Research methodology for social sciences rajat acharyya, nandan bhattacharya, routledge, 2020 scan

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES Research Methodology for Social Sciences provides guidelines for designing and conducting evidence-based research in social sciences and interdi

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES

Research Methodology for Social Sciences provides guidelines for designing and conducting

evidence-based research in social sciences and interdisciplinary studies using both qualitative and quantitative data Blending the particularity of different sub-disciplines and interdisciplinary nature of social sciences, this volume:

• Provides insights on epistemological issues and deliberates on debates over qualitative research methods;

• Covers different aspects of qualitative research techniques and evidence-based research techniques, including survey design, choice of sample, construction of indices, statistical inferences and data analysis;

• Discusses concepts, techniques and tools at different stages of research, beginning with the design of field surveys to collect raw data and then analyse it using statistical and econometric methods.

With illustrations, examples and a reader-friendly approach, this volume will serve as a key reference material for compulsory research methodology courses at doctoral levels across different disciplines, such as economics, sociology, women’s studies, education, anthropology, political science, international relations, philosophy, history and business management This volume will also be indispensable for postgraduate courses dealing with quantitative techniques and data analysis.

Rajat Acharyya is Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and Director

(additional charge) of UGC-Human Resource Development Centre, Jadavpur University, India He was the former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Jadavpur University (2013–2016) Professor Acharyya received his MSc (Economics) degree from Calcutta University in 1990 and PhD (Economics) degree from Jadavpur University in 1996 He was a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Rochester University, New York, USA, during 1997–1998 Professor Acharyya has written five books and published more than 60 articles in journals and edited

volumes His recent books include International Trade and Economic Development (co-authored with Saibal Kar, 2014) and International Economics: Theory and Policy (2013) He was awarded

the EXIM Bank International Trade Research Award in 1997, Global Development Network (Washington D.C.) Research Medal in 2003, the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2006 and Shikhsaratna (Best University Teacher) Award by the Government of West Bengal in 2016.

Nandan Bhattacharya is Assistant Director of the UGC-Human Resource Development

Centre, Jadavpur University, India Dr Bhattacharya received his MSc (Zoology) degree in

1992 and PhD (Zoology) degree in 2004 from Vidyasagar University, India He has published several articles in different reputed journals and delivered lectures at different colleges and institutes of higher learning within and outside West Bengal He has coordinated and designed course curriculums for orientation programmes, workshops and short-term courses specially conducted for college and university teachers/librarians under the UGC Guidelines His areas

of research interest include ecology, education and communication skill development, amongst many others.

Contemporary Issues in Social Science Research is a series dedicated to the advancement

of academic research and practice on emerging 21st-century social and cultural themes It explores fresh perspectives on a legion of interdisciplinary social science themes connecting subject areas that have hitherto been unexplored, underdevel-oped or overlooked This series aims to provide scholars, researchers and students a ready reference for the new and developing in social science academia which has come into the fore as focal points of debate and discussion today

Research Methodology for Social Sciences

Edited by Rajat Acharyya and Nandan Bhattacharya

Peace and Conflict Studies

Theory and Practice

Edited by Shibashis Chatterjee and Anindya Jyoti Majumdar

For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Issues-in-Social-Science-Research/book-series/CISSC

Contemporary Issues in Social Science Research

Series editors: Rajat Acharyya and Nandan Bhattacharya

UGC-Human Resource Development Centre, Jadavpur University, India

Edited by Rajat Acharyya

and Nandan Bhattacharya

RESEARCH

METHODOLOGY FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES

First published 2020

by Routledge

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Development Centre, Jadavpur University; individual chapters, the contributors

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List of figures vii

2 Towards a pragmatic centre: debates on qualitative

Swapnendu Banerjee

6 Impact evaluation: a simple need and a difficult choice

Arijita Dutta

7 Construction of different types of indices in social science

Sushil Kr Haldar

PART IV

8 Designing a primary survey-based research 167

Tanmoyee Banerjee (Chatterjee)

Malabika Roy

10 An introduction to statistical inference 206

Sugata Sen Roy

11 Problems of endogeneity in social science research 218

Arpita Ghose

12 Quantitative methods for qualitative variables in social

Ajitava Raychaudhuri

FIGURES

4.1 Snapshot view of difference in economic theories 76

7.3 Income (in Rs.) earned by members per day of different social groups 131

7.5 Dimensions and indicators of multidimensional poverty at the

7.6 Multidimensional poverty at the household level 138

7.10 Parameters of human poverty across states, 2015–16 156 7.11 HPI across sixteen major states using Anand and Sen (1997)

methodology 156 7.12 HPI (weighted and un-weighted) and the ranks of states 157

9.4 All possible samples with probability and mean 190

Swapnendu Banerjee is Professor of Economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India His areas of interest include microeconomic theory, game theory and eco-nomics of contracts He completed his PhD from Jadavpur University and subse-quently did his postdoctoral research from the National University of Singapore (2004–2005) and London School of Economics (2016) He has published exten-sively in reputed international journals and given presentations and invited lectures

at places like Cornell, LSE, Birmingham, Nottingham, National University of gapore, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi School of Economics, IIM Kolkata, IIM Bangalore and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, amongst others

Sin-Tanmoyee Banerjee (Chatterjee) is Professor of Economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India Her areas of interest are industrial organization, microeconomic theory, micro econometrics, microfinance, financial inclusion and gender analy-sis and economic growth She has undertaken various empirical research projects funded by national agencies of India, such as ICSSR and UGC She has published extensively in reputed international journals

Anjan Chakrabarti completed his MSc in Economics from University of Calcutta and his PhD in Economics from University of California, Riverside He is currently Professor of Economics, University of Calcutta, India His interests span Marxian theory, development economics, Indian economics, financial economics, history

of economic ideas and political philosophy He has to his credit eight books and has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, edited books

and handbooks His latest co-authored book is The Indian Economy in Transition:

Globalization, Capitalism and Development He has published in journals such as bridge Journal of Economics, Rethinking Marxism, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal

Cam-of Asset Management, Collegium Anthropologicum and Critical Sociology He is presently

CONTRIBUTORS

x Contributors

a member of the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism and Marxism 21 He is the recipient of Dr V.K.R.V Rao Prize in Social Science Research in Economics for the year 2008

Achin Chakraborty is Professor of Economics and currently the Director of the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK) in India, specializing in wel-fare economics, development economics, political economy and methodology of social science Chakraborty obtained his PhD in economics from the University of

California at Riverside, USA He has published widely in journals such as Economic

Theory, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Quantitative Economics, Environment and Development Economics, Economics Bulletin, Economic and Political Weekly and others

He has co-edited two recently published books, The Land Question in India: State,

Dispossession and Capitalist Transition (2017) and Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles

of the Indian State (2019) He has also co-authored the recently published book its of Bargaining: Capital, Labour and the State in Contemporary India (2019).

