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Running head: FEMINIST DILEMMAS
Book Review: Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research
Sharon Stopforth
SOWK 747–Fall 2010
Faculty of Social Work
University of Calgary
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The following book, Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research (Ribbens & Edwards,
1998) takes a look at how theory, ways of knowing about the world, methodology, and practice
interact when conducting qualitative research. In particular, the book takes a look at private and
personal lived experience in qualitative research within the aforementioned context while trying
to retain research participants’ voices in the production of research. The book is a compilation of
research conducted by women and the process of how they have proceeded in academic research
in which they recognize that they are located in a predominantly male sphere. As feminist
researchers, they highlight issues involved in conducting research on ‘women’s matters’ or
research on what is characterized as female concerns and how they have personally found
themselves placed at the edges between public knowledge and private lived experiences.
What I found fascinating about the book was that the authors express how they
alternately shifted between the position of participant and observer/listener, constantly reflecting
on how they came to know things and how to view the knowledge they produced. It was in
looking at aspects of private and personal lived experience that so clearly drew these issues out
and presented the researchers with dilemmas and challenges. I was impressed that listening
closely to accounts of ‘mundane’ everyday domestic activities in detail and sharing with
interviewees on a personal level, the authors attempted to avoid reshaping and drowning out
women’s voices and experiences.
An Explanation of Terms
Before beginning, a clarification of some of the terms used in the book may be valuable
to the reader. The public and private spheres are complex and ambiguous concepts which cannot
be understood simply by referencing the physical locations of home, neighbourhood, workplace,
or government, nor can they simply be mapped straight onto gender identities-although they have
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strong gendered implications. The authors suggest that these terms amount to different ‘ways of
being’ in the world. These different ways of being carry gendered implications for a range of
issues in people’s lives, including orientation to time, understanding of the self, language use,
and ways of relating to others. The authors suggest that these differences can be summarized as
“a contrast in concerns between individualized achievement of goals (characteristic of the public)
and the concrete details of ongoing processes and connectedness with people (characteristic of
the private).” (p. 9). The authors argue that public and private ways of being take a gendered
form because women, especially mothers, have a particular social (not biological) positioning
within the private sphere of the home and family life. Women are not always, but frequently
involved in doing housework, in caring for children and the elderly in both public and private
spheres and that this is both an oppressed position and a strength.
Another set of terms that need to be explained are public and private knowledges. Public
knowledges can be characterized as involving objective, abstract, detached, rational, institutional
epistemologies which are separated off from, and regarded as superior to private knowledges.
Private knowledges can be characterized as involving grounded, subjective, involved, emotional,
detailed, daily or everyday forms of knowledge. Apthekar (1989) states this nicely as:
“By the dailiness of women’s lives I mean the patterns women create and the meanings
women invest each day over time and in the context of their subordinated status to men...The
point is to suggest a way of knowing from the meaning women give to their labors. The search
for dailiness is a method of work that allows us to take the patterns women create and the
meanings women invent and learn from them…dailiness is a process rather than a conclusion; it
structures thought.” (p. 43-44).
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Finally, the term discourse needs some explanation. Discourse is a set of common
assumptions that may be so taken for granted as to be invisible or assumed. Discursive
frameworks enable or constrain the production of knowledge in that they allow for certain ways
of thinking about reality while excluding others (Cheek, 2004). In this way, they determine who
can speak, when, and with what authority and who cannot. Not all discourses are afforded equal
presence. At any time, certain discourses will operate so as to marginalize or exclude others.
Discourses represent political interests and are constantly vying for status or power (Weedon,
1987). Foucault has argued that a society’s power holders fashion and own the dominant
discourses of the day (Foucault, 1980).
Book Review
Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research is divided into three parts. Part I is called:
“Introducing Our Voices”. In this section, Ribbens discusses and explores some of her own
personal experience and thoughts on ‘voice’. She considers some of her difficulties in hearing
her ‘feeling voice’ around mothering her youngest child, given the potency of other voices
within both the public and private domains to which she acknowledges as also having become a
part of her own personal voice. The author asks how we as researchers can facilitate the
expression of the ‘muted’ personal voice.
