Feminist Epistemologies in Action
Seminar 7
Working with Participants: Some Practical and Ethical Issues
Introduction
Working with informants includes:
producing data through some kind of long or short term relationship with participants
the use one makes of the participants’ accounts or stories in research
1.
Judith Stacey - ‘Can there be a feminist ethnography?’
Looks back to Ann Oakley’s ‘Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms’ (in H. Roberts
(ed.) Doing Feminist Research, 1981).
Oakley assumed feminists would and could use different research methods from men
Ethnographic methods were preferred.
For Oakley this would be more egalitarian research.
Stacey argues that feminism and research goals are not so easily reconciled, that feminist
ethics and ethnography are not so compatible.
For Stacey, the appearance of greater respect for and equality with subjects is actually risking
a deeper more dangerous exploitation.
Problem 1.
Apparent friendship involves risk of manipulation - the loves and lives and
tragedies of the researched are grist for the ethnographic mill.
Problem 2.
The research product is ultimately that of the researcher.
Acknowledging unequal reciprocity with participants is not the same as
ameliorating it.
Stacey concludes that there can nonetheless be partially feminist ethnographies, and that they
are worth the moral cost.
2.
Jackie Stacey’s research: Star Gazing
Located in cultural studies and uses literary ie. textual analysis to look at at respondents’
accounts of going to see film in the 1930s and 1940s.
Her methodology aims to show the centrality of the research process to the research
conclusions.
What is the status of the women’s accounts? Jackie argues that they are never a
straightforward retrieval of facts.
Accounts are always produced in a context so the method used partly determines the
knowledge produced
Ultimate research method: Recruiting women informants using women’s magazines.
Dialogues
- between her methods and other methods
- between herself and her informants
- between her study and critics or potential critics.
Transparency about the messiness of the research process may be incompatible with the
requirement to establish the legitimacy of the research. It all depends on who the audience of
the research is going to be.
Carol Wolkowitz and Annie Phizacklea (Homeworking Women) present their methodology as
seamless for strategic purposes, knowing their audience
Dialogics - processes of textual exchange
Every text is produced with an imaginary reader in mind
Jackie’s research method was produced with an imaginary respondent in mind
The distinction between recording and interpreting narratives
Researchers have a responsibility to interpet
Jackie argues that her female participants show a homoerotic interest in the female
stars, even though they deny it
3.
Donna Luff: ‘Dialogue Across the Divides’
Luff raises the issue of research that cuts across hierarchies of power in such a way that it
might described as ‘research up’. Doesn’t the researched have the power here?
The potential for friendship between researcher and participant may be specific to their
relative statuses, and sharing a gender identity may not in itself be enough.
Rapport may be momentary and deeply uncomfortable
How could the tension between her responsibilities to her informants and her feminist project
of challenging and critiquing their anti-feminist politics be managed?
4.
Deborah Lee: ‘Interviewing Men: Vulnerabilities and Dilemmas’
Lee’s research was on men’s and women’s experiences of workplace bullying, sexism and
sexual harassment in the contemporary UK.
Lee defines her research as ‘sensitive’ – potentially a threat to those involved. Confidentiality
was assured to the informants, addressing the risks they faced, but what about potential risks
for the researcher?
-
topic involves ‘sex’;
-
the men were strangers
-
other women researchers have recounted frightening experiences when
interviewing men
Lee decided all the interviews would be in public (in fact 9/21 were in private)
Strategies:
Lee wore plain clothing
Carried personal alarm
Maintained serious demeanor (what about jokes made by participant?)
Public interviews still held risks/tensions points:
recognizing informant
Inappropriate contact
But many informants were very gender
sensitive
Dilemmas:
the trade-off between the participant choosing the venue and interviewer safety
The trade-off between generating rapport and withholding personal
information
5. Revisiting Questions of Interpretation in Feminist Research
Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson (1997) reflect on their experience of women informants
who ‘say things not easily incorporated into our own (radical feminist) theories’ (p. 567).
CK experienced women who think sexual harassment is no big deal
SW women who blame themselves for breast cancer and are ashamed of their mastectomy
‘What, as feminist researchers, are we to do about this? What does it mean to “validate” the
experience of a woman who says she’s never been sexually harassed? What does it mean to
“validate” the experience of a woman who says she believes she has breast cancer because
she chose not to breast feed her child, that her breast cancer is a punishment for past sins, and
that her post-mastectomy body is mutilated, deformed and ugly?’
5 potential strategies can be identified, all of them problematic in some way:
1.
Omit the narratives from the report.
2.
Attribute the narratives to ‘false consciousness’, ‘male identification’, ‘brainwashing’
etc.
3.
Interpreting the narratives as indicative of an essentially feminist understanding
despite an often explicitly anti-feminist stance.
Problem: also creates hierarchies: ‘the feminist researcher is saying, in effect, that her
participants spoke wisely, spoke better than they knew, but they knew not what they
said’.
4.
Post-structuralist move. Internal contradictions are identified in the narratives and
attributed to competing discourses, some liberatory and some oppressive, so the
discourse, not the individual, is critiqued.
5.
Presenting the narrative as a particular account or interpretation of experience, and
disagreeing with some or all of it.
This tends to be resisted: ‘Feminist social scientists apparently feel an overwhelming
obligation to be (as we see it) “nice” to research participants; and saying, particularly
in print, that we disagree with them is not seen as “nice”.
Nonetheless ‘Routinely validating women’s experience can be positively dangerous in
enforcing dominant constructions. Moreover, there are many aspects of our own and
other women’s experience [for example, our own racisms, classism, heterosexisms
and disableisms] that we want to change rather than to accept’.
Conclusion
Early ideas about researcher and participant cosying up about women’s issues have been
abandoned
The power relations between researcher and participant need to be scrutinised.
The researcher may have ‘power over’ the participant, but power is a complex concept and
Foucauldian understandings of power may be helpful, particularly in ‘researching up’.
Methodologies that incorporate the ‘messiness’ of the research process are more honest and
highlight that the method you use determines the knowledge that is produced.
Feminist researchers need to be strategic in deciding when they tell the truth about their
methods and when they don’t, and this will depend on the audience involved.
Feminist researchers may need to be strategic about the tradeoffs between rapport and safety
Where the accounts of participants at are odds with the analysis of the researcher the
researcher could retain analytical privilege but highlight the disagreement.
For Wilkinson and Kitzinger routine validation by the researcher can be highly problematic,
but so can the alternatives.
Questions for group work:
1.
What did you find most interesting about Jackie Stacey’s account of her ‘stargazing’
research methodology, and why?
2.
Where does power lie in the encounter between researcher and participant?
3.
Is it OK for feminist researchers to use the accounts of participants in any way they
choose? Who does the material belong to?
4.
How would you assess Lee’s strategies for interviewing men?
5.
What sorts of issues might be raised by male researchers interviewing women? Or by
male researchers interviewing men?
6.
Will a full and ‘messy’ version of the methodology be appropriate for your own
research? Why or why not?