Research
methods in the social sciences: A quest for relevant approaches for Africa
Abstract
Fadlalla,
Bashir Omer Mohamed; Kiros , F. G. [Fasil G. Kiros] (eds.)
OSSREA, Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). 1986. iv + 230p. Khartoum (Sudan): Khartoum
University Press. Research Methods in the social sciences, Khartoum (Sudan), 1-3
Oct 1984.
Compilation
of papers that were presented at an OSSREA workshop on research methods in the
social sciences and that address various aspects of the relevance of the
different methodologies used for research on African societies while examining
how these could be improved upon. The first group of papers deals with issues
pertaining to fieldwork techniques, collection of ethnographic data for rural
development purposes, and the relevance of the present techniques, which are
largely' borrowed from non-African contexts, to the African realm. A common
feature of the contributions to this section is the authors' critique of the
prevailing methodologies and their plea for their reconsideration. The second
section consists of four papers that deal with mathematical techniques in data
analysis in the social sciences. The final section comprises three articles
dealing with problems and methods in documentary research. The papers are
titled: "Introduction: Research methods in the social sciences, an
overview", "Social science research in Africa: A review of methods and
ethics", "The recency and immediacy of political science: Some
implications for research", "The African household in socio-economic
change: A conceptual problem in research", "Research methodology and
the competence of social scientists in depicting reality: Some odd facts from
rural Sudan", "Sampling errors from socio-economic baseline survey in
an Ethiopian rural setting", "Village surveys as a primary source of
data for testing hypotheses in rural/rural migration in Sudan", "An
approach to the use of scaling in sensitivity analysis", "The problems
of social science research in developing societies, with examples from a survey
of Zairian refugees in' Tanzania", "Methodological issues in research
on public administration in Uganda: Problems and prospects of
documentation", "Methodological issues in administrative research in
Africa”, and “Researching on the history of labour”