Part II of the book is called: “Speaking and Listening: Reflecting Multilayered Voices”.
This part of the book focuses on ‘hearing’ research participants’ voices and concerns itself with
issues of access to research participants and data gathering. This section of the book begins with
a chapter by Mauthner focused on the data collection stage of the research process. She explores
the dilemmas raised when making public the private lived cultures of relationships between
sisters, when little in the way of a public or private discourse exists upon which to draw. She
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describes the advantages and disadvantages of language she used while interacting with her
research participants in order to create new public knowledge on this subject. The language she
drew upon from other studies included the language already in use to describe female
relationships and transitions in relationships.
Miller, in the following chapter, documents how she sought to create a space in which
women felt able to voice their personal narratives about becoming mothers. She discusses a
number of research dilemmas raised in accessing, gathering and listening to women’s accounts
over time, during the period of uncertain transition from pregnancy to motherhood. She
discusses how gatekeepers can influence this period of transition for soon-to-be mothers and
hinder whether or not women feel able to voice their personal feelings and experiences. Next,
Bell reveals how she came to realize that the method of gathering data through solicited diaries
may be emphasizing public understandings rather than personal voices. In the areas of family
and household research, she argues that representations of time and activity observed in diaries
need to account for private as well as publicly acknowledged meanings. Bell considers her own
field diary in order to shed further light on these issues. Finally, Parr discusses the way in which
her framework for research into the experiences of mature women students changed from a
positivist to a grounded theory approach, allowing her research participants, as well as her own,
voices to be heard. She reveals the tensions created between acknowledging a pre-existing body
of theoretical knowledge and being guided by research participants’ own voices.
Part III of the book is called: “Hearing and Representing: Reflecting the Private in
Public”. This section of the book focuses on ‘representing’ research participants’ voices through
data analysis and write up. It examines how we re/construct voices within research accounts,
especially in how we make sense of, understand, analyze, select and re/present narratives or
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accounts as part of the research process. In the first chapter, Song discusses the dilemmas and
insights she made from comparing and interpreting two siblings’ interviews, and issues around
multiple perceptions in social research. Issues that emerged included addressing the questions
about the relative credibility and truth of siblings’ accounts and questions about reflexivity and
the construction of knowledge. Mauthner and Doucet write a chapter which pays attention to
issues in the data analysis stage, tracing the ways in which they adapted the voice-centered
relational method of data analysis in their research project and the insights that arose out of their
processes of reflecting on the method. On the one hand, they sought in their research to
transform private concerns into public debates and to voice what might otherwise remain
invisible and/or devalued issues to domestic life. On the other hand, private accounts were
changed by and permeated with their identities as researchers, and became different stories to
those originally told by the respondents.
In another chapter, Aldred invites us to challenge the epistemological merits of
ethnographic research and some of its unintended reification of researchers’ power. She looks at
how recent discourse analytic research with children presents itself in terms of the authority to
interpret young peoples’ experiences. In the next chapter, Birch documents decision-making
processes in her study as a research journey, from ‘going there’ to ‘being here’ in the final
analysis of the research story. It is the reconstruction of the research narratives that informs the
author of her sociological identity, just as the self-discovery stories informed the participants.
Finally, in the last chapter, Standing examines issues that arise in the final write up of research,
raising questions about how we write and who we write for. She explores the differences and
power relations between feminist academic language and everyday voices of groups of less
powerful women. The dilemma she addresses is how we represent the voices of low-income
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lone mothers in our research in a way which is faithful to their experiences and language, but
does not position them as ‘other’ and reproduce hierarchies of power.
In reviewing the book, it was refreshing to see so much transparency and reflexivity from
the authors. The book illuminated many of the challenges that qualitative researchers need to
keep in mind when engaging in every stage of the research process. You get a real sense that the
authors took great care in bringing forth the subjugated knowledges of their participants. It was
easy to see how the line between the researcher and the participant becomes blurred when
undertaking the task of exploring the private sphere and personal voices. You could witness how
the lives of the authors became transformed in profound ways as a result of conducting the
research and being engaged with the participants and the research process.