Lim-Arijita Dutta is Professor of Economics in Calcutta University, India An alumnus

of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the University of Calcutta, Arijita’s research interests are health economics, quantitative development economics and econometrics Prof Dutta has many publications in national and international journals to her credit and has com-pleted many research projects She has been closely associated with health policy making of the state of West Bengal and has published policy documents on health care in West Bengal She has taught in a number of European universities and has been a visiting researcher at UNU Merit, Maastricht, the Netherlands, and the University of Bonn, Germany

Arpita Ghose is Professor of Economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the mer head of the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University She also taught at the Department of Economics of University of Calcutta and Presidency University

for-as guest faculty She is an for-associate editor of Trade and Development Review, a

peer-reviewed e-journal published by the Department of Economics, Jadavpur sity She earned her PhD from Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata and worked in the area of dynamic disequilibrium macro models She has published her research papers

Univer-in reputed Univer-international and national journals and Univer-in different edited volumes from renowned international publishers in the area of computable general equilibrium models, productivity and efficiency analysis using data envelopment approach, sto-chastic frontier models, applied time series analysis and economies of education and health She has authored three books and edited two books with reputed publishers She has presented research papers and chaired sessions at different international and national conferences, organized national and international seminars/conferences/workshops, completed project funded by DFID-UNCTAD-Government of India for Jadavpur University’s Trade Research Capacity building programme, Depart-ment of Health and Family Welfare, Government of West Bengal, UGC, ICSSR,

Contributors xi

amongst others, and supervised many PhD students Her major areas of interest include econometrics, macroeconomics, and empirical models, including interna-tional trade, economies of social sector and regional development

Sushil Kr Haldar is Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University, India, since

2004 His areas of teaching and research are research methodology in social sciences and economics of social sectors, including economics of health, education, poverty and human vulnerability He has carried out numerous projects funded by the European Union, UNDP, University Grants Commission – New Delhi, Centre for Advanced Studies – Economics Department and UPE – Jadavpur University He has supervised many PhD and MPhil students and authored several research articles

in national and international journals and edited volumes in books

Amites Mukhopadhyay teaches Sociology at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India Trained as an anthropologist, he works on ecology, landscape and governance in India, coastal wetlands in particular Apart from publications in academic journals

and edited volumes, Mukhopadhyay authored Living with Disasters: Communities

and Development in the Indian Sundarbans, published in 2016 His research interests

include narratives of governance and development, identity politics and tional histories, science, and knowledge making in the South Asian context

institu-Ajitava Raychaudhuri is a Professor of Economics, former Head and former Coordinator of Centre for Advanced Studies, Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India He held Chair Professor (honorary) of Planning and Development Unit sponsored by NITI Aayog He was a senior Fulbright Scholar

at Economic Growth Center, Yale University and Reid Hall Scholar in Residence

of Columbia University, Paris Campus He has undertaken several important jects from UNESCAP, ADB, World Bank, UNDP, UNCTAD, PEP, GDN, SANEI, Finance Commission, Planning Commission etc He has also written numerous papers in international and national journals and edited books Amongst his notable

pro-books are India’s Exports: An Analytical Study (with Sugata Marjit) and International

Trade in Services in India: Implications for Growth and Inequality in a Globalising World

(with Prabir De) His latest book (co-edited with Prabir De) is Myanmar’s

Integra-tion with the world: Challenges and Policy OpIntegra-tions He also co-authored two District Human Development Reports of Nadia and Purba Medinipur, published by UNDP

and Planning Commission

Malabika Roy is Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University, Kolkata She received her PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute, India Prof Roy has conducted projects funded by organizations like UGC and ICSSR and has acted as a consultant for ESCAP, UN and ILO She has published widely in reputed journals – both national and international Her areas of interest in research and teaching are corporate finance, functioning of financial institutions, issues related to finance and development and industrial organization, especially in the context of developing economies

xii Contributors

Soumik Sarkar is pursuing PhD in economics at University of Calcutta and ing as an economist in the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Kolkata, India His research interest is in political economy and Indian economics He has to his credit articles on the broad areas of Marxian theory and Indian State and is one of

work-the translators for The Country of First Boys by Amartya Sen.

Samita Sen is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at bridge University, UK She received her PhD from Cambridge in 1992 She was the first Vice Chancellor of Diamond Harbour Women’s University (2013–2015), and Dean of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Law and Management at Jadavpur University (2016–2017) She has been taught at Calcutta University and Jadavpur University Her monograph on women’s employment in the jute industry

Cam-in colonial Bengal was published Cam-in 1999 and won the Trevor Reese Prize Cam-in monwealth History She is at present working on women’s migration in relation to tea and overseas plantations Her various research publications cover issues such as education, the women’s movement, marriage, domestic violence, domestic workers, women in governance and women’s land rights Her recent publications include

Com-the jointly written Domestic Days (2016) and edited volumes Passage to Bondage (2016), Intimate Others (2010) and Mapping the Field (2011).

Sugata Sen Roy did his BSc with major in Statistics from Presidency College, Kolkata, India He then did his MSc in Statistics and subsequently my PhD from the University of Calcutta He joined the Department of Statistics, University of Calcutta, as a lecturer in 1989 and is currently serving as a Professor and the Head

of the department He has also been a visiting professor in Indian and foreign versities/institutes His research interests are primarily in the areas of time series analysis, regression analysis, survival analysis, development statistics, applied mul-tivariate analysis and functional data analysis and he has guided research students

uni-in these areas He has also been uni-involved uni-in collaborative work with faculties from other institutes and universities in India and abroad

I congratulate Prof Rajat Acharyya and his colleague Dr Nandan Bhattacharya at the UGC-Human Resource Development Centre of our University for initiating

a series on Contemporary Issues in Social Science Research based on lectures delivered

by experts in teacher-training programmes, such as orientation courses, refresher courses and short-term courses The present volume is the first in the series It addresses the crucial issue of research methodology for social sciences

Social science by its nature is subjective; any problematic in this discipline can be viewed differently, and the more scholarly debates there are, the more enriched the discipline becomes But such debating exercises need to be undertaken on the basis

of scientific research methods This entails constant refinement of research odologies in social sciences, and the present collection gains a particular signifi-cance in this perspective At the same time, increasing adoptions of interdisciplinary approaches in social science research are making irrelevant the research methods and tools of analysis defined by traditional rigid confinements of particular subjects, such as economics, political science, sociology or history But in the name of inter-disciplinarity the specific flavour of a particular branch of social science need not be undermined In terms of social science research methodology what is perhaps thus required is a fine blending of the particularity of a subject and interdisciplinarity

meth-of the discipline I hope in this context, too, this volume will break new ground

I understand that selections on Peace and Conflict Studies: Theory and Practice,

His-tory and Philosophy of Science, Gender Studies and Disaster Management have been

planned under the present series We eagerly look forward to their publications On

my own behalf and on behalf of the university I also sincerely thank Routledge India for collaborating with the UGC-HRDC unit of Jadavpur University to pub-lish this collection, which should benefit both the reading public in general and social scientists in particular

– Suranjan Das,Vice-Chancellor, Jadavpur University

A wide variety of methods and techniques are applied in social sciences to analyse social and economic phenomena Such methods range from census survey data to the analysis of a single agent’s social behaviour, from documentation of stylized facts and case studies to rigorous statistical and empirical analyses and from collecting data from the field to analyses of secondary data.

