online books and sites available.
• Discussed about the present scenario of research
• Covered various ethical aspects to be followed while doing the  research and writing the thesis
• Difference between References and bibliography
• He also discussed about the importance of use of various references and must consult the expert of the field to upgrade the research work.
• He has also explained the collaborative research and its importance and how it is useful to the society.

Moreover, Dr. SanketVij started a new topic which is now days a very common among research scholars but most of research scholars do not know how to use it and it is SPSS software. He ended the session by concluding on a note that “It is not require to write 40 articles/books instead researchers should do 1 quality work which is worth 40”.

Day 3

Session I

Dr. SanketVij further highlighted more on the research methodology. He discussed the tools of data collection-Primary and secondary data, Interview, observation etc. He enlightened participants on the basic operations in SPSS. He then gave a practical training of working on these two views on SPSS software to all the participants.

He provided the practical knowledge on the basics of SPSS to research scholars. In his lecture he covered several topics related to SPSS.

Session II

He emphasized on the importance of the review of literature and how it is essential to conduct a good research work .Under following heads he covered up the entire session:

• How to increase the quality of research by referring various online books and sites available.
• Discussed about the present scenario of research.
• Covered various ethical aspects to be followed while doing the research and writing the thesis.
• Difference between references and bibliography.
• He also discussed about the importance of use of various references and also emphasized that one must consult the expert of the field to upgrade the research work.
• He also explained the collaborative research and its importance and how it is useful to the society.

Session III

The session of the Research Methodology course work was taken by Prof. NishaYadav the IIS University enumerated in detail about the measurement scales with suitable examples which researchers can use while making their questionnaire and measuring the variables in suitable way. Prof. NishaYadav in her session covered up in detail the following:

• Defined measurement , need for correct measurement technique to be used
• Difference between Qualitative Measurement and Quantitative measurement
• Criteria for a good measurement
• Levels of measurement
• Some commonly used scales: Cumulative, thrustone, summated etc.

In the end of the session Prof. NishaYadav enumerated that a researcher should choose the measurement scales appropriately.

Day 4

Session I

The first session on the 4^th Day of the workshop was taken by Dr.SanketVij. He started with the basic concepts and terms of statistics, measures of location i.e. mean, median, mode, measures of variability i.e. range, interquartile range, variance and standard deviation, measures of shape i.e. skewness and kurtosis. He gave an insight to what is hypothesis, null hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, the types of errors and concept of metric and non-metric data,

Session II

 After giving some basic information about the hypothesis testing, Dr. SanketVij gave some more practical knowledge of using SPSS to the participants. He highlighted the essentials  of Data cleanliness, Data normalization and Data editing. While teaching SPSS he elucidate the outliers,  forms of outliers ,methods to identify the outliers which included Box Plot, Descriptive table (Comparing Mean and 5% trimmed mean), analyzing standard deviation, QQ Plots, application of normality test i.e.Kolmogrov-Smirnov test, Shapiro- Wilk test, dealing with multiple responses, cross tab, calculation of  Pearson correlation and Spearman correlation.

Session III

Dr. SanketVij provided the detailed and practical knowledge of testing hypothesis on the software SPSS emphasizing on parametric test. He further enumerated the types of sample and test which are generally applicable to them.

He explained the difference between Nominal Data, Ordinal Data and scale Data. He also pointed out that parametric values are based on natural numbers and non-parametric tests are based on artificial numbers or values that the researcher assigns them. He explained one sample t test, Independent sample t test, paired sample t test and One way ANOVA with Post Hoc Analysis,

In the end he encouraged all the students to study passionately and be confident about their research and always be eager to learn as much as possible.

Day 5

Session I

The  I session on the 5^th day was taken by Dr. Balwinder K. Saini of GurunanakDev University, Amritsar. He was welcomed by  Dr. Meenakshi Sharma, Workshop Coordinator, The IIS University. The session started with the prerequisites of computing data.

He guided the students that the data entered in SPSS must be scale data, i.e. all kinds of parametric and non-parametric tests must be possible to be computed on it.

