DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH

The present work by exclusively focusing on the practice of conducting research in India is an effort to map various forms of research practices in social sciences by situating it in the general context of various epistemological issues. Without essentialising the methods of research, it primarily argues for the collection of authentic data by treating it as the cornerstone of social research. In the process, the book brings out the stifling effect of the standardised methodologies on the epistemological practices. As a corollary to it, the work identifies three forms of field work which constitute the fundamentals of the research practice; and in the process, it demolishes the myth of much hailed value neutrality-objectivity nexus in sociology in particular.

Paramjit S. Judge, formerly Professor of Sociology, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, has been actively engaged in social research for four decades. He has worked and published in the areas of political sociology of social movements and development, Dalit studies and social exclusion, social theory and modernity. He was Dr B.R. Ambedkar National Fellow of Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi. Presently, he is the President of the Indian Sociological Society.