RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

38 THE NATURE OF INQUIRY
relationship between researchers and participants
is one of equality, and outsider, objective, distant,
positivist research relations are off the agenda;
researchers are inextricably bound up in the
lives of those they research. That this may bring
difficulties in participant and researcher reactivity
is a matter to be engaged rather than built out of
the research.
Thapar-Björkert and Henry (2004) argue that
the conventional, one-sided and unidirectional
view of the researcher as powerful and the research
participants as less powerful, with the researcher
exploiting and manipulating the researched, could
be a construction by western white researchers.
They report research that indicates that power
is exercised by the researched as well as the
researchers, and is a much more fluid, shifting and
negotiated matter than conventionally suggested,
being dispersed through both the researcher and
the researched. Indeed they show how the research
participants can, and do, exercise considerable
power over the researchers both before, during
and after the research process. They provide a
fascinating example of interviewing women in
their homes in India, where, far from the home
being a location of oppression, it was a site of their
power and control.
With regard to methods of data collection,
Oakley (1981) suggests that ‘interviewing women’
in the standardized, impersonal style which
expects a response to a prescribed agenda and
set of questions may be a ‘contradiction in
terms’, as it implies an exploitative relationship.
Rather, the subject–object relationship should be
replaced by a guided dialogue. She criticizes the
conventional notion of ‘rapport’ in conducting
interviews (Oakley 1981: 35), arguing that they are
instrumental, non-reciprocal and hierarchical, all
of which are masculine traits. Rapport in this sense,
she argues, is not genuine in that the researcher
is using it for scientific rather than human ends
(Oakley 1981: 55). Here researchers are ‘faking
friendship’ for their own ends (Duncombe and
Jessop 2002: 108), equating ‘doing rapport’ with
trust, and, thereby, operating a very ‘detached’
form of friendship (p. 110). Similarly Thapar-
Björkert and Henry (2004) suggest that attempts
at friendship between researchers and participants
are disingenuous, with ‘purported solidarity’ being
afraudperpetratedbywell-intentionedfeminists.
Duncombe and Jessop (2002: 111) ask a
very searching question when they question
whether, if interviewees are persuaded to take
part in an interview by virtue of the researcher’s
demonstration of empathy and ‘rapport’, this
is really giving informed consent. They suggest
that informed consent, particularly in exploratory
interviews, has to be continually renegotiated and
care has to be taken by the interviewer not to be
too intrusive. Personal testimonies, oral narratives
and long interviews also figure highly in feminist
approaches (De Laine 2000: 110; Thapar-Björkert
and Henry 2004), not least in those that touch
on sensitive issues. These, it is argued (Ezzy 2002:
45), enable women’s voices to be heard, to be
close to lived experiences, and avoid unwarranted
assumptions about people’s experiences.
The drive towards collective, egalitarian and
emancipatory qualitative research is seen as necessary
if women are to avoid colluding in their own
oppression by undertaking positivist, uninvolved,
dispassionate, objective research. Mies (1993: 67)
argues that for women to undertake this latter form
of research puts them into a schizophrenic position
of having to adopt methods which contribute to
their own subjugation and repression by ignoring
their experience (however vicarious) of oppression
and by forcing them to abide by the ‘rules
of the game’ of the competitive, male-dominated
academic world. In this view, argue Roman and
Apple (1990: 59), it is not enough for women simply
to embrace ethnographic forms of research, as
this does not necessarily challenge the existing and
constituting forces of oppression or asymmetries of
power. Ethnographic research, they argue, has to
be accompanied by ideology critique; indeed they
argue that the transformative, empowering, emancipatory
potential of research is a critical standard
for evaluating that piece of research.
This latter point resonates with the call
by Lather (1991) for researchers to be concerned
with the political consequences of their research
(e.g. consequential validity), not only the
conduct of the research and data analysis itself.