Contemporary qualitative and quantitative research are questioned by the post-colonial turn and those epistemologies which are alternative to the Western thinking models or, at least, do not entirely fit with them. The challenges directly concern the tacit cultural foundations of traditional research methods, which still embodies (in its methods) an ethnocentric, and sometimes colonial, attitude. Most of the current research methods originated in Europe, and later received an Anglophone transformation, whose footprint became dominant during the twentieth century. Hence, contemporary worldwide methodology is almost entirely constituted by research methods recrafted by an Anglophone middle-class academic culture. After the World War II, this particular (Anglophone) local/indigenous methodological culture was then globalized, becoming dominant in almost all forms of inquiry around the world. However, when exported and applied in marginal Western cultures (to which poorly educated people, lower classes, cultural peripheral communities belong), among migrants and Afro-American communities, and obviously in non-Western research contexts. these Western (in general) and Anglo-phone (in particular) research methods run into several cultural difficulties. For this reason, a growing need to find postcolonial methodologies and non-ethnocentric methods, and to transform the current research methods in more culturally flexible tools, 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.
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