If you do not have root privilege and want to install a python module, you can try the following approach:
python setup.py install --user
This will install packages into subdirectories of site.USER_BASE. To check what is the value of site.USER_BASE, use:
import site print site.USER_BASE
reference: https://docs.python.org/2/install/
Update 2018/01/06:
using pip to install a python package:
pip install --user package_name