At the beginning of the book, the editors discuss an entire section on how the book came
together and the personal journeys that brought all of the authors together. It is refreshing to see
the authors admit to uncertainty and doubt, twists and turns, and their own inner insecurities in
their personal lives. In Narayan’s (1989) terms,
We have had to learn how to belong to, and operate within, two different contexts at the
same time, retaining our concerns with private ways of being while also making our
voices heard within public ways of being. While this may bring some epistemic
advantage, it can also be uncomfortable…leading to a sense of totally lacking any roots
or any space where one is at home in a relaxed manner. (p. 266).
In the Epilogue, the editors leave us with a final provoking question for qualitative
researchers to consider: how do we know when we have ‘sold out’? In their response,
discomfort and the feeling of living on the edges is something to be valued in itself, as
reassurance that we retain our critical perspective. The editors claim there are no easy solutions
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to the dilemmas outlined in the book and the only suggestion they offer is that we need to
recognize ambiguity, to be open about the dilemmas we face and the choices we make, and to
think through the implications of these choices for the knowledge we produce.
Introducing My Voice
In honouring of the authors and their self-disclosure, this book review would be
incomplete without mentioning my own background and reasons for choosing this book for
review. As a woman, I am drawn to what resonates for me and my own personal experiences
and views of the world. I consider myself a feminist and proudly claim this stance. Hearing
women’s stories, struggles, and triumphs empowers me in my own life living in a world still
insidiously run by a patriarchal system. As women come together to share their life experiences
and have their stories told, research can be a powerful medium to bring forth change, especially
when those who advocate for women are women themselves. As I consider my research topic
and how I might go about conducting the research, I see that I need to stay true to myself. After
reading Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research, I feel permission to do just this and honour
myself and my process.
In deciding what book to select for a book review, I was disappointed that I could not
find a book on qualitative research, feminism, and the body. Also, within the current book under
review, there were no studies included that incorporated some aspect of the female body. The
editors discuss in the Introduction, that in working with the public and the private, the
importance of recognizing the dimension of the ‘personal’. They define the personal dimension
as:
a way of drawing attention to experiences that are constituted around a sense of self or
identity, to do with emotions, intimacy, or the body. We are not suggesting that the
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personal is not social, but that it concerns the social as ontologically experienced by the
individual; that is, in relation to a person’s own sense of being or existence. (Ribbens &
Edwards, 1998, p. 14).
Is embodiment, then, not an essential component of this dimension? As a body-centered
psychotherapist, this is my challenge: to bring forward the body as an integral piece in exploring
women’s ways of knowing and our ability to resist oppression. In omitting the body from
research, are we not continuing to perpetuate the mind/body, male/female, nature/civilization
dualisms on which the key to oppression rests? As Mauthner discusses in her chapter to bring
silent voices into a public discourse, the body is just this voice. However, as the profession of
social work and the social sciences evolve and qualitative research approaches become more
respected and commonplace, feminist researchers will naturally begin to incorporate the body as
having a voice from which to speak. Feminist researchers are already positioned to bridge this
gap as they have already been deeply concerned with the body and the connection to women’s
subordination. According to Grosz (1994), feminist philosophy needs to seek an “embodied
subjectivity…a notion of corporeality which avoids not only dualism but also the very
problematic of dualism that makes alternatives to it and criticisms of it possible.” (p. 22). As I
finish writing this statement and conclude this book review, my body takes one big full breath
from the diaphragm, my centre of power, and resonates with this truth.
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References
Apthekar, B. (1989). Tapestries of life: Women’s work, women’s consciousness and the meaning
of daily experience. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Cheek, J. (2004). At the margins? Discourse analysis and qualitative research. Qualitative Health
Research, 14, 1140-1150.
Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality. New York: Vintage Books.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Narayan, U. (1989). The project of feminist epistemology: Perspectives from nonwestern
feminists. In A. M. Jagger & S. R. Bordo (Eds.). Gender, body, knowledge: Feminist
reconstructions of being and knowing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ribbens, J., & Edwards, R. (1998). Feminist dilemmas in qualitative research. London: Sage.
Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and post structuralist theory. London: Basil Blackwell.