Qualitative research across boundaries: indigenousation, glocalization or creolization?

Contemporary qualitative research is questioned by non-academic and/or non-Western epistemologies, although far less so than quantitative methods. The challenge directly concerns the tacit cultural foundations of traditional qualitative research, which still embodies (in its methods) an ethnocentric, and sometimes colonial, attitude. Due to the initial European colonization (see Gobo, 2011), and later the Anglophone domination during the twentieth century (see Alasuutari, 2004; Fielding 2014; Hsiung 2012; Ryen 2011), worldwide qualitative methodology is almost entirely constituted by research methods (focus group, in-depth interview, ethnography, visual methods, discourse and conversation analysis, etc.) invented by the Western middle-class academic culture. This particular local/indigenous, methodological culture was then globalized, becoming dominant in almost all forms of inquiry around the world. This phenomenon led to a sort of ‘methodological genocide’ of non-Anglophone qualitative research traditions: many local research traditions (e.g. in Austria, Norway, Italy and so on) and their outcomes (not translated into English) disappeared and were erased from local memories and methodological textbooks. However, the paradox is that many contemporary methodological articles are ‘reinventing the wheel’, that is, re-stating what was already found 80–90 years ago by these deleted local research traditions. Though already global, conventional qualitative research methods still embody the Western indigenous knowledge from which they originated, and they share the limits of globalization evident in many other fields, from economy to politics, from marketing to culture and social life. In fact, when exported and applied in marginal Western cultures (to which poorly educated people, lower classes, cultural peripheral communities, and so on, belong) to migrants (see Flick & Röhnsch, 2014), Afro-American communities (see McDougal III, 2014), and obviously in non-Western research contexts (Ryen, 2000), these research methods run into cultural difficulties. For this reason, a growing need to find postcolonial methodologies and non-ethnocentric methods, and to develop culturally flexible, conventional, qualitative research methods, is challenging contemporary research procedures and practices. Researchers wanting to pursue this alternative can choose from at least three methodological directions: indigenization, glocalization or creolization. After a description of some challenging non-Western epistemologies and a review of some cultural difficulties concerning the main traditional qualitative methods, the three methodological directions will be scrutinized in regard to their advantages and intrinsic limitations. The first direction (indigenous methodologies) will be considered out of date because the local/indigenous no longer exist after the glocalization processes that have invested the entire world (Robertson, 2013). The remaining alternatives to the colonial and ethnocentric Western conventional qualitative research methods are glocalization and creolization. Both are useful, even if creolization seems to be the alternative that is more respectful of cultural traditions, methodologically flexible and fruitful.