By Arne Worm, Georg August University of Göttingen
In this contribution, I reflect on the experiences and challenges of incorporating the central themes of this network into academic teaching—particularly the intersections between qualitative research on the one hand, and global and postcolonial sociologies on the other. While debates about the agenda and methodologies of Global Sociology are far from settled, it seems fair to identify reflexivity regarding the orders, legacies, and practices of knowledge production as one of its core concerns. This reflexivity extends well beyond research practices in the narrow sense of data collection and analysis. It encompasses a wide range of issues, such as rethinking the so-called “Western” canon of social theories and methodologies, or confronting language hierarchies—just to name two examples that resonate strongly with teaching.
I will begin with an (auto)sociological exercise in self-reflexivity about teaching within an academic field that may eventually become institutionalized as global qualitative research. I then share reflections and observations from a course titled Qualitative Research in the Context of Global Sociologies, which I taught during the 2022–2023 winter semester at the University of Göttingen. I hope these reflections will be useful to colleagues teaching within the German academic system as well as elsewhere—or to readers interested in the peculiarities (or provincialities) of a “venerable” German university in a mid-sized provincial city.
I must begin by asking for your indulgence regarding the somewhat cheesy—or even slightly sentimental—wordplay in the title. Readers familiar with debates on global sociologies will no doubt recognize the reference to Michael Burawoy’s (1947–2025) introductory chapter, “Reaching for the Global,” in the volume Global Ethnography (Burawoy, 2000). The British sociologist based in California, who passed away unexpectedly last year, played an important role in shaping discussions about practicing sociology as a global discipline, particularly within the International Sociological Association. He was also among the few scholars to make early and concrete contributions to the methodological realization of this agenda. Unsurprisingly, his work was included in our seminar readings.
If I’m honest, Burawoy’s intellectual accomplishments aren’t the only reason I thought it clever to begin with a playful nod to his work. Another—and probably more relevant—reason is biographical, and sociological. Born in the early 1980s and raised in a monolingual German family in a small provincial town in northern Germany, the “cultural capital” (to borrow Bourdieu’s term) that shaped my early socialization had little to do with cosmopolitan orientations or versatile academic discourses. It had, however, a great deal to do with U.S. pop culture. My parents belonged to the professional lower-middle class but had not attended university. Looking back, the impression Burawoy made on me when I saw his presidential address opening the ISA World Congress in Yokohama in 2014 (isasociotube, 2015)—during the early phase of my doctoral studies and at my first international conference—clearly reflects the symbolic and linguistic orders that structure academia. To be fair, I could have opened with memories of a similarly brilliant talk by Gurminder K. Bhambra on European Colonial Entanglements in Göttingen (Bhambra, 2019), but I couldn’t find a fitting wordplay (though we discussed her work in the seminar). Either way, when writing about global sociology and qualitative research, I would have begun with a reference to English-speaking academia.
German, U.S.-American, and British sociology have long been historically entangled, especially in the field of qualitative social research. During my own M.A. studies in Göttingen, I took it for granted that the literature we read was written by US-American, British, and German sociologists. Many of them—such as Adorno, Arendt, Elias, Mannheim, and Schütz—had fled from National Socialism in Germany to English-speaking countries. Only later in my career did I realize that the canonical—and critical—sociologists who had expanded my intellectual horizons during my time in Göttingen actually represented a rather narrow slice of what sociology could—and should—be. After the effort it took to grasp the Anglo-German qualitative research “canon”—which, in fact, was only a very specific and, in a sense, even marginalized canon within Western sociological “grand theories”—I began to learn more about the institutional inequalities and colonial legacies that continue to shape our (academic) world today. It is worth noting that colonialism in general—and Germany’s (post)colonial history in particular—have long been marginalized topics in the German educational system, in cultural institutions, and in public memory.
