Welcome

THE CONSORTIUM ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS (CQRM) promotes the teaching and use of qualitative research methods in the social sciences. Our activities include an annual training institute, where leading scholars have (to date) taught advanced qualitative methods to seven hundred and eighty graduate students and faculty.

Beginning with academic year 2008-2009, the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research moved to the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, and shifted from January to a summer time slot. The Institute is partly funded by the National Science Foundation. CQRM's activities have received generous support from the Hunt Alternatives Fund.

The Institute is held at the same time as a related Research Group on Qualitative and Multi-Method Analysis. While the Institute focuses on teaching research skills, the Research Group encourages the development of qualitative and multi-method research techniques.

CQRM's members in academic year 2008-2009 included departments, centers and/or institutes at: Aarhus University; University of Aberystwyth; American University; Bergen University; University of British Columbia; Brown University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Riverside; University of California, San Diego; University of Chicago; Columbia University; Cornell University; Duke University; Emory University; University of Florida; George Washington University; Georgetown University; Harvard University; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology ; Indiana University ; Johns Hopkins Baltimore; Johns Hopkins SAIS; Universite Laval, Quebec; University of Maryland; University of Massachusetts; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Michigan; Michigan State University; University of Minnesota; University of Montreal; New School for Social Research; Northwestern University; North Carolina - Chapel Hill; University of Notre Dame; Ohio State University; University of Oklahoma; University of Oregon; Oxford University; University of Pittsburgh; Princeton University; Radboude University; Rutgers University; University of Southern California; University of Southern Denmark; Stanford University; University of Sussex; Syracuse University; University of Texas; Tufts University; University of Virginia; University of Washington; Washington State University; University of Western Michigan; and Yale University.

While the consortium's mission is to promote qualitative methods, we proceed from the position that to produce policy-relevant knowledge, the social sciences should employ the full range of available complementary qualitative, statistical and formal methods. Our concern is that very few leading research universities offer graduate-level qualitative methods courses and even fewer require them. As a consequence, the social sciences are failing to take advantage of recent advances in qualitative methods, and in the long run risk losing an important component of their methodological heterogeneity.