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FEMINIST RESEARCH 39
Research must lead to change and improvement,
particularly, in this context, for women (Gillies
and Alldred 2002: 32). Research is a political
activity with a political agenda (Gillies and
Alldred 2002: 33; see also Lather 1991). Research
and action – praxis – must combine ‘knowledge
for’ as well as ‘knowledge what’ (Ezzy 2002:
47). As Marx reminds us in his Theses on
Feuerbach:‘thephilosophershaveonlyinterpreted
the world, in various ways; the point, however,
is to change it’. Gillies and Alldred (2002: 45),
however, point out that ‘many feminists have
agonized over whether politicizing participants
is necessarily helpful’, as it raises awareness of
constraints on their actions without being able
to offer solutions or to challenge their structural
causes. Research, thus politicized but unable to
change conditions, may actually be disempowering
and, indeed, patronizing in its simplistic call
for enlightenment and emancipation. It could
render women more vulnerable than before.
Emancipation is a struggle.
Several of these views of feminist research
and methodology are contested by other feminist
researchers. For example, Jayaratne (1993: 109)
argues for ‘fitness for purpose’, suggesting that
exclusive focus on qualitative methodologies
might not be appropriate either for the research
purposes or, indeed, for advancing the feminist
agenda (see also Scott 1985: 82-3). Jayaratne
refutes the argument that quantitative methods
are unsuitable for feminists because they neglect
the emotions of the people under study. Indeed she
argues for beating quantitative research on its own
grounds (Jayaratne 1993: 121), suggesting the need
for feminist quantitative data and methodologies
in order to counter sexist quantitative data in
the social sciences. She suggests that feminist
researchers can accomplish this without ‘selling
out’ to the positivist, male-dominated academic
research community. Oakley (1998) suggests that
the separation of women from quantitative
methodology may have the unintended effect of
perpetuating women as the ‘other’, and, thereby,
discriminating against them.
De Laine (2000: 112) argues that shifting from
quantitative to qualitative techniques may not
solve many ethical problems in research, as these
are endemic in any form of fieldwork. She argues
that some feminist researchers may not wish to
seek either less participation or more detachment,
and that more detachment and less participation
are not solutions to ethical dilemmas and ‘morally
responsible fieldwork’ as these, too, bring their
own ethical dilemmas, e.g. the risk of threat. She
reports work (p. 113) that suggests that close
relationships between researchers and participants
may be construed as just as exploitative, if more
disguised, as conventional researcher roles, and
that they may bring considerable problems if data
that were revealed in an intimate account between
friends (researcher and participant) are then used
in public research. The researcher is caught in a
dilemma: if she is a true friend then this imposes
constraints on the researcher, and yet if she is
only pretending to be a friend, or limiting that
friendship, then this provokes questions of honesty
and personal integrity. Are research friendships
real, ephemeral, or impression management used
to gather data
De Laine (2000: 115) suggests that it may be
misguided to privilege qualitative research for its
claim to non-exploitative relationships. While she
acknowledges that quantitative approaches may
perpetuate power differentials and exploitation,
there is no guarantee that qualitative research
will not do the same, only in a more disguised
way. Qualitative approaches too, she suggests, can
create and perpetuate unequal relations, not least
simply because the researcher is in the field qua
researcher rather than a friend; if it were not for
the research then the researcher would not be
present. Stacey (1988) suggests that the intimacy
advocated for feminist ethnography may render
exploitative relationships more rather than less
likely. We refer readers to Chapter 5 on sensitive
educational research for a further discussion of
these issues.
Gillies and Alldred (2002: 43-6) suggest that
action research, an area strongly supported in
some quarters of feminist researchers, is, itself,
problematic. It risks being an intervention in
people’s lives (i.e. a potential abuse of power), and
the researcher typically plays a significant, if not
Chapter 1