The African Context, Cultural Competence and Emic Aspects of Qualitative Research

The context of African and Eastern emerging markets often requires research methods to be adapted for culture and less sophisticated levels of human development. Recently there have been calls from scholars to increase African contributions to knowledge creation by being open to an interpretivist approach. This conceptual paper responds to the appeals by describing ways in which researchers may supplement existing knowledge by repositioning their worldviews from an outsider (etic perspective) perspective to that of an insider (emic perspective), taking on a range of culturally-relevant skills and attitudes. Being explicit about the contextual assumptions and boundary conditions of a study facilitates a shift from acontextual generalizable research to rich and detailed explications grounded purely in the gathered data; such an approach enables the emergence of new theories which may later be tested empirically.