Auditorium Goettingen, 2020. Copyright: Klein und Neumann, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
This also applies to the local context of Göttingen and its university, where I have been researching and teaching for several years now. The University of Göttingen (“Georg-August-Universität”) is one of the oldest German universities, with a long history of Nobel Prize winners and an international reputation. As history tells it, the university was founded in 1732/1734 by the British King George II—although locally he is mostly remembered as the Elector (“Kurfürst”) of Hanover. In my view, few students—and probably few staff members—are aware of the imperial context and the entanglements with the British crown in the university’s history. I myself learned about this thanks to my colleague and network member Eva Bahl, who explored this connection as part of a research project on Individual and Collective Memories of Slavery and the Slave Trade. Today, the university is internationally well connected and makes great efforts to attract students and scholars from around the world. Nevertheless, Göttingen remains a mid-sized, historically Protestant provincial city in Lower Saxony. As in most German universities, the majority of students come from the immediate region, and BIPOC students are typically underrepresented in classrooms. Within the social sciences, concrete research on Global South societies—beyond ethnology or anthropology—remains scarce. In the methodology and methods courses I teach, M.A. students come from various social science disciplines, including sociology, political science, diversity studies, gender studies, and sports studies.
Let us now turn to the seminar “Qualitative Research in the Context of Global Sociologies,” which I taught during the 2022–2023 winter semester. Addressing the complexity of topics surrounding global qualitative social research—combined with the diversity of the student group—gave me quite a headache. In light of this diversity and complexity, I decided to approach discussions on global sociology and postcolonial perspectives from various “standpoints” within the German-speaking sociological field. This approach required largely dispensing with primary literature, but it allowed for a more systematic examination of the structures and discourses within the German-speaking academic landscape in which my students and I were primarily embedded. In the syllabus, I announced that students would engage with the methodological, epistemological, and social-theoretical foundations of qualitative research on the one hand, and reflect on—or (counter-)read—them in light of current discussions on global sociologies and de- and postcolonial approaches on the other. We asked questions such as: What challenges arise for qualitative social research in the context of complex transregional and global interdependencies and power inequalities? And what contributions have qualitative methodologies made to developing a globally informed and reflexive sociology (for example, through case studies or multi-sited research)? For the 20–25 students enrolled, the topic proved engaging enough to sustain thirteen highly interactive, discussion-based sessions (each lasting 120 minutes) that covered a wide range of readings.
Students’ groupwork on the Interpretive Paradigm: Social action (soziales Handeln) produces the social world (soziale Welt), which is at the same time dependent on and structuring the social order (soziale Ordnung). Photo: Arne Worm, 2022.
We began with an introduction to the so-called Interpretive Paradigm (Keller 2012; Rosenthal 2015), which emphasizes the need to delve into the depths and contradictions of everyday lived realities when developing social theories. The following session adopted a postcolonial perspective (Reuter & Villa, 2010; Castro Varela & Dhawan, 2020) in order to establish a basic understanding of what the term implies and what directions postcolonial theories urge us to consider when conducting research. Next, we examined the concerns and perspectives of global sociology by reading Burawoy’s introduction to Global Ethnography as an entry point into methodological principles. This resonated strongly with a text on the relationship between theory and empirical research in qualitative sociology (Kalthoff, 2008).
Under the heading “Turning South,” we then discussed Julian Go’s “Perspectival Realism and the Southern Standpoint” (2016). Go’s argument that “social positions matter” and are not in contradiction to objectivity struck a chord with many students and seemed to offer pathways out of their unease with the androcentric and Eurocentric traditions that continue to dominate the social sciences. Some students raised complex epistemological and ethical questions—such as “Do we still have any concept of truth?” or “What about universal human rights?” Interestingly, these “big questions” were less important to most participants than the practical challenge of transforming knowledge production and research practice. A (critical) pragmatic approach in the face of structural inequalities appeared more promising than waiting for philosophical absolution. Elísio Macamo’s essay “Before We Start: Science and Power in the Constitution of Africa” (2016) led to reflections on how knowledge systems shape the construction of epistemological and geographical territories—even before we begin doing research.