This volume on Research Methodology for Social Sciences takes researchers and

mar-ket analysts through concepts, techniques and tools at different stages of research With epistemological issues, debates over qualitative versus evidence-based quan-titative research, survey design, choice of sample, methods of data collection, con-struction of indices, statistical inferences and quantitative analyses of both qualitative and quantitative date put together, the volume provides a useful guide for research-ers in – but not limited to – the fields of commerce, economics, sociology, political science, international relations, strategic studies and history

The contributors in this volume are experts in their respective fields who have developed the respective chapters based on their lectures delivered at the UGC-sponsored Short Term Courses on Research Methodology organized by the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, in collaboration with the UGC-Human Resource Development Centre, Jadavpur University during 2014–2016 The courses were targeted for and attended by MPhil and PhD research scholars working at different universities and institutes in India Understandably, their feed-back and observations on the lectures have helped the authors in developing their lectures into chapters for this volume

We take this opportunity to thank all the authors for their support and tion to undertake this endeavour Without their contributions it would not have been possible to bring out this volume Comments from the anonymous external reviewers engaged by Routledge India had been extremely useful as well We also thank Ms Shoma Choudhury, commissioning manager of Routledge India, for her

coopera-EDITORS’ NOTE

Editors’ note xv

continuous encouragement and advice right from the inception of the series and this volume Excellent support from Ms Brinda Sen and other technical staff at Routledge cannot be forgotten as well

Our sincere thanks go to Prof Suranjan Das, Vice Chancellor of Jadavpur versity, since it was his idea to disseminate knowledge, generated in academic programmes conducted by the UGC-Human Resource Development Centre of Jadavpur University, through publication of edited volumes like this He has always been a source of inspiration for us in endeavours like this We also thank Dr Pradip Kumar Ghosh, Pro Vice Chancellor, Jadavpur University; Sri Gour Krishna Pat-tanayak, Finance Officer, Jadavpur University; and external members of the Local Programme Planning and Management Committee of UGC-HRDC, Jadavpur University, for all their help and encouragement We also cannot but happily remember the support provided by all the staff at HRDC, particularly, Mr Prabir Chatterjee and Ms Chaitali Mukherjee, who made the process of publication of this volume smoother

Uni-Last but not least, we thank Ms Shrimoyee Ganguly, research scholar at the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, for her academic inputs as well

as conceptualization of the cover image for the book series, and Mr Prithwish Bhowmick of Amar Ekushe for logistic support in this regard

Rajat AcharyyaNandan Bhattacharya

May 2019

Rajat Acharyya

Over the years research methodology as a subject matter of study has gained growing importance not only in pure academic discourses but also for research students as it has been enforced upon the institutes of higher learning in India by the regulatory bodies, such as the University Grants Commission, as a necessary precondition for research degrees But this aura of regulation in research, emphasizing too much the techniques and measurement, has somewhat bypassed more fundamental questions, such as what exactly constitutes research methodology in social sciences and debates over quantitative and qualitative methodologies At the same time, there have also been rather insufficient academic attempts to put together whatever academic and scientific discourses that we have on both these dimensions and how the methods and tools at hand can be used for research questions that cut across different disci-plines and fall in wider socio-political-economic contexts In the Indian context, insufficiency of academic discourses becomes even more apparent Though there has indeed been some insightful exploration of debates over research methodology

in the social and cultural contexts of India, there has been no sustained engagement.Research methodology in social sciences is not and cannot be uniquely defined Research methodologies are as diverse as the different disciplines or paradigms in social sciences However, while research methodologies or techniques may differ widely in respect of approach, objective, language and expression, the common trait is that it intends to train the researcher how to examine whether any causal relationship exists between different events or observations; how to evaluate, inter-pret or predict outcome of an event; and how to produce objective or subjective knowledge from occurrence of events and observations of facts

Within this broad perspective of research methodologies, there are two tively different but equally important approaches One is the qualitative, which focuses on reconstruction of causal-relationship or impact-evaluation through logical reasoning based on different accounts of observed facts and their subjective

distinc-2 Rajat Acharyya

evaluations by other researchers; the other is the quantitative techniques, which delves into the construction of causal-relationship through quantification of obser-vations, events and their outcomes in numeric forms Whereas the former is pri-marily interpretative in nature, the latter is more of a predictive kind Part I of this volume discusses the differences and debates in these two approaches and the epis-temological issues involved in research methodologies in general Part II deliberates upon debates on research methods, and Part III discusses methods of conflict analy-sis and evaluation of development programmes Part IV of the volume introduces different quantitative techniques of research and how those can be used in analysing events data of both qualitative and quantitative nature and research questions in larger contexts that go beyond the boundaries of specific disciplines

In the first chapter of this volume, ‘Methodological or epistemological issues in social research’, Achin Chakraborty raises certain epistemological issues critical to the understanding of diversity in research methods in social sciences He argues that the ‘actual practice of research in social sciences is too rich in diversity and inno-vativeness to be disciplined by a few prescriptive norms’ There are several distinct motivations as well which drive research inquiries in social sciences In this con-text, he distinguishes between explanatory (the ‘why’ question) and descriptive (the

‘what’ question) analysis or research questions Then there is the research question of

‘evaluation and assessment of the good and the bad’ that leads to evaluative inquiry

All these types of research inquiries that he discusses fall in the positivist paradigm.

Part II of the volume consists of three chapters In her chapter, ‘Towards a matic centre: debates on qualitative methodology’, Samita Sen emphasizes the fundamental debates on research methodology across the world, that concerns fun-damental questions about whether there is a need and a role of methodology in social science research, the paradigm wars and the more prosaic debate between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, all of which are closely interconnected She talks about interconnected paradigm wars of three kinds First is the research methodology versus anti-methodological traditional scholarship, interpretation or judgements versus evidence The second paradigm war draws us to the qualitative

prag-versus quantitative methods and scepticism over recent attempts to combine both

The third one is conflict between evidence-based methodologies, mixed ods, interpretive and critical theory schools These conflicts have been taken as the entry point for discussion of five commonly used qualitative methods of social sciences: ethnography and narrative methods, mixed method and grounded theory and interviews and focus group discussions in the context of feminist method

meth-In ‘Ethnographic fieldwork: the predicaments and possibilities’, Amites padhyay argues how conditions of governance under colonialism led to ethnogra-phy’s interest in other cultures He provides an account of ethnography’s emergence

Mukho-in the Indian context and documents the debates of the late 1980s when phy as a positivist practice came under the scanner Such debates marked a critical rethinking of ethnography as an instrument of anthropological imagination.The question of diversity in research, particularly in the discipline of econom-ics, has been analysed by Soumik Sarkar and Anjan Chakrabarti in their chapter,

ethnogra-Introduction 3

‘Diversity in economics: an examination and defence of heterodox approach’ Often

a normative perspective of research may warrant a heterodox approach, but what they object to is that theorizing the economy cannot but be heterodox The authors put two epistemological questions at the centre of their discussion: ‘what is theory?’ and ‘what distinguishes one theory from another?’ They argue that the contrasting forms of determinism and non-determinism and entry point serve as the founda-tion of constructing different theories and of inter-theoretical comparison

