Today marked the second and last day of SCIQUAL 2017 seminar, my first attempt at organizing a seminar. SCIQUAL covered topics spanning different dimensions of scientific integrity in qualitative research. The idea of organizing such an international seminar first came up in my mind when I was invited to a workshop organized by the Institute of Organization and Human Resource Management, University of Bern in 2015. In 2017, I finally received a chance to organize one myself, with the internationalization project funds from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Utrecht University. The preparation for SCIQUAL 2017 thus started in February 2017.
SCIQUAL involved scholars from different countries (The Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Belgium). During these one and a half days, we had a series of presentations, individual Q&A sessions, and two group discussions (a last minute addition) which all gave interesting, thought-provoking, and engaging insights pertaining to scientific integrity in qualitative research. Apart from these activities, the seminar dinner was also a good venue for knowing more about each other. (What is more, even the sun was out until the seminar was over! Thank you, Utrecht!) My thanks to all the attendees and presenters. It was a wonderful group to be in. And thank you to my colleagues in Methodology and Statistics Department who made this possible by helping me with my umpteen organization and practical matters related queries.
Today, especially after the exciting intellectual experience and the positive feedback from the attendees (and the encouraging tweets), I am really happy I received a chance to do something like this. To answer a question the attendees asked me “Shouldn’t we have a sequel to SCIQUAL?”, my answer is “Definitely, if I/we get a chance again.” 🙂 🙂
LAKSHMI B. NAIR 