We then dedicated two sessions to a debate published in the journal Soziologie by the German Sociological Association (DGS). Between 2018 and 2020, various authors discussed the aims and implications of a postcolonial sociology, beginning with an email exchange on “Postcolonialism and Sociology” between Manuela Boatcă, Sina Farzin, and Julian Go (2018). A sharp response by Markus Holzinger (2019) questioned “what is new about the ‘new postcolonialism,’” given that research on colonialism has existed for quite some time. Subsequently, Meinhof (2020) reiterated that “(p)ostcolonial sociology is not a sociology of colonialism, but a programmatic project to explore a new type of sociology—one that includes non-Western social theory and theorizes modernity in a way that de-centers Europe and acknowledges the colonial origins of modern society.” In their response, Matthias Leanza and Axel T. Paul (2021) criticized oversimplifications on both sides of the debate while recognizing “the urgent need for further sociological investigation of the interconnections between colonial rule and global modernity.” Reconstructing this debate—where various authors directly responded to one another—proved extremely useful for gaining insight into the different arguments circulating within the German sociological discourse on what a post- and decolonial sociology might entail. We discussed the differing perspectives with great interest but ultimately concluded that many of the arguments were either too abstract or required more background knowledge. Several students expressed a desire to see how the arguments for or against a post- or decolonial sociology might play out in concrete empirical research.
We then turned our attention to the tradition of biographical research, focusing particularly on contributions that call for a less Eurocentric or more postcolonial approach (Rosenthal, 2012; Lutz, 2009). Because Max Weber’s writings remain a central point of reference for the German qualitative research paradigm—especially his concept of Verstehende Soziologie—we discussed his work through the lens of Manuela Boatcă’s “Postcolonial Critique of Weber’s Theory of Race and Ethnicity” (2018). Gurminder K. Bhambra’s online lecture “Segregated Sociologies of Weber and Du Bois” (Connected Sociologies, 2021) further inspired discussions about the neglect of W.E.B. Du Bois in the sociological canon and how this omission (mis)represents cross-continental and global intellectual legacies. In our final session, we explored Nina Baur’s reflections on “Decolonizing Social Science Methodology: Positionality in the German-Language Debate.”
Overall, there was strong interest in the topics and debates we examined. All of the students reported that they had rarely—if ever—encountered the authors and discussions we engaged with in any of their other courses. Many considered the topics and critiques, particularly the methodological questions, to be highly relevant. Still, it was a learning process with many ups and downs, detours, and perhaps even dead ends. I recall several moments when students remarked that such theoretical interventions might be “useful and important when dealing with postcolonial societies.” “And what—and where—is a postcolonial society?” I would often reply. This prompted them to recognize how easily we fall back into Eurocentric and modernist “common sense” assumptions. The “global,” it turned out, was even more difficult to grasp than the “postcolonial” (capitalism often served as the default explanatory framework). It took time to acknowledge that the global and the postcolonial are not elsewhere—they may, in fact, be right around the corner, entangled with what we do in research and teaching.
References
By Sylvia Esther Gyan, University of Ghana
Background
How can global sociology help us to more adequately conceptualize age, counted in the number of years lived since birth, that has long been viewed as a universal marker of personhood and status? Age is an important construct in medical sociology because it helps us understand health outcomes and behaviours (Barrett & Michael, 2022). When investigating sexual and reproductive health issues, having reasonable knowledge of the age of the target population helps in classifying and identifying the study population (who should be included or excluded), predicting and/or explaining their behaviours. As a researcher, whose target populations are mostly adolescents and women, knowing the age of my study participants is important, especially in studying issues about sexual and reproductive health.
In the general research process, knowing the age of research participants plays an important role in the ethical considerations for researchers. Including people below the age of 18 years in research is governed by strict ethical principles that seek to protect this group of people from any harm. It is therefore considered ethically right to seek the consent of a parent or guardian of study participants below the age of 18 years before seeking their assent to participate in a study. Going by this ethical principle, three actions are important: knowing the age of participants, seeking parental/guardian consent, and seeking the assent of the person below the age of 18 years in the study.
In data analysis, having a sense of the age of study participants informs how data would be described, explained, and interpreted. For instance, adolescents are described as people between the ages of 10-19 and are further categorized into young adolescents (10-14 years) and older adolescents (15-19 years). In the global literature on adolescents, these are the categories that form the basis of most of the discussions on sexual and reproductive health. On the issue of child marriage, the definition is based on the age of one of the parties in the marriage. Hence, knowing the age at first marriage of a participant plays a role in how the data would be interpreted with respect to existing literature.
