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In this short commentary, I comment on the state and popularity of mixed methods in social sciences in recent decades. While quantitative and qualitative methods are considered complementary, I question the use of mixed methods by scholars without deeper reflections on the epistemological and methodological foundations of these two methods. My contention is that researchers cannot simply combine qualitative and quantitative methods without explicating how they reconcile and negotiate their different foundations. These two methods are not just tools. The act of mixing them without reflections is simply not sufficient. Reconciling and reflecting upon the foundational differences between these two methods would be an essential step.

The construction of foreign domestics as 'Others' has been a critical process to the globalization of domestic service. While the globalization of domestic service has been associated with a transnational female labour force, the transnational labour system has always been reconstituted as a new labour regime consistent with local particularity. In this article, I examine how Taiwanese employers discursively construct the otherness of their Filipino domestics. I argue that Taiwanese employers construct and naturalize the otherness of foreign domestics utilizing national identities, racial characteristics, and nationally based class difference. These differences, integral to the racialization of foreign domestics, are central not only to the persistence of their servitude at home but also to their social and political marginalization in the host society as a whole. The localization of a transnational labour force necessitates the examination of the contextual politics of difference. Rather than speaking of the universalized experience of foreign domestics, the contextual politics of difference provides a comparative framework for understanding not only the relational but also the contextual nature of identity construction. It demonstrates how difference is localized in the transnational system of care and how the localization of difference serves to reproduce social and global inequality.