Rethinking Qualitative Rigor in Applied Linguistics: Trustworthiness Frameworks, Phenomenological Inquiry, and the Epistemological Demands of Emerging Methodologies

Abstract

Qualitative applied linguistics leans on two supports above all: Lincoln and Guba’s [37] trustworthiness framework and the phenomenological tradition. Humanist and Western epistemological premises are built into both. Neither can be dispensed with; neither, this article argues, can be left as it stands. Three pressures give that argument its urgency. Posthumanist and decolonial work has unsettled the humanist subject on which both traditions rest. The methodological landscape has meanwhile widened to take in digital ethnography, translanguaging research and AI-assisted analysis. And Global South research contexts, as a growing body of scholarship insists, generate epistemic demands that canonical frameworks do not adequately address. The argument proceeds from a critical synthesis of applied linguistics methodology literature spanning 1985–2026, with scholarship from Bangladesh and the wider Global South kept in the foreground, and it makes a threefold case. Trustworthiness criteria are better understood as epistemological commitments than as procedural checklists. Phenomenology’s contribution is substantial but philosophically bounded by its anthropocentric and Western subjectivist foundations. And the tensions that emerging frameworks generate are sites of epistemological innovation rather than symptoms of theoretical incoherence. Three principles follow: epistemological transparency, contextual reflexivity, and productive tension management. Together they describe a pluralist conception of rigor: decolonially attuned, grounded in reflexivity, and suited to the epistemological diversity of twenty-first century applied linguistics.