My Challenge as a Researcher
As a researcher, I have realized that knowing the age of research participants is not always easy While the age of study participants is often measured as a continuous variable in chronological years (Johfre & Saperstein, 2023) this is not easy to pinpoint. In my interactions with my research participants, I have often observed that some did not know their age in years. This was common in communities with low education levels and low delivery of babies in health facilities. This was not peculiar to older women; it included some young women as well. Most of these participants lived in rural communities without the requisite documentation facilities and therefore it was not surprising that they had no record of their date of birth to inform them about their ages.
What steps can researchers take to help these participants arrive at a reasonable estimate of their ages or age range? In this post, I share my experiences on how I navigated the challenge of calculating the ages of my research participants when it was obvious they did not know their ages in years. I discuss this by highlighting the various strategies I adopted to arrive at a reasonable estimate of their ages.
Conducting an in-depth interview and being assisted by an interpreter.
Finding the age of my study participants
During one of my fieldwork visits for a study that sought to investigate child marriage in Ghana, I was confronted with my participants’ lack of precision regarding their age and its implications for my analysis. Knowing the age of the participants in this study was important because the study was interested in two main categories of women; women who married before the age of 18 years and were currently above the age of 18, and women who married before the age of 18 and were still below the age of 18 at the time of the fieldwork. Auntie Yaa, was a respondent who did not know either her current age or the age at which she got married. To have an idea of her age, I asked her to share some stories she was told about her birth by her parents. According to her, she was told that she was born at a time when Ghana was experiencing serious famine. This clue was very helpful to me because, in the history of Ghana, 1983 was the year the country experienced this kind of hardship; thus, I could estimate Auntie Yaa’s year of birth.
To help me know the reasonable age at which Auntie Yaa got married, I asked how long it took her to conceive her first child after she got married. According to her, she conceived immediately after she got married. Armed with this information, I asked for the age of her first child, and with this information, I got to know that she married before the age of 18 therefore per the study’s objective, she was classified as a woman who got married before the age of 18 and was currently above the age of 18.
In some instances, my participants shared their age or showed evidence of their age as indicated on official documents such as voters’ ID cards or their maternity health book. In the case of Ruki, her maternity health book indicated that she was 17 years old, however, my interactions with her suggested that she was about 21 years old. How did I arrive at the age of 21? According to Ruki, she got married at the age of 14 and did not conceive until the fourth year of her marriage. At the time of the interview, she had a 3-year-old daughter and was one month pregnant with her second child. Going by Ruki’s narrative, she should be 21 years, however, on her maternity health book for her second pregnancy, she was 17 years an indication that there were some inconsistencies in how old she was. Based on her narrative, she was classified as a woman who got married before the age of 18 and was currently above the age of 18.
Conducting an in-depth interview and being assisted by an interpreter.
On her part, Afia Atta did not know her age, however, she informed me that she was very young when some historical events took place in the country and recounted the various presidents who came to power and at what stage she was in life for each one of them. For instance, she noted that she gave birth to her first child, during the first coup d’état by Fl. Lt. Rawlings. This suggested that her first child was born in the year 1979. Although Afia Atta had no knowledge of her age, and even that of her children, such clues together with other biographical information gathered from her made it possible to put her in an age category based on the objectives of the research.
Conclusion
What constitutes global sociology has been described in different ways by various scholars. One that stands out for me is the perspective that doing global sociology means doing comparative sociology. Doing comparative sociology may stem from comparing the past and the present or comparing societies and cultures within and across societies and countries. Global sociology offers an opportunity to compare local case studies in different countries (either south-south or north-south) to identify universality and diversity in each social phenomenon. The basis for these comparisons makes a difference in the knowledge that is produced. Global sociology researchers must take into consideration the historical and social context of their study subjects (Akiwowo, 1988; Field & Syrett, 2020).
For instance, due to colonialism and modernity, age is measured chronologically in most societies in the global south and has become the basis of categorization to the neglect of other indigenous ways of categorizing people in terms of age sets or generations (Field & Syrett, 2020). This notwithstanding, we still have societies, where chronological age is not so important and therefore members of the society do not know their chronological age. We must make room for other age categories. Allowing my interlocutors to share their stories to inform or help identify their age set/ generations provides a better understanding of their age given their social context.
