Guided by an experienced professor, you’ll learn the foundations of qualitative research, including: how to develop a thesis, how to formulate a research model, how to conduct a literature review, and how to sketch out a research outline. Once you’ve learned these core concepts, you’ll work directly with a PhD mentor who will assist you in conducting research on a topic of your own choosing. By the end of the program, you will complete your own research paper.

To give a brief overview, qualitative research looks broadly at issues in the world around us. It focuses on people and how they interact with each other and their surroundings. This is a very flexible type of research involving methods like interviews, surveys, and questionnaires. The researcher interacts with the participants posing questions for them to consider. Usually the sample sizes are not very large. The information gathered is in the form of words, not numbers. Researchers analyze the data by looking for themes and patterns. This type of research is used in social science subjects like sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, and education.