Part III of the volume focuses on theories of conflict analysis in social sciences, measuring development, and evaluation of public development programmes In real life, we encounter conflicts in every stage of our decision making, whether eco-nomic decisions, political decisions or decisions of any kind and in any sphere of life Potential conflict situations arise because as individuals or as group-members (whether it is a social or an economic group we belong to), we pursue our self-interests and our aspirations, capabilities and possessions of means to achieve our interests different from each other Pursuit of self-interest is conceived through individuals having characterized as rational agents, and this is a building block of

a wide spectrum of social science research It is because our self-interests differ and conflict with those of others and that we are rational agents and behave non-cooperatively even in situations when cooperation could have been better for the aggregate Game theory provides us a tool for choosing strategies in best pursuance

of our self-interest in conflict situations and non-cooperative environment Such tools become more engaging when we do not have sufficient or complete informa-tion regarding the environment, including other rational agents whom we interact with Swapnendu Bandyopadhyay, in his chapter on ‘Game theory: strategy design

in conflict situations’, introduces researchers to such game theoretic tools in a wide variety of situations, such as international relations and political diplomacy, power supremacy, crime detection, ethics and morality With non-technical introduction

of optimal choices of non-cooperative strategies by two agents in terms of known and generalized games, he elaborates upon their applications in specific cases like regional conflict, bribery and corruption, surrogate motherhood and auction

well-In social sciences one major research question is assessment or evaluation of benefits of a development policy, whether it is a poverty eradication programme, a health programme, a targeted education programmes (such as Kanyashree Prakalpa),

an employment generation programme or a targeted policy of social inclusion Impact evaluation is a technique of evidence-based research whereby acceptability

of a development programme amongst potential beneficiaries and the long-term outcomes of it are measured and assessed Arijit Dutta, in her chapter titled ‘Impact evaluation: A simple need and a difficult choice of methodology’, discusses chal-lenges of impact assessment, construction of counterfactuals and associated prob-lems and different methodologies of impact evaluation and their uses in India, such as randomized control trials, propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods

Construction of indices and studying their trends is an alternative approach

of evaluating and predicting outcomes of a public policy programme Indices are

4 Rajat Acharyya

useful constructions to measure multi-dimensional socio-economic and graphic characters of an economy and its population, such as poverty, health, edu-cation and human development, in terms of a one-dimensional numeric value The issues assume further relevance in social sciences as we often confront both qualita-tive as well as quantitative variables The qualitative variable is measured ordinally, and it is subject to fluctuation and different scales or degrees in perception-based study Given these dimensions, appropriately constructed indices reflect relative position of an individual based on various numeric and non-numeric character-istics In ‘Construction of different types of indices: some numerical examples’, Sushil Haldar elaborates on the construction of different indices, their theoretical underpinnings and rationale and their limitations in reflecting different dimensions

demo-of development

Chapters in Part IV of the book discuss different dimensions of evidence-based research methods and predictive analysis Data, which may be both quantitative and qualitative, is the key element of it; as such, at the core of evidence-based research lies the method of data collection However, in contrast to observation as a method

of data collection in qualitative research, survey and questionnaire are the main forms of method of data collection in the quantitative research Tanmoyee Banerjee (Chatterjee), in the chapter on ‘Designing a primary survey-based research’, dis-cusses different aspects of primary survey to collect information regarding socio-economic features of a group of individuals on which official sources of information either are insufficient or shed no light Such aspects concern ethical issues related to primary survey-based research, a comparison of different modes of survey – such as face-to-face and telephonic interviews and email – and finally design of question-naire depending upon the research question at hand

In evidence-based quantitative research, though the target is to make tions about a population, surveys for data collection cannot be made over the entire target population, except in case of census, simply because of the time, effort and money that such complete enumerations will take But census data may not always help a researcher get his or her required information either since these capture only decadal information and may not cover all dimensions of socio-economic attributes

predic-of population Thus, surveys are conducted on a sample or sub-group predic-of population with some representative attributes of the entire population The issue at hand then

is how to select the sample of population in the best way to make a prediction or

an inference of the population characteristics based on information collected on characteristics of the sample to address a set of research questions There are dif-ferent sampling techniques, and applicability of these techniques varies with the nature of the research question at hand Malabika Roy introduces the researchers

to these techniques and their applicability in her chapter titled ‘Sampling methods:

a survey’ Most relevantly, in the context of this volume, she discusses non-random sampling methods that are more useful to address research questions in wide areas

of social sciences but which are not covered adequately in standard text books, in addition to probability sampling, which is the most adopted method in physical sciences and in economics

Introduction 5

Having designed the suitable sample and collected all information from that ple of population relevant for the research question at hand, a researcher needs to draw conclusions about the population characteristics based on the sample observa-tions Statistical inference concerns itself with this dimension of the evidence-based quantitative research There are two dimensions: estimation and hypothesis testing

sam-In his chapter, ‘An introduction to statistical inference’, Sugata Sen Roy elaborates upon these dimensions with the help of quite a wide variety of examples His dis-cussion of estimation and hypothesis testing also takes the readers through some essential mathematical rigour

In a predictive analysis, the major problem faced by a researcher is the tion of cause-and-effect relationships between events (or variables capturing such events) and identification of such relationships from observations or data on such events This problem is prevalent not only in economics but also in a wide variety

direc-of disciplines, such as demography, sociology, physical education and development studies An endogeneity bias arises when we estimate an incorrectly presumed uni-directional causality In the chapter on the ‘Problem of endogeneity in social sci-ence research’, Arpita Ghose discusses the nature, sources and consequences of such endogeneity bias The chapter also highlights two related issues: the problem of identification, which is concerned with whether all the parameters of the system can successfully be estimated, and the endogeneity problem arising out of omitted variables and measurement errors

The last chapter of the volume, titled ‘Quantitative methods for qualitative ables in social science: an introduction’, Ajitava Raychaudhuri introduces the quan-titative techniques for analysing qualitative data Qualitative data may take a wide variety of forms, such as binary form – in research questions such as probability

vari-of survival vari-of cancer patients, for example, the variable under consideration would

be whether the patient has survived or not – or ordered variables in terms of rank

In such cases standard methods of quantitative analysis fails, and one needs special techniques to estimate and analyse statistical relationships from the qualitative data Ajitava Raychauduri introduces the researchers to two such techniques, called logit and probit, which transform discrete binary variables into continuous variables that are amenable to statistical estimations

PART I

Epistemological issues

gramme in terms of those principles In other words, the logical sequence turns out

to be from a set of prescriptive principles to the practice that is supposed to follow those principles In economics, for example, philosophers of science were believed

to hold the key to how to do ‘economic science’, even though several groups side mainstream economics (e.g Marxists, Austrians, Institutionalists) have had their shared methodological approaches What has been common amongst the practi-tioners of economic research – both within and outside the mainstream – is that both sides have viewed methodology as offering a set of prescriptions on what con-stitutes legitimate practice In this view, the common concern of methodological discussions is essentially normative and is based on philosophers’ attempt to justify knowledge claims

out-In this chapter, we take the opposite route We argue that there is enough evidence

to show that actual practice of research in social sciences is too rich in diversity and innovativeness to be disciplined by a few prescriptive norms Therefore, in section 2

we begin with the invocation of the diversity of practices and a rough classification

of different types of research inquiries, each of which is ostensibly driven by a ferent motivation Research inquiries are not always explanatory – or as economists tend to suggest, predictive Apart from explanation and prediction there are several other motivations that drive social research A major area, for example, deals with the normative issues involved in assessing states of affairs or changes therein For example, an issue like how development of a country or a region is to be assessed is