In most cases, to get around participants not knowing their age, relying on qualitative measures is very useful. Allowing participants to share their life stories by relating them to specific events in their personal life or in the wider society as well as probing further helped me to have a sense of their age range and not their specific age from their date of birth. Using this strategy reduced possible errors that could have been made because I did not know their ages or even relied solely on what has been documented as seen in Ruki’s narrative. Clearly, the institutional record of her age was not in sync with her narrative, therefore casting doubts about her documented age. This points out a limitation in the reliance on chronological age as the sole indicator of age in most research because, in some social contexts, there may be misrepresentation.
Relying on age categorization or groupings guided by the objective of one’s study could help reduce such misrepresentations. When researching a population or a group that may not know their age either because of low levels of education or poor record keeping, it is important to validate responses by asking probing questions to unearth the truth about their responses.
Finally, I recommend that researchers should be guided by the objectives of their study as well as the social context of their interlocutors to determine whether knowing the chronological age or age categorization of their participants will be the best option for achieving the goals of their research.
Cite this article as: Gyan, S. E. (2024, August 26). How old are you? Uncovering the age of research participants when it is not obvious. Global Qualitative Sociology Network. https://global-qualitative-sociology.net/2024/08/26/how-old-are-you/
References
Akiwowo, A. (1988). Universalism and indigenisation in sociological theory: Introduction. International Sociology, 3(2), 155-160.
Njonga, B. (2016). Je continue… Trente ans de lutte citoyenne. Yaoundé.
Weber, M. (2014). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Angelico Press. (Original work published 1905)
By Hilal Alkan, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient
In political science and international relations literatures, it is common practice to study migration comparatively—putting numbers, legal frameworks, policies, and outcomes in international comparison. Such comparisons teach us about how migration dynamics are affected by state policies and national contexts with a bird’s eye view. Qualitative sociology, anthropology and human geography, on the other hand, follow methods that get closer to experiences of migrants as persons, their daily lives and practices, struggles, strategies, emotions, and how all these relate to places of origin, transit and arrival. This valuably close-up view often does not engage with comparison but goes into the depths of a phenomenon and unravels its inner tensions. In my research with Syrian migrants in Germany, I aimed to bring comparison into ethnographic research by positioning my research participants as the agents and undertakers of the comparative task.
In 2018 and 2019, in Berlin and Leipzig, I conducted life-story interviews with Syrian migrants, who had lived in Turkey before their arrival to Germany. My initial idea was to do a follow-up of my research in Istanbul which focused on informal neighbourhood initiatives that aided Syrians in their settlement in the metropolis (Alkan, 2021b). I wanted to understand how these informal aid groups were perceived and how Syrian migrants managed the power asymmetries that were inherent in the relations that had been formed through these networks. With this purpose I chose people who had lived in Turkey at least for six months, so that they would have found jobs, flats and have had the intention to stay there until at least the circumstances changed in Syria. But my interlocutors were also people who had fled again, going through a second (or third) migration and facing the challenges of building lives from scratch, in another context, within a short period of time. They had a lot to say about what led to this second move and how they were met in Germany.
A line of Syrian refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany. September 2015. Copyright: Wikimedia Commons.
This was the first reason why I did not want to conduct semi-structured interviews that solely focused on the theme of neighbourhood support. Second, in order to test my hypothesis that such informal neighbourly aid had been important in their lives, I had to withhold from providing too much direction and be open to hearing other narratives. So I chose to prompt very little and asked general questions like ‘can you tell me about yourself, how you migrated here and how your life was in Turkey?’ This general prompt gave my research participants freedom to expand on the aspects of their lives as they chose. Some talked a lot about the horrors of the war and the flight. Others dwelled more on economic struggles or changes in family structures. Some were more reserved to talk about their emotional burdens, others less so. But from the first interview on, although I did not ask them anything about Germany, it became clear that they retrospectively perceived their lives in Turkey in comparison to their lives in Germany. Gradually I decided to take up this theme more deliberately and asked them to engage in a comparison towards the end of our conversations.
