Migrating Diseases: Triangulating Approaches - Applying Qualitative Inquiry as a Global Endeavor

Abstract

Understanding qualitative inquiry as a global endeavor and using it in a globalizing context leads to several challenges. Differences in concepts of what qualitative research is may become visible. Methods like interviews may have a different connotation in other cultures, where our interviewees come from. We may have to conduct and analyze interviews differently. These challenges are discussed here on the background of an ongoing project focused on migrants from former Soviet Union states living in Germany with drugs and alcohol addiction problems. For understanding how the help-seeking processes in this context work and what makes them more complicated, episodic interviews with the clients were conducted in German or Russian and triangulated with expert interviews with service providers.