10 Achin Chakraborty

evaluative in nature Of course, the brief account of different types of social research presented here is far from exhaustive In section 3 we discuss how an explanatory kind of research question is dealt with within the positivist-empiricist framework

In particular, the respective roles of theory (or explanatory framework), data and method are discussed In section 4, we raise a few issues about normative-evaluative kind of research In section 5, we briefly discuss the post-positivist approaches in social research, and in section 6 we conclude

2 From practice to methodology

The commonplace view about social research is overwhelmingly explanation- oriented, where the central question is ‘why’ Why is the labour force participation rate of women low in India? Why are some states better at human development than others? Why have so many farmers committed suicide in India in the recent past? Answers to these questions take a causal form, even though the method usu-ally deployed to establish a causal explanation can accomplish the job only imper-fectly Nevertheless, most policy discussions are based on some understanding of the causes and their effects on various outcomes In other words, the essential nature

of inquiry here is explanatory Inquiries of this kind end up indicating or

‘establish-ing’ some causal connections between choices or actions of agents (individuals, groups, governments, corporations etc.) and outcomes However, the self-conscious practitioners of statistical or econometric techniques know rather well that at best

their techniques establish some association between variables, rather than a causal

connection One must take a big leap of faith to claim an associational

observa-tion between, say, x and y, as a causal one, even though certain econometric

tech-niques, such as the Granger causality test, claim to establish causal connections between variables Thus, we might self-consciously seek to establish some associa-

tion between entities, in which case the nature of inquiry would be associational or

relational, rather than explanatory.

Besides explanation and finding association, one can identify several other motivations which drive research inquiries When a study is designed primarily

to describe what is going on or what exists, without entering into the analysis of

underlying relationships or causal connections that are not so apparent, it is

descrip-tive A question such as ‘how has GDP of India grown in the post-reform period’

falls in this category To answer this question one has to describe the pattern of growth in India’s GDP between, say, 1991 and the present However, there is no such thing as ‘pure description’, as description involves conscious methodological choice.1 As in this apparently simple question, one has to decide on whether the average annual rate of growth or the trend rate of growth should be calculated, whether the period should be divided into sub-periods and the average or the trend growth rates in the sub-periods should be noted and so on

Different underlying motivations seem to dominate different disciplines In nomics, for instance, prediction is considered to be the most important motivation behind theoretical and empirical inquiry In mainstream economics, the standard

eco-Methodological or epistemological issues 11

methodological route is to set up a model of behaviour of agents (individuals, firms etc.) Starting from a set of axioms about behaviour of the agents, conclusions are derived using deductive mathematical logic The methodological approach is therefore called hypothetico-deductive Such models based on deductive logic are expected to predict future outcome This dominant view was made explicit by Mil-ton Friedman in his widely known paper ‘The Methodology of Positive Econom-ics’ (Friedman [1953]) Friedman argued that the assumptions made by economists while modelling individual behaviour should be judged ‘by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions’, not

by the ‘realism’ of the assumptions Amartya Sen, however, holds a different view:Prediction is not the only exercise with which economics is concerned Pre-scription has always been one of the major activities in economics, and it is natural that this should have been the case Even the origin of the subject of political economy, of which economics is the modern version, was clearly related to the need for advice on what is to be done on economic matters Any prescriptive activity must, of course, go well beyond pure prediction, because no prescription can be made without evaluation and an assessment

of the good and the bad

(Sen [1986, p 3])

Thus, ‘evaluation and an assessment of the good and the bad’ gives rise to yet

another altogether different kind of inquiry, which is evaluative For an evaluative

inquiry one applies certain normative criteria to judge states of affairs For ple, a question such as, ‘Is gender inequality more in country A than in country B?’ apparently falls in the descriptive category But on closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that there is no obvious way of assessing gender inequality with a compara-tive perspective Even if one restricts oneself to this question, ignoring such related questions as why gender inequality is more in one country than in another, it turns out to be non-trivial as explicit value judgements with moral philosophic underpinnings are deeply involved Amartya Sen often makes a distinction between evaluative2 exercises and descriptive-analytic or predictive-prescriptive exercises, as

exam-in the earlier quotation, and emphatically poexam-ints out that the motivation behexam-ind the evaluative type of inquiry is no less important than that behind others The entire theoretical literature on measurement of inequality, poverty and human develop-ment falls in this category

All these types of research inquiries briefly described here roughly fall in the

paradigm which can be called positivist In the next section we elaborate on the

notion of paradigm and the epistemology of positivism

3 Positivist-empiricist practice

There is no simple formula to establish any connection between specific ‘causes’

and ‘effects’ Three basic ingredients of social research are (1) some ideas about

12 Achin Chakraborty

how things are or how change takes place, (2) data or observations on ‘facts’ and (3) methods that integrate ideas and observations By method we mean a set of tools

or techniques informed by an approach which is applied in a research inquiry But

methodology is concerned with the framework within which particular methods are

appraised In other words, methodology deals with the broader question of ‘how we know what we know’ and is somewhat close in meaning to what we understand as epistemology Ideas are obtained from various theories They may often look like commonsense But if they are part of a theoretical framework one can expect logi-cal coherence in the ideas, which commonsense does not guarantee

What is theory? Before we come up with an imprecise answer to this question,

it would be helpful if we accept that theory can be defined only within a paradigm

Roughly speaking, a paradigm is a combination of a set of underlying beliefs about the ways things are and specific ways of inquiring about how things are, how they change, how they are connected with or influenced by each other and so on In

other words, a paradigm can be identified with specific ontological and

epistemo-logical positions For many of us who work in what is loosely called ‘development

research’, a kind of positivism seems to be the underlying paradigm In this version of

positivism the core belief is that reality is out there and that by gathering ‘facts’ it is possible to find out what is happening in reality The researcher is assumed to stand apart from the observed and produce objective knowledge How does he or she go about it? First, the researcher identifies separate aspects of reality and expresses them

as ‘variables’ Then he or she goes on examining the relationships between ables This involves both observation and reasoning based on arguments acceptable within the paradigm Within the positivist paradigm, a theory is expected to answer our ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions in the most generalized way with a coherent logical structure Generalizability is at the core of theoretical statements

vari-Someone with an empirical bent of mind and relying less on theory for mination often tends to say ‘facts speak for themselves’ As a matter of fact, facts hardly speak for themselves One has to sort out relevant from irrelevant facts at the outset Without some prior idea about the nature of the phenomena, without some propositions, assumptions etc., there is no way this can be meaningfully done, according to a positivist Deciding that observation X or Y is relevant marks the start of a theory In this paradigm, theory means a logically valid chain of reasoning starting from certain premises called postulates Postulates are taken as axiomatically given and contain certain terms that are representative of persons, organizations, things, actions, states etc found in the world of experience A meaningful analysis presupposes that the terms are unambiguously defined

illu-In this positivist-empiricist paradigm hypothesis testing seems to take the pride

of place It is a commonly held view that any proposed research in social science must specify at the outset the hypotheses to be tested Admittedly, certain types of social research do require the use of hypotheses They can be useful in helping to find answers to ‘why’ questions and therefore are developed at the outset to set the direction However, precise specification of the hypotheses is neither necessary nor appropriate in many cases In particular, when explanation is expected to come