Their comparisons opened up many other themes than neighbours and neighbourliness—although neighbours (Alkan et al., 2021b), to my relief, still occupied a significant place—like labour conditions (Alkan et al., 2021a), rental market, human smuggling networks (Alkan, 2021a), education and family. When left to articulate contrasts and reflect on them, my interlocutors were very insightful. They carefully chose their words and engaged in a thought exercise about the reasons of differences and similarities. Their talk was peppered with lots of ‘but’s, ‘although’s and ‘however’s, used as qualifiers and precautions against a one-sided perspective. During the interviews I sometimes took this as an indication of their kindness towards me—a Turkish woman who wanted to hear about their experiences in Turkey—as they sometimes apologized for what they were about to tell. But later when I listened to the interviews over and over again, I figured one more reason, and maybe a more important one, for their meticulousness. As agents of their own lives, they paid attention to how they would narrate these lives and how they would analyze the conditions that shaped their choices.
The nuanced descriptions and several clauses notwithstanding, social life and future-making were the areas which were presented with greatest contrast between the countries. In Turkey, most of my research participants were surrounded by families, extended kin, friends and neighbours. Turkey’s initial open-door policy allowed Syrians to flee in larger constellations of kin and village/neighborhood networks, and because encampment was not preferred as a state policy, these large networks resettled in closer proximity to each other. The presence of familiar people, as well as the cultural affinity and shared religion with the Turkish and Kurdish residents of the cities they settled partially remedied the pains of exile for my all-Muslim interlocutors. Moreover, many had felt welcome by their neighbours and co-workers (yet hostility and indifference were not excluded either) (Alkan, 2020), and easily established friendships. All three elements of social life—family, Syrian social networks and meaningful, close connections with the locals—were missing in Germany. Their new neighbours occasionally said ‘guten Tag’ and gave a nod when they met in the staircase, and they had very few relatives and family members in Germany, let alone in Berlin or Leipzig.
In Germany, on the other hand, they were more hopeful about their futures. A meaningful and aspirable future was not even imaginable in Turkey. Their time was sucked away by exploitative, back-breaking work in the informal sector, and they did not have many chances to further their education or get their qualifications accredited. Germany promised them time—although it was incessantly interrupted by bureaucratic hassles—and a legal status which would lead to naturalisation after some years. Both made imagining a future possible, even though none of these were immediately accessible. However, on the flip-side they suffered from delayed normalisation of their lives, as they were not allowed to work until they fulfilled several requirements.
A worker at a textile workshop in Gaziantep. 2021. Copyright: Wikimedia Commons.
A global sociology does not have to be comparative. Yet comparison can be a good exercise, when the benchmarks are chosen carefully. Most often what we see in comparisons is an effort to situate non-western contexts on a scale that puts Western norms as the standard. Then differences become deviations from the norm. Yet, whatever we understand as the international (read as European) standards, they are actually highly dynamic and contingent, especially in the realm of migration management. What is considered an absolute right one day, can be easily shelved the next day. Or different standards apply to different migrants, as we have clearly seen with the welcome treatment of the Ukrainian refugees in the EU while there is tremendous effort about increasing border security to stop the migrants coming from African countries, where wars are being waged simultaneously. Such Eurocentric benchmarking also leads to overseeing the politics and policies around migration that do not immediately fall in step with the ‘international’ standards. These can be informal, ad-hoc solutions, rather than well-laid-out and formalized regulations but have tremendous effects on migrant lives whether positive or negative.
We should find ways to look into the specifics of any migration context without immediately subscribing to the norms set by the robust migration control and management regimes in Western Europe. In this line of work, Kelsey Norman identifies ‘indifference-as-policy’, (Norman, 2019) and Wendy Pearlman points to ‘selectiveness,’ (Pearlman, 2020) as defining features of the migration regime of Turkey. Both of these features have formative effects on how migrants establish and fit into the rhythms of daily life, how they experience the current course of their lives, how they relate to their past, and what they aspire for their future. Indifference, as Norman poignantly illustrates, does not mean inaction. Turkey has had several implicit and explicit policies regarding migration. However, these policies (and non-policies) are much less interventionist than their counterparts in Western Europe (and particularly Germany, in this case).
Listening to migrants’ own open-ended comparisons allow detecting these policies in a holistic manner. Because in their narratives they bring together work conditions with intimate family affairs, bureaucratic mile-stones with the soundscapes of cities and give us a more nuanced and thicker understanding of migration contexts. Such comparisons are what a Global Sociology could offer.
