Creolizing social sciences

Although far less than quantitative methods, however also cultural foundations of qualitative research are questioned by non-Western epistemologies. Indeed also worldwide qualitative methodology (due to the Anglophone domination during the twentieth century ─ see Alaasutari 2004, Ryen 2011, Hsiung 2012, Fielding 2014) is almost totally 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. Later this indigenous methodological culture has been globalized and become dominant in almost all forms of inquire across the world. However, even if already global, these research methods still embody the Western indigenous knowledge from where they originated, and 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 and so on belong), to migrants (see Flick and Röhnsch 2014), Africana communities (“black world”) in the American context (see McDougal III 2014), and obviously in non-western research contexts (Ryen 2000), these research methods meet several cross-cultural troubles. For this reason, an emerging need for finding postcolonial methodologies, and making culturally flexible research methods, is challenging our contemporary research procedures and practices. According to it, researchers wishing to pursue this alternative path have before at least three methodological directions: indigenousation, glocalization or creolization. Which path to follow?