Researchers using this hypothesis become very careful about making generalizations from what they discover in a single context. They do not assume that a conclusion based on the behaviour of particular people in a particular location at a particular time can necessarily be applied to the same behaviour by another population in another location at another time. They try to have as many different research sites and different ways of collecting data as possible. They are committed to looking for multiple realities, causes, and truths.

Patricia Hill Collins (1990), a feminist philosopher, has written very strongly about researchers' need to be clear about what they can discover in each location they study. If, for example, researchers are white men who have completed a research study involving other white men, they cannot claim to have learned anything about Black women. Similarly, researchers who are white women working with First Nations women cannot claim that they speak for everyone. It is a form of colonization, of imperialism, to make generalizations from our own interpretation or from information we gain from a particular situation. Rather than accepting the traditional view that research is reliable and credible Only when such generalizations can be made, Collins suggests that claims of universality should result in a loss of credibility.

The mainstream qualitative research that emerged from grounded theory and the naturalistic approach closed the distance between researchers and research subjects. Researchers began to value the perspective of subjects, or participants, inviting them to join in the collection of data. The process became more interactive and, rather than using traditional theories to analyze the subjects' experiences, the research documentation most often remained descriptive. (Marshall & Rossman, 1989, p. 11) Researchers distanced themselves from their own theoretical and experiential backgrounds, refusing to put any kind of framework around the descriptions they developed using the subjects' words as data.

Within the last ten years there have been significant developments in qualitative work, extending the research beyond description to analysis, action, and change. Ethnographic and alternate paradigm research have given researchers tools to increase the involvement both of themselves and of their subjects. They work collectively not only to collect data, but also to plan, implement, analyze, and document the project.