Methodological or epistemological issues 13

out in the form of a complex web of interconnections and mutual influences,

a cut-and-dried kind of hypothesis testing may not give a better insight into a phenomenon Hypotheses should ideally be derived from a theory of some kind Hypotheses that are simply based on common sense or intuition without making any reference to the existing state of knowledge rarely make significant contribu-tions to the development of knowledge

Most mainstream economists believe that their methodology is positivist The philosopher who has had the greatest influence on the methodology of econom-ics is Karl Popper, as evident from the frequent invocation of Popper by economic methodologists such as Mark Blaug (1992) Popper’s philosophy even influenced a

major introductory textbook – Richard Lipsey’s An Introduction to Positive

Econom-ics Popper’s philosophy of ‘scientific knowledge’ is concerned with what he calls

‘the problem of demarcation’, i.e the problem of distinguishing science from

non-science Popper introduces falsification as the criterion to be applied for demarcation

A statement is in principle falsifiable if it is logically inconsistent with some finite set of true or false observation reports Popper himself gives an example of a scien-tific statement: ‘All swans are white’ This is a falsifiable statement since the observa-tion of a non-white swan would establish its falsity There is an asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability A universal statement concerning an unbound domain, such as ‘all swans are white’, may be falsifiable but not verifiable For example, the observation ‘this swan is black’ falsifies the statement ‘all swans are white’ To verify

the statement, we need to observe all possible swans, but the set of all swans is unbounded as it includes, inter alia, swans yet to be born In other words, it is not

possible to verify any truly universal statement, but one can falsify it or verify its negation (Hausman, 1992]

Ironically, economists do not seem to practice what they preach Hausman cizes ‘the methodological schizophrenia that is characteristic of contemporary eco-nomics, whereby methodological doctrine and practice regularly contradict one another’ We take a different standpoint here, one which fundamentally disagrees with the view that economists should stick to falsificationism as the only criterion

criti-to assess knowledge claims in economics In what follows, we present a glimpse of the variety of theoretical ideas and the corresponding methodological approaches that scholars have actually adopted in social sciences in general and in certain brunches of economics in particular

4 Explanatory framework and varieties of theory:

structure versus agency

A broad classification of theoretical approaches in social sciences could be made in terms of the basic unit of analysis Traditionally, the dominant view in social science happened to be that of understanding the functioning of the social system From

Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, most of the classics in social

sciences focused on some kind of social (or economic) system However, much of

14 Achin Chakraborty

contemporary social research focuses on explaining individual behaviour With the development of quantitative methods of research, dependence on individual-level data has increased significantly If one still feels that the functioning of the system should remain the central problem for research inquiry, how does one go about explaining the system? From both ontological and epistemological points of view there can be two broad ways of explaining the system – systemic (or structuralist) and agency-based3

A structuralist mode of explanation generally rejects the view that the social, economic or political structure can be explained entirely as the aggregate of the actions of individual agents The most well-known statement representative of an extreme form of structuralist explanation is perhaps contained in Marx’s preface to

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the eco-nomic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness

(Marx [1859, 1977])

Here individuals seem to have no ‘agency’ role to play; relations of production corresponding to a definite stage of development of material productive forces determine what they do Marx continues in the preface to further suggest that it

is the interplay of the forces and relations of production that brings about social transformation – transition from one mode of production to another

In a similar vein, more recently, Terry Byres (1997) begins an article on India’s development planning as follows:

This is an essay on development planning in post-1947 India, written from

a Marxist political economy perspective It is not an essay about the ‘failure

of planning in India’ Nor is its theme Indian planning’s achievements It is rather a consideration of those contradictions that were inherent in Indian development planning at its inception, which centred on the state and class: contradictions which deepened as planning proceeded; and which continue

to demand attention despite planning’s apparent demise

A full assessment of planning in India, Byres demands, must be a historical exercise –

in an analytical political economy sense, not necessarily in a chronological sense

In the analytical political economy sense it must be historical, according to him,

Methodological or epistemological issues 15

in three broad ways: (1) planning must be located with respect to the ‘laws of motion’ or ‘tendencies’ which mediate the Indian social formation, and their atten-dant contradictions, especially as these relate to accumulation and the sources of accumulation; (2) the instrumentality of planning must be judged in relation to the possibility of transition from economic backwardness to a dominant capitalist mode

of production; and (3) a long time horizon, sufficient to talk about the structural, the epochal, the trend – not the ‘moment’ or the conjunctural The methodological agenda that Byres charts out are clearly very different from the one we introduced

at the beginning and do not fall into the familiar theory-method-data kind of positivist-empiricist category

To take another example roughly in the same tradition as that of Byres, the key analytical concept that runs through the book by Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2002) is ‘contradiction’, which has been extensively deployed to analyse the evo-lution of the Indian economy from the planned phase through ‘neoliberal reform’, using plenty of empirical material Three mutually reinforcing and interrelated contradictions, which arose out of the various roles that the state had to play, led

to the development impasse of the late 1960s and the 1970s, according to drasekhar and Ghosh The chapter on ‘the political economy of reform’ says in a nutshell that the ‘internal contradictions’ of the earlier policy regime generated increasing support within the powerful and affluent sections of society for chang-ing this regime in the manner desired by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank

Chan-An empirically oriented economist is likely to find this series of tions unpersuasive since it cannot be demonstrated easily by appealing to relevant empirical evidence that it is indeed ‘internal contradictions’ that explain the entire evolution of the Indian economy in the past decades No amount of data is enough

contradic-to refute the hypothesis of internal contradiction Chandrasekhar and Ghosh have used a wide range of macroeconomic data to present an excellent narrative of the experience of economic reforms in India But to what extent their data support the ubiquity of ‘internal contradictions’ remains a question

If one goes through the huge literature on agrarian reform, one is struck by the variety of methodological and epistemological perspectives – mostly implicit but occasionally explicitly articulated – that the scholars have taken Sometimes they trigger curious sort of exchanges in seminars and conferences The paper by Griffin

et al (2002) presented at the International Conference on Agrarian Relations and

Rural Development in Less-Developed Countries (Kolkata) was labelled as classical’ by several commentators, to which Griffin’s reply was as follows:

‘neo-Several participants have described our analysis as ‘neoclassical’ While labels do not matter terribly, it is slightly puzzling why anyone would think our analysis is neoclassical, given the emphasis we place on non-market clear-ing, uncompetitive behaviour, multifaceted labour market discrimination, organized interest groups of landowners, the exercise of political power and

so on The American variety of neoclassical economist would disown us!