He explained the difference between Nominal Data, Ordinal Data and scale Data. He also pointed out that parametric values are based on natural numbers and non-parametric tests are based on artificial numbers or values that the researcher assigns them. In the end he encouraged all the students to study passionately and be confident about their research and always be eager to learn as much as possible

Session II

Session II was continued by Dr. Singh describing when and where to use Non parametric tests like Mann Whitney, Kruskal Wallis, etc. He explained the participants the method to apply various non parametric tests on SPSS. Hands on Session on SPSS were taken by him.

Session III

Dr. Singh started Session III by discussing the difference between cross sectional data (when various variables are studied at the same time), panel data (when variables vary across sections and time) and time scale data (when time varies).

Day 6

Session- I

The firstsession on the 6^th day of the workshop was conducted by Dr. Balwinder K. Saini of GurunanakDev University, Amritsar. The session began with the topic “sources of information for researches”. On the problem of selection of topic he suggested that it is always advised for the researches that they must first find out the material available on their topic. He emphasized upon the role of internet as a good supplement for researcher in their studies.

He introduces ‘SCOPUS’ to participants as a source of authentic data. Dr. Saini emphasized on model-building. Its first step is to find relationship using scatter plot and then analyse using SPSS.

The session was mostly practical and the various tests were demonstrated and later done in the lab by the participants.

Session-II

The second session of the 6^th day was continued by Dr. Balwinder K. Saini. The topic of discussion was Regression Analysis. The entire session was technical, where he demonstrated how to certain operations with the help of examples. The topics he took for discussion are:

1. How to remove outlier from the data
2. Use of log to normalize the data
3. Checking data using scatter plot
4. ‘Split File’ option to organize data in desired format
5. Linear regression with co linearity diagnostic, Part and Partial correlations
6. Multi-co linearity which should be step-wise
7. Dummy regression for quantitative data
8. Importing file from SPSS to excel
9. Chow test to check regression

In the session he demonstrated the steps to the participants which were done by the latter then. He also suggested a book namely- Econometrics by Damodar N. Gujarati.

Session-III

The third session was totally focused on regression analysis using E-View software. Dr. Saini explained how to run regression on E-view. This session aimed to give a basic understanding of how E –Views works and how to run simple statistical analysis of data.

The highlighted topics were:

1. Creating a Work file in E-Views.
2. Examining the data and performing simple statistical analyses

3.  Running a simple regression and plotting results

4.  Performing specification and hypothesis testing

Day 7

Session I

 Day seven of the Research Methodology workshop session began with the informative lecture of Dr. Grish Taneja Professor, Department of Commerce & Business Management
DAV University the focus of the session was on Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Conjoint Analysis and Discriminant Analysis.

The Highlights of the session were:

• Understand  the concept of exploratory factor analysis
• Apply the EFA for data analysis/ reduction with the help of SPSS
• Teach and guide your students about factor analysis effectively
• Write the results of  EFA in your research report and/or research  report

Session II

DrGrishTaneja continued the session.

The Highlights of the session were:

• Understand  the concept of discriminant analysis
•  Apply the discriminant analysis for data analysis with the help of SPSS
• Teach and guide your students about discriminant analysis effectively
• Write the results of discriminant analysis in your research report and/or research report

Session III

Dr Taneja explained the components of a research report. Lastly he provided several references and links from which research scholars can easily get detailed matter, published papers, journals, researches on the topics on which they want to pursue their research. The session was very interactive. Valedictory session started with a valedictory note by Workshop Coordinator Dr. Shweta Kastiya. Few of the participants shared their experiences during the course. This was followed by distribution of certificates to the participants. The workshop was concluded by Workshop Coordinator, Dr Ankita Chaturvedi’s Vote of thanks.

5. Evaluation by Participants 

Feedback on the session was taken from the Participants after every session .  Overall Feedback of the Participants was also taken at the end of the course. The participants appreciated the manner in which the course was conducted by The IIS University. The found the course very relivent in terms of course contents and persentatiions. Some of the participants requested to conduct the advance course on Research Methodology on the similar pattern. Some of the participants fournd that the schedule of the course was very tight. All the Participants were happy and satisfiede at the end of the course. 

6.  Course Director’s Suggestions/Recommendations 

- The organizing institute should have liberty in finalizing the course contents

- The number of practical session should be given more weightage

- Similar courses training the students on the other software like E-views, Metlab, Stata should also be duly sanctioned by ICSSR.

Dr. SubhashGarg

Dean & Director

CRIT, The IIS University, Jaipur