The Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods

CQRM's members in academic year 2015-2016 included departments, centers and/or institutes at: Aarhus University, Denmark; University at Albany, SUNY; American University; University of Arizona; Arizona State University; Australian National University; Bergen University; Boston College; Boston University; Brandeis University; University of British Columbia; Brown University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Riverside; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Chicago; University of Cincinnati; Columbia University; Cornell University; University of Connecticut; University of Delaware; University of Denver; Duke University; École nationale d'administration publique; University of Florida; Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt, Germany; George Washington University; Georgetown University; Griffith University; Harvard University; University of Hawai'i at Manoa; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Indiana University; Johns Hopkins; Johns Hopkins SAIS; Universite Laval, Quebec; London School of Economics; University of Maryland; University of Massachusetts; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; McGill University, Canada; National University of Singapore; University of New Mexico; New School for Social Research; Northwestern University; University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill; University of Notre Dame; Oberlin College; Ohio State University; University of Oklahoma; University of Oregon; University of Ottawa; Oxford University; University of Pittsburgh; Princeton University; Purdue University; Queen's University; Radboud University; Rutgers University; University of Southern California; University of Southern Denmark; SOAS, University of London; Syracuse University; University of Texas; University of Toronto; Tufts University; University of Virginia; University of Washington; University of Wisconsin; and Western Michigan University. In addition to participants sponsored by subscribers, the 2016 institute also drew individual attendees from: Carleton University; Centro en Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE); Emory University; George Mason University; School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University; Stanford University; United States Air Force Academy; University College London; University of Michigan; University of North Texas; 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.