16 Achin Chakraborty

Clearly, between Byres’s kind of pure Marxist political economy perspective and what Griffin’s commentators call ‘neoclassical’ there could be a variety of perspec-tives in between It appears that, while Byres’s perspective is less likely to be con-taminated by other perspectives, many would not mind going a step down the system level for more illumination

One significant attempt to capture the long-term development in the capitalist

world system in systemic terms, needless to say, is Amiya Kumar Bagchi’s Perilous

Passage (Bagchi [2005]) He traces out when and how the divergence between

countries occurred Instead of focusing exclusively on divergences in economic prosperity of the nations he looks at the living standard of people from the human development perspective With the help of demographic and anthropometric data,

he shows that divergence did take place from the Industrial Revolution, although

it is not a case of steady divergence throughout the period to date From the odological point of view the most significant aspect of the book is its narrative style, eschewing either a rigid form of determinism that is characteristic of Marx’s preface or an empiricism that comes out of positivist thinking Even though the underlying theme is ‘capitalist world system’, his narrative style seems to be con-sistent with any perspective that takes as an analytical entry point any level below the capitalist world system (for example, evolution of institutions or behaviour of corporations) (Chakraborty [2008])

meth-In sum, what we have tried to illustrate here is the variety of practices which do not subscribe to the standard positivist-empiricist method that combines theory, data and hypothesis-testing And second, it is impossible to put different theoretical approaches in water-tight paradigmatic compartments

5 Contested terrain in evaluative research: composite

index as an illustrative example

The process of development is essentially qualitative in nature However, in order to

know how a country or a sub-region in a country is doing vis-à-vis others we need

to identify certain quantifiable aspects of development Whereas the expansion of a

country’s productive capacity may be considered a necessary condition for ment in the long run, it is not sufficient to ensure expansion of the real freedom

develop-of people to do what people have reason to value Development is conceptualized

as freedom, and freedom is multi-dimensional Therefore, any measure of ment has to be multi-dimensional Each dimension is quantitatively represented by

develop-an indicator, develop-and the indicators are often put together through certain aggregators to construct a composite index of development.

Underlying any composite measure is some assumption regarding how various dimensions of development (or interchangeably ‘well-being’, ‘quality of life’, ‘human development’) are related to the overall index There are mainly two ways of estab-lishing such a relationship One is the so-called data-driven method to derive a set

of weights Starting from observed data on the variables to be included in the

meas-ure of well-being, a principal component analysis is carried out, and the first principal

Methodological or epistemological issues 17

component, if it explains a significant proportion of the total variability of the ables, is taken to be a composite index of well-being since the first principal compo-nent is a linear combination of the original variables This method does not define any well-being function explicitly The alternative approach, what we may call the ‘ethi-cal approach’, starts from an explicit well-being function We discuss a few plausible ethical positions that would give rise to different composite indices Since the most widely known composite index is the Human Development Index (HDI), popular-ized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), many of the issues that we discuss naturally draw heavily on the conceptual background of HDI and the lessons one learns from its evolution and application over the past quarter of a century.Essentially there are three steps in construction of a multi-dimensional measure

vari-of development We briefly describe the steps here and illustrate them with the example of HDI

Identification

First, we need to identify the dimensions that we propose to include in the dimensional measure The dimensions are selected on the basis of the conceptual framework that underlies the measure The HDI, for example, measures human development, which is conceptualized as expansion of people’s choices Following this conceptualization UNDP settles on three dimensions of human development, namely a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living The corresponding indicators are life expectancy at birth, a combination of mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars

multi-It is obvious that the conceptual richness of human development cannot be fully captured by these three dimensions As a matter of fact, the chief architects of HDI, Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq, both have written explicitly about the crude-ness of the index There are many variables of relevance to human development that are not included in the HDI, such as civil and political rights, nutritional status, autonomy, mobility, freedom from crime and violence and so on Some of them could be included But the basic idea was to keep the index simple and manageable One must acknowledge the dilemma at this point Should we aspire for a measure that is ‘complete’, scientifically perfect, logically correct and so on? Or should we try to find a measure that may not be perfect but effective for advocacy and policy-making? HDI is believed to strike a balance between the two.4

The income component of HDI has been criticized on the following ground The conceptual foundation of HDI is based on the concepts of capabilities and functionings A functioning refers to the state of being of a person or how the per-son is doing In this sense, income is not a functioning It may be instrumental in achieving some functioning, but it is the functioning which is valued or a person’s reason to value Income has only ‘derivative importance’ rather than any intrinsic importance The rationale for including income, however, is that it acts as a close, feasible proxy for all choices other than those captured by longevity and knowledge

18 Achin Chakraborty

indicators The HDI is also criticized for mixing stock variables with flow variables Life expectancy or expected years of schooling, for example, are stock variables in the sense that they refer to some point in time, not duration of time We do not say

‘life expectancy per year or per month’ But income is a flow variable It refers to duration, as income is expressed as ‘income per year’ or ‘per month’, for example

Valuation

Once the dimensions are settled on and the component indicators are identified, the next question is whether the indicator values reflect our ethical intuition about the relative worth of different values For example, if we interpret income as an indicator

of real standard of living, should we consider a country with a per capita income of 80,000 dollars as offering 80 times the living standard offered by another country whose per capita income is 1,000 dollars? We may not It is a value judgement based

on our understanding of the ethical worth of certain indicator values The HDI treats the income component differently from the other components Instead of taking the real per capita income in its face value, it takes the logarithm of per capita income

This is a valuational exercise In other words, the authors of the Human Development

Report think that as a country’s per capita income rises, it improves people’s living

standard, but at a diminishing rate Without this logarithmic transformation, for income countries the value of the income component would be so large that the value of the composite index would be largely dominated by the income compo-nent, which would go against the very purpose of constructing an alternative index

high-Aggregation

The final step is aggregation The multiple dimensions produce a vector of numbers

We cannot say whether country A ranks higher than country B in terms of human development achievement, if, for example, the first indicator is higher in A than in

B and the value of the second indicator is higher in B than in A We can compare

A with B only in the less likely situations where all the indicators in A show higher values that corresponding values in B This is the case of ‘vector dominance’ But in most cases of actual comparisons we do not find vector dominance Therefore, we need to combine the component indicators to construct a scalar number, which is called the composite index

Two broad types of aggregators are cardinal and ordinal HDI, for example,

fol-lows a cardinal aggregation procedure in which geometric mean of the component indicators (after they are normalized) is taken as the composite index An example

of ordinal aggregation is the method proposed by Borda in the context of voting.5From 2010, UNDP radically changed its method of aggregation – from arith-metic mean to geometric mean HDI first transforms the indicators into unit-free numbers and then takes the geometric mean of the three transformed variables (United Nations Development Programme, 2016) One implication of the arith-metic mean is that the three components are treated as perfect substitutes In other

Methodological or epistemological issues 19

words, low longevity and high per capita income are considered as good as high gevity and low per capita income Low achievement in one dimension is assumed

lon-to be perfectly compensated by high achievement in another dimension Although UNDP had been using the arithmetic mean for almost two decades on the ground

of ease of comprehension by policy makers, it was always felt that perfect tutability between dimensions was not a very reasonable assumption – hence, the realization that the geometric mean would make better sense The geometric mean has the following implication: if the indicator that has the lowest value makes an improvement by one point, its contribution to the composite index would be more than the same one point improvement in the indicator that has a higher value

substi-In any composite index, we should know what weights are attached to the component dimensions to properly judge if it has got the balance right The weight

in any given dimension can be defined as the index’s first partial derivative (slope) with respect to that dimension Since the component dimensions have been re-scaled so that they lie in the 0–1 interval, what really matters is the relative weights

of its component dimensions In other words, we need to know the assumed offs, as given by the HDI’s marginal rate of substitution (MRS), i.e how much of one desired component of the HDI must be given up for an extra unit of another component, keeping the overall index constant If a policy or economic change entails that one of the positively valued dimensions increases at the expense of another dimension, it is the MRS that tells us whether human development is deemed to have risen or fallen Martin Ravallion (2010) has pointed out that the implicit trade-offs often go contrary to what our value judgement would suggest

trade-On a priori grounds it is unclear what effect relaxing perfect substitutability between

the transformed indicators would have on the trade-offs in the core dimensions Whether the MRS increases or decreases essentially depends on the data

