Anne Ryen

Exploring or exporting? Qualitative methods in times of globalisation

Europeanism, westernism and methodological imperialism all refer to the classic criticism of Western research in non-Western contexts. Though I welcome the debate, I find arguments based on simple binary oppositions and descriptions problematic. This debate is better positioned as one about the quality of qualitative research. With reference to the criticism I ask if contemporary qualitative research is stuck in old problems. Based on my ethnographic data from East Africa I show that the pitfalls of Western research that are pointed to in classic criticisms are the outcome of old models and poor analytic work. I also show that contemporary ‘Western’ qualitative research offers analytic alternatives that better allow us to capture local non-Western contexts. Nonetheless, I welcome new epistemologies emerging from non-Western philosophies and practices not yet known in the hegemonic West.

Marking Boundaries: Culture as Category Work

Contemporary social science is acutely aware of what happens when we mark or police boundaries. Cross-cultural research highlights such issues. Face-to-face interviews and e-mail exchanges with Asian businessmen appeared to suggest clear boundaries between Tanzanian African and Asian “culture.” However, such ready understanding raises two further issues. First, boundary marking might fit with a colonial methodology used by the early anthropologists to fix a boundary around “native” populations. Second, the very concepts of “culture” and “identity” need deconstruction. Using Sacks’s insistence on the inescapably local and self-constituting character of social interaction, the authors examine what is involved when ethnographers (and laypersons) use categories to describe the world. They conclude with an assessment of what remains of anthropology’s and sociology’s concept of culture given their tendency to fudge the boundary between the descriptive abilities of lay and sociological members.

Trust in Cross-Cultural Research The Puzzle of Epistemology, Research Ethics and Context

The complexity of social relations in ethnographic fieldwork makes us rightly wonder how do we come to see what is ethical or not? Trust in cross-cultural research works well to explore this issue. I will compare two different treatments of the same linguistic practice from interaction with my main informant, an Asian in East-Africa, and argue that it is important to see the action-orientation of utterances designed to achieve particular interactional ends. Failure to do so may result in analytic claims based on incomplete understanding of data. Treating the informants utterances as a passive medium for transmission of information, makes us vulnerable to the non-western criticism of western research in non-western contexts. Rather, the action orientation offers an alternative way that makes us see talk as designed to perform sequentially relevant actions. This approach safeguards us against premature interpretations of trust in cross-cultural research practice.

The Inefficiency of Knowledge and the Limits of Explanations; the Necessity of Critique

July 22nd 2011 Norway experienced the deadliest terror attack in the country since World War II. One man, Anders Behring Breivik, ABB (33), blew up the Governmental Headquarters in our capital Oslo, killing eight people. Later that day he shot and killed, one by one, 69 youths attending a summer camp at Utøya, and wounded many others. His target was the Norwegian Labour Party, its most prominent and influential members, and those who one day might be. His country is dying he says, because of multiculturalism. He is a commander and knight—future leader and even king. His actions were political , compulsory—necessary. . . he says. He regrets nothing.

Managing the decline of globalized methodology

In his preface to the World Social Science Report (ISSC, 2010) Gudmund Hernes, the President of the International Social Science Council argues that the contemporary confluence of crises generates a demand for more social science. At the same time, he claims that never before have social scientists had such impact on how the world is seen and acted upon though a rather mixed blessing. The problem is that our map no longer offers proper guidance, ‘while we live on one planet, we belong to worlds apart’ (ISSC, 2010, p. viii). This has instigated a call for developing alternatives to the European scientific legacy that in many ways has both subjugated non-Western social sciences to the Western cultural hegemony as well as reduced academic freedom elsewhere by presenting assumingly universal models or paradigms making their own less relevant. Chinese Deng Zhenglai (2010) calls for academic autonomy by a knowledge transition with ‘authentic participation in intellectual discourse, and academic exchange with social scientists from elsewhere’ (ISSC, 2010, p. 183). This includes developing methods and tools to make local contexts visible and to develop locally embedded responses. But, just as there are no context-free responses, we are also reminded that the social sciences are no power-free zones. The North Atlantic domination in social science journals and in publishing perpetuates a hegemony that tends to marginalize Southern voices. Access to this hegemonic superstructure is crucial to make research count as knowledge though access is systematically skewed in favor of the Anglo-American research communities. This complicates indigenous intellectual authority in the non-Western world and makes international legitimacy problematic as long as knowledge is not ‘global’ until disseminated in the West, and second, published in English. We may use Norwegian Eilert Sundt (1817–1875) (1866/1967) as an illustration; an ‘unknown’ methodological pioneer he walked throughout Norwegian valleys, combined qualitative and quantitative methodology, was well informed about international surveys of the time, and published extensively, but all in a minority language. Europe and the US have been the cradle of contemporary methodology. Consequently most of the methodological knowledge has been invented by a Western academic culture. Social research methods created by European and American indigenous (or local) cultures have throughout the twentieth century become a sort of general knowledge: journals, handbooks, and textbooks have slowly transformed a locally based product in general into context-free principles. This made Alatas (2004) refer to an ‘intellectual superstructure’ as a barrier to non-Western researchers as documented in the ISSC report. Due to this subtle transformation social science methodology has become one of the most globalized knowledges. International Journal of Social Research Methodology Vol. 14, No. 6, November 2011, 411–415

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . 43: Justice! Ay! Ay! Ayotzinapa: A Challenge for New Critical Qualitative Inquiry

Dedicated to Bernardo Flores Alcaráz Felipe Arnulfo Rosa Benjamín Ascencio Bautista Israel Caballero Sánchez José Ángel “Pepe” Navarrete, Marcial Pablo Baranda Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías Marco Antonio Gómez Molina Cesar Manuel González Hernández Julio César López Patolzin Abel García Hernández Emiliano Allen Gaspar De la Cruz Dorian González Parral José Luis Gonzalez Parral Alexander Mora Venancio Saúl Bruno García Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo Jorge Álvarez Nava Christian Tomas Colon Garnica Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas José Luis Luna Torres Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa Mauricio Ortega Valerio José Ángel Campos Cantor Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza Giovanni Galindes Guerrero Jhosivani Guerrero De la Cruz Leonel Castro Abarca Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías Antonio Santana Maestro Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz Israel Jacinto Lugardo Adán Abrajan De la Cruz Abelardo Vázquez Peniten Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Martin Getsemany Sánchez García Cutberto Ortiz Ramos Everado Rodríguez Bello Jonás Trujillo González José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa And their loved ones . . .

Self-efficacy in protecting oneself against HIV transmission

This article deals with the complexity of health behaviour from a self-efficacy perspective, and shows the naivety in assuming knowledge as the main guide to better protection against HIV. The authors accentuate the importance of local knowledge when developing health strategies as in the case of protection against HIV, in this case for female university students in Malawi. Being part of a transition period, these students have to handle complex and at times opposing expectations. This makes HIV protection into a complex social- and health issue. However, the close association between universities and rational thinking has for long made public health see self-efficacy as one of the main determinants in general health behaviour. By seeing health behaviour as complex, this study explores into how female university students perceive their own self-efficacy in protecting themselves against HIV in Malawi with a HIV score of approximately 12%. The study is based on data from Chancellor College in Zomba, Malawi. The authors point to the potential of a closer collaboration between social work and public health in issues of both a social and a health nature, as in the case of HIV protection.