Interpretative research in the Global South: Do we need different methods?

In this blog post, I discuss the need for social research which is skilled and competent in terms of methods (understood here primarily as research practice) when carrying out investigations in the Global South. If we use interpretative, qualitative methods which follow the principles of openness and reconstruction, and use an abductive approach, we do not need different methods for research in the Global South. I argue that this is one of the big advantages of rigorous interpretative or reconstructive social research, which also implies reflecting on the researcher’s position in the social field and the positions of our field assistants. It also implies flexibility in our research design, meaning which methods we use, in which sequential order, and in which context.

Flexibility in research design and continuity in theoretical orientation

Before I wrote this blogpost, I had never explicitly considered the question of whether field research in countries of the Global South requires methods different from those we use in countries of the Global North. This does not mean, however, that the way I use my toolkit has not changed over the past thirty years in the context of my research in various countries of the Global South. I still use the same tools for data collection and data interpretation, but I have become more flexible in the way I apply them. While my main focus has always been on the collection and analysis of autobiographies, I have increasingly used other methodological instruments, such as participant observation, spontaneous or planned group discussions, family interviews, expert interviews and ethnographic interviews. In particular, I have become increasingly flexible, for instance in respect of the sequence or combination of methods used, or in the way I conduct interviews. With each succeeding research project, I have become more and more open as to the research design, depending on the conditions in the particular field.

However, it is my belief, or at least my hope, that this would have happened even if my research had been restricted to the Global North. My use of interpretative methods has developed in this way because I have always followed the principles of the so-called interpretative paradigm, Pragmatism, and the Chicago School. And my research has always been based on a social-constructivist, and in the last twenty years also a figurational approach, with a special focus on biographical research (see Bogner & Rosenthal, 2017; Rosenthal 2012). This theoretical orientation is bound up with the basic assumption that, in order to understand and explain social and psychological phenomena, we have to reconstruct their genesis—the processes of their creation, reproduction, and transformation. This assumption, together with the idea that we need to reconstruct the subjective perspectives of actors in the different phases of their life and in the present, and their courses of action, explains why sociological biographical research is so important for me. In the traditon of figurational sociology, this means adopting a processual, historical and intergenerational perspective that involves the reconstruction of figurations, of unequal and fluctuating power chances, and of the perspectives of both established groupings and outsiders (see Elias & Scotson, 1994).

My research is based on fieldwork, as well as other methods, including archival studies and document analysis, by which I mean discourse analysis of different texts, including media texts. In general, I follow the principles of openness and reconstruction, and use an abductive approach. In this context, the question whether we need different methods, can be answered as follows: it depends on the methodology, methods and research design we use.

In addition to doing research in Germany, and for several years in Israel, I have conducted field work in Kazakhstan, Palestine, Jordan, Brazil and several African countries—going right back to 1989. In Africa, I have carried out field studies in Ghana and Uganda, in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, along with short periods of fieldwork in Morocco. And my colleagues and I have been conducting interviews for several years now with refugees and migrants who have arrived in western Europe, Brazil, Jordan or Uganda, after leaving their homes in the MENA region, the Sahel or sub-Saharan Africa (Becker, 2021; Bahl et al., 2017; Rosenthal, forthcoming). Since the start of the pandemic, we have conducted online follow-up interviews with these migrants and refugees, and documented their situation in times of COVID-19 (Bahl & Rosenthal, 2021).

Especially when working in environments that as sociologists we are not familiar with, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, it is important to be flexible in accessing the field and in the use of different methods. This depends on which forms of access to the field open up more easily than others. In other words, which methods I use, and in which sequence, is always determined by how the work progresses. In some settings, we may begin with observations and group discussions, perhaps arising from chance conversations with different people, and then go on to conduct biographical-narrative interviews in a second step. By contrast, in a study I carried out with Artur Bogner of so-called child soldiers in northern Uganda who had returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army (Bogner & Rosenthal, 2020), we started by interviewing a former key actor in the peace process, who then worked as a field assistant for us and arranged contacts with returnees. After the interview with this key actor, we interviewed the returnees individually, and it was these interviews that led to our being invited to the compounds of their families of origin, and having the opportunity to conduct family interviews and biographical interviews with various family members who belonged to different generations in the genealogical sense.

In almost all settings, we (Artur Bogner, my co-workers and myself) work with local field assistants who undertake the task of translating the interviews, and with whom we are able to discuss not only the interviews but also our general observations. Sometimes we recruit these field assistants from the same grouping as our interviewees, for instance because of their knowledge of the language, as in the case of Wolof which was spoken by the Senegalese migrants we interviewed in Brazil. This is something that cannot always be planned beforehand. One challenge we were faced with when studying illegalized migrants, for instance, was that with each new field trip we met refugees with ethnic and national backgrounds that were different from what we expected, or from what we had experienced during previous field trips. This meant we had to react very flexibly, especially in respect of the ethnic and national background of the two interviewers (or interviewer and field assistant). During the subsequent analysis, this gave us very fruitful insights into how the rules of the we- and self-presentations changed according to the collective belongings of the field assistants.

Methodological background of interpretative research

In the tradition of “Grounded Theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), the main focus is on the discovery of theory during the process of empirical research, with the help of sensitizing concepts as discussed by Herbert Blumer. A sensitizing concept “gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances. Whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts merely suggest directions along which to look” (Blumer, 1954, p. 7). Grounded theory does not mean an empiricism that is “free of theory,” but a conscious bracketing of theoretical presumptions, and a decided shift in the balance between theory and empirical discovery. This does not imply that the results of previous empirical studies and existing concepts should be ignored, but rather that one should bracket hypotheses at the outset of an empirical study along the lines of the procedure of abduction introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1985). Crucial to this procedure is that reasoning begins with data (or empirical phenomena) and then starts moving towards hypotheses.

An abductive inquiry does justice to the principle of reconstruction, which is generally required in interpretative methods. This means that the researcher does not approach the texts to be interpreted with an existing set of hypotheses, in order to avoid subsuming them under definitive categories. This consistently open approach that follows the logic of discovery, this completely unprejudiced view of social reality, and this avoidance of the logic of subsumption, determine not only how data is interpreted, but also the whole research process, including data collection and the research design. Following the principle of openness means (see Rosenthal, 2018, ch. 2):

• Starting with a tentative research question that is open to modification

• Forming hypotheses during the research process

• Developing theoretical samples during the research process

• Being willing at times to ignore one’s own particular research interests during observations or interviews

• During data collection, investigating the everyday relevance system of the actors (and not relying on that of the researchers)

• During analysis, giving priority to reconstructing the everyday relevance system of the actors