The HDI’s new aggregation method based on the geometric mean hides partial success amongst countries doing poorly in just one dimension As dimension X approaches Xmin we see that HDI approaches zero no matter what value is taken

by the other dimensions Consider, for example, Zimbabwe, which had the lowest

2010 HDI, 0.14, and it is the lowest by far, at about 60 per cent of the next lowest Yet this is due to one component that currently scores very low, namely income Zimbabwe’s income index value of 0.01 is the lowest of any country by a wide margin (60 per cent of the next lowest value) However, the schooling index value

is 0.52 and the longevity index value is 0.43 – both well above the bottom Indeed, there are 56 countries with a lower schooling index than Zimbabwe’s, yet this relative success is hidden by the HDI’s new aggregation formula, given its mul-tiplicative form Using the arithmetic mean instead (with other data unchanged), Zimbabwe still has a low HDI, but it ranks higher than six countries

Reckoning change

The following figures are taken from the India Human Development Report 2011

presented by the Planning Commission of India Between 1999 and 2007, the HDI

20 Achin Chakraborty

value in Bihar increased by 0.075 from 0.292, and in Kerala it increased by 0.113

starting from 0.677 Clearly Kerala made greater absolute improvement However,

if we compared the percentage changes in HDI in the two states and with the national average as well, which the report did, the increase in Bihar (25.7 per cent) turned out to be greater than the increase in the national average (20.7 per cent)

On the other hand, Kerala’s HDI improved by 16.7 per cent, which was below the national average of 20.7 per cent What kind of meaning can we attach to these

percentages? Do they mean that Bihar’s improvement is more valuable than Kerala’s?

Do they mean that Bihar has performed better than Kerala? The two questions are

distinctly different, and they direct us to two very different ways of measuring improvement If one holds the view that the marginal human development dimin-ishes as human development improves, any improvement from a lower level is con-sidered to be more valuable than similar improvement from a higher level In this

view Bihar’s improvement would be judged more valuable than Kerala’s However,

if one is to judge how commendable the performances of the two states are, it is rather unlikely that a reasonable person would accept the view that Bihar had per-formed better than Kerala Kerala clearly made more commendable progress as it managed to improve its HDI by 0.113 from an already high 0.677, whereas Bihar’s HDI increased by only 0.075 starting from a low 0.292 Moreover, in this exam-ple, the gap between the HDI values in the two states in fact increased rather than decreased Therefore, just by looking at the relatively higher percentage changes in the HDI values in low HDI states one cannot logically conclude that the low HDI states made better progress than others and ‘there is convergence taking place in HDI across states’.6

What we have presented here shows the contested nature of evaluative research Each step of constructing a composite index of development is fraught with a range

of conceptual and technical issues, and there is no magic formula that would resolve the ‘problems’ However, there is nothing defeatist about the multiplicity of pos-sibilities and not having any way to privilege one over the others In certain social science disciplines, such as economics, pluralism as a value position does not seem

to be the most sought after

6 Pluralism and post-positivist approaches

Till this point we have taken the position that there is an underlying reality which research can find out more and more about With effort and technical know-how

we can achieve greater precision in our understanding However, an alternative belief could be that different accounts or pictures of reality are simultaneously pos-sible based on different perspectives and interests ‘Qualitative’ research methods are

usually associated with this constructivist or interpretive view The researcher tries to

bring out and record different accounts from different viewpoints and then struct what appears to be a complex story But the problem with this view is that one does not have a sure way of deciding on what the best story amongst several possibilities is

con-Methodological or epistemological issues 21

In some areas of social research, the qualitative-quantitative distinction has led to protracted arguments with the proponents of each arguing the superiority of their kind of method over the other The quantitative side argues that it is ‘rigorous’,

‘hard’, ‘scientific’ and so on The qualitative approach, as claimed by its proponents,

is ‘superior’ because it is ‘sensitive’, ‘nuanced’, ‘contextual’ and so on Both tive and quantitative research rest on rich and varied traditions that come from multiple disciplines, and both have been employed to address almost any research topic one can think of There is no reason to give primacy to one over the other Different methods are required to address different problems, and a combination

qualita-of techniques may yield greater insight than either one qualita-of them used in isolation However, it must not be taken for granted that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods should always be considered superior to either of them Two things have to be separated in this context As far as types of data are concerned, there is little difference between qualitative and quantitative data All qualitative

data can be coded and expressed in numeric form Even if one retains qualitative data

in non-numeric form and uses it for additional insight besides what is known from quantitative information, the methodological approach is still positivist-empiricist.7The difference perhaps lies in the assumptions about reality and about the way one should acquire knowledge about reality For instance, many researchers who follow the qualitative approach believe that the best way to understand any phe-nomenon is to view it in its context Some in the qualitative tradition believe that the researcher cannot stand apart from the process and produce objective knowl-edge Thus, the two approaches clearly differ in terms of ontological assumptions and epistemological positions Ignoring the deeper issues of this kind, a blanket

advocacy of the so-called ‘mixed method’ (apparently some ad hoc combination of

qualitative and quantitative methods) smacks of superficiality

A wide range of scholars have advocated ‘methodological pluralism’ ever since Caldwell (1982) made a compelling case for change in the thinking about eco-nomic methodology We believe the primary purpose of our methodological dis-

cussion is to enhance our understanding of what social science is all about and, by

so doing, to improve it The critical appraisal of methodological approaches plays an

essential role in methodological pluralism Criticism is not to be undertaken for the purpose of correcting the deviations from the so-called ideal, for the ideal in the absolute sense does not exist at all Appraisal of scholarly practice is therefore a complex process of questioning and interpreting that cannot be based on any gen-eral so-called ‘scientific method’.8

7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have argued that research methodology in social science must not be viewed as prescribing a set of rules about how to do social research We have illustrated with examples from the literature the variety of practices which can hardly be seen as following a narrow set of normative criteria Judging by the impact that various scholars have in the research community with their research

22 Achin Chakraborty

output, it seems that methodological appraisal as a scholarly enterprise can ingfully contribute to social research if it draws on the richness of actual practice and on how scholars deploy their methodological strategies to persuade the mem-bers of their community Moving away from a meta-theoretic perspective such

mean-as positivism is likely to facilitate better communication amongst practitioners in social sciences

Notes

1 Sen (1980) explains why a ‘good’ description may not be a precisely true description.

2 This is not to be confused with programme evaluation or impact assessment.

3 For a comprehensive and lucid discussion on this see Hollis (2000).

4 Some of these issues and others are discussed in Chakraborty (2002).

5 For an application of the Borda method of ordinal aggregation see Chakraborty and Mishra (2003).

6 For further details see Chakraborty (2011).

7 This point was discussed in Chakraborty (1996).

8 Such an attempt was made in Chakraborty (2005).

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