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 nearly five hundred graduate students and junior faculty.
The Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research is co-hosted by Arizona State University's Institute for Social Science Research, and the Department of Political Science, and is partly funded by the National Science Foundation (award # 0452768). CQRM's activities have received generous support from the Hunt Alternatives Fund.
The consortium is presently headquartered at Arizona State
University. CQRM's members in academic year 2007-2008 included departments, centers and/or institutes at:
Aarhus University (Denmark), American University, Bergen University (Norway), University of British Columbia (Canada), Bristol University (UK), Brown University, University of California – Berkeley, University of California – Davis, University of California – Irvine, University of California - Los Angeles, University of California – Riverside, University of California – San Diego, University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Cornell University, Duke University, University of Florida, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, New School for Social Research, Northwestern University, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, University of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University, University of Oregon, Oxford University (UK), Princeton University, Radboud University (Holland), Rutgers University, University of Southern California, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark), Stanford University, University of Sussex, Syracuse University, University of Texas, Tufts University, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Western Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 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.