Cite this article as: Alkan, H. (2024, February 4). When migrants compare: De-centring Europe in migration management. Global Qualitative Sociology Network. https://global-qualitative-sociology.net/2024/02/04/when-migrants-compare/
References
By Gabriele Rosenthal, University of Göttingen
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
Graffities in the Moroccan city of Tangiers.
Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Artur Bogner.
Possible challenges connected with conducting interviews in the Global South
Regardless of the specific research question, I ask the person I am interviewing to tell me their whole life story and the history of their family. This applies regardless of whether I am interested in Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank and the figurations or relationships between them, or former child soldiers in northern Uganda and the processes of their reintegration into civilian society after returning from the Lord’s Resistance Army. This interview method is always accompanied by other methods, such as thematically focussed narrative interviews with so-called experts (such as members of NGOs, humanitarian organizations, the army or the local administration).
Now, we could ask, as some authors have done, whether requesting people to tell their own life story is a suitable method for interviews in the Global South, or whether we need to conduct them in a different way. The answer to this question has a lot to do with our expectations with regard to a biographical we- and self-presentation: whether we are prepared to accept the way the person responds to a request to tell his or her life story, or whether we only accept a response that corresponds to our own fixed idea of a biographical narration.
Whether it works straight away or not, whether it takes four hours or just a couple of minutes to get an answer, whether the answer is a long chain of arguments or a stream of narration: the manner in which the interviewee responds to my request to tell me the story of their life gives me first important clues to the nature of the setting or the grouping I am interested in. Thus it is not surprising that former child soldiers who have returned from the LRA usually begin with a detailed account of how they were abducted, and that they speak about their life before this event only after being asked about it in the second part of the interview; or that from a detailed account of their abduction and the first days with the rebels, in which they were forced to learn extremely cruel methods of killing, they jump to the time of their escape from the LRA, even though a period of maybe sixteen years lay between these two events.
This detailed narration, with hypermnesic memories of certain very bad experiences at the beginning of a phase of extreme traumatization, can be explained by the brutal invasion of this event into the everyday life of these young people, an event which ruptured their “earlier life line,” disturbed or damaged earlier self-images, and led to dramatic differences between their life before it happened and their life after it happened. We believe that these narrations also have the function of demonstrating that they were powerless in this situation and were abducted against their will. In such cases, the question is not whether it is a good interview or not. The important point is how this typical and frequently observed structure of the biographical self-presentations of ex-rebels can be explained. Useful in this respect is what we learn in the external questioning part of the interview, or in further interviews with the same person, about certain phases of their life, and how these are talked about, or whether there are phases about which the person consistently says nothing. In our interviews with ex-rebels in Uganda, we succeeded in eliciting biographical narrations concerning periods which they did not describe in detail or which they skipped in the first part of the interview, the so-called self-structured presentation.
Another example of a phenomenon that needs explaining is the fact that in most of the interviews that my co-workers and myself conducted in Palestine, more precisely in the West Bank, it was difficult to motivate our interviewees to tell us their life story. Rather, their primary concern was to present the argument that “we Palestinians have no internal conflicts, we only have conflicts with the (Jewish) Israelis” (Rosenthal, 2016). At first we thought that this was due to the presence of German researchers, but then we found that the interviews conducted by our Palestinian co-workers displayed the same phenomenon. Palestinians are anxious to resist any attempt—or Israeli policy—to divide them into different categories or “minorities,” which would make them even more powerless against the stronger conflict party of the Jewish Israelis. In their meetings with members of our team, they fought against these (more or less intentional) attempts to split them up by repeatedly insisting that they are a united, peaceful community or we-group, in which no one suffers discrimination because of their religion, their status as a refugee or a long-time resident, or their legal status. In the course of this research, there were nevertheless some interviews in which the interviewees spoke very openly about the conflicts within the Palestinian community. For them the interviews represented an opportunity to talk about their personal problems, or the way their we-group (or the grouping to which they are regarded as belonging) is discriminated against. Most of the interviewees who spoke openly about their experiences of discrimination could be regarded as outsiders in Palestinian society, such as members of binational families or people in a binational marriage relationship, people who have lived abroad for many years, or men who are defined as homosexual (Worm & Hinrichsen, 2016). Because of this empirical finding, the research team actively sought such outsiders as interviewees.
