Journal of Social Development in Africa (1994),9.1.59-71 Culture and the Indigenisation of Quality in Third World Social Research

Itmay appear little more than commonplace to assert the central significance of the cultural and epistemological contexts of societies in shaping the contoW'S and even the very existence of social research within those societies. It is argued in this article, however, that the force of this reality is too frequently ignored or deflected by those who attempt to fashion and institutionalise culturally pertinent social research strategies and programmes in the Third World. In this paper we attempt a broad brush illustration of this argument through a discussion of social research in the Arab world. We sketch aspects of both Western research and Arab society which accentuate for us the inevitable problematics of social research in the Arab world. Grounded on the assumption that social research in these societies can ignore the impacts of neither Western paradigms nor the scholarly and social implications of a contemporary Muslim worldview, we offer tentative suggestions for ways in which culturally appropriate, yet socially chal-lenging research can become indigenous within the Arab world. While the application of our specific argument is limited at best to the Arab societies of the Middle East, parallel tasks need to be undertaken elsewhere in Africa and the developing world. Indeed, indigenisation is everyone's task. Western Export Models of Social Research Impressionistic, ad hoc evidence strongly suggests that Arab research- not to mention social research elsewhere in the developing world- is marked by a heavy reliance on quantitative methods, and in particular, survey models. We find the implications of this both unsettling and paradoxical. Unsettling, because in terms of the potential for significant sociological analysis and under-standing of analytic and policy issues, surveys offer at best a partial and limited tool. Paradoxical, because, on the one hand, survey research demands resources relating to population information, language and data analysis that are frequentl