We usually hold more than one interview with each individual, usually combined with participant observations, inclusion of other people who are present during the interviews, and in some cases a transition to family interviews or group discussions with people who have been present from the beginning, or who have joined us at some stage during the interviews. Whether in the refugee camps in the West Bank, or in family compounds in northern Uganda, my experience shows that one must expect other family members or neighbours to come and show interest in the interview. A contrastive comparison, for instance of an interview in a hotel at which, besides myself and the interviewee, only a field assistant or interpreter was present, and one conducted with the same person in the presence of “the family” in their compound, would give us insights into dominant discourses, in other words the rules concerning what can or cannot be said by whom and in what context. The challenges involved in eliciting biographical narrations, conducting multiple interviews, and combining the findings from the interviews with data collected during observations or group discussions, are the same as those with which we are confronted when conducting biographical interviews with certain groupings in western Europe.
In general, I do not see these challenges as being connected with the method of narrative interviews. Rather, especially when beginning field research in unfamiliar cultures, we-groups, milieus or geographical regions, I have to cope with certain irritations or misunderstandings due to my ignorance of the local customs and discourses, or I hesitate to ask certain questions because I fear that people might be offended or embarrassed. And yet these irritations can be an advantage! In the literature on methods we find the suggestion that we should put ourselves in the position of a stranger when studying our own society or social milieu. This happens without any effort when starting with research in an unfamiliar milieu. And so it is a big advantage that we scholars from the Global North find ourselves increasingly confronted with the discovery of phenomena that do not easily fit into our categories (and vice versa, researchers from the Global South have this advantage when doing research in the Global North). This applies, for example, to our understanding of family structures, national borders, boundaries of groups, or concepts of state and “nation.”
In general it can be said that we should:
a) avoid subsuming phenomena too quickly under familiar categories
b) always have doubts that we understand what we hear or observe
c) never be afraid to ask questions in interviews.
Sometimes our ignorance of the regional or local context can lead us to think that certain phenomena are individual or special features of that region, when in fact they are far more widespread. For example, when I started working in Uganda, I had no idea how strong the belief in good and bad spirits is in many regions of Uganda, and of Africa in general. I gradually learned how widespread it is, that it does not depend on the interviewee’s educational background, and, very important, I had to learn what functions it can have. For example, family members of ex-rebels sometimes claim the returnees are possessed by bad spirits and give this as the reason why they have refused to allow them to return to the family compound—although the real reason is that the family does not want to recognize their rights to land or their right to participate in local decision-making processes. We also need to be aware that we- and self-presentations may be influenced by Western discourses, with the result, for example, that many do not mention bad spirits. So we need to be aware that interviewees may not mention certain things because they know that the interviewer is a European, and we need to be prepared to ask questions about these things just as naturally as about any other topic.
Even if some of the returnees believe that their mental problems are caused by bad spirits, for us they are clearly consequences of extreme traumatization such as we can also observe in the Global North. Extreme traumatization results from spending a long period exposed to constant death threats and not knowing whether or when this might come to an end. The consequences of this are not fundamentally different among different groupings of people; they are only interpreted differently. Whether they are traumatized by violence, or suffer from circumstances that are prescribed by inherited rules or accustomed discourses, they experience feelings of sadness and hopelessness, although they have been taught not to express these feelings, or they talk about them in a way that is different from what we researchers would expect. In other words, we should not assume that people from other parts of the world function according to completely different psychological mechanisms.
Significantly, I could have discussed the same challenges had I been asked to give a talk on interpretative research in Germany.
References
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine Transaction.
Peirce, C. S. (1985). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (C. Hartshorne, Ed.; 5.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rosenthal, G. (Ed.). (forthcoming). Transnational biographies: Changing we-images, belongings and power balances of migrants and refugees. Göttingen University Press.
Rosenthal, G., & Bogner, A. (2017). Biographies – discourses – figurations: Methodological considerations from the perspectives of social constructivism and figurational sociology. In G. Rosenthal & A. Bogner (Eds.), Biographies in the global South: Life stories embedded in figurations and discourses. Campus Verlag.