qualitative research on gender studies

• Open access
• Published: 01 November 2022

A qualitative study on gender inequality and gender-based violence in Nepal

• Pranab Dahal 1 ,
• Sunil Kumar Joshi 2 &
• Katarina Swahnberg 1  

BMC Public Health volume  22 , Article number:  2005 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Gender inequality and violence are not mutually exclusive phenomena but complex loops affecting each other. Women in Nepal face several inequalities and violence. The causes are diverse, but most of these results are due to socially assigned lower positioning of women. The hierarchies based on power make women face subordination and violence in Nepal. The study aims to explore participants' understanding and experience to identify the status of inequality for women and how violence emerges as one of its consequences. Furthermore, it explores the causes of sex trafficking as an example of an outcome of inequality and violence.

The study formulated separate male and female groups using a purposive sampling method. The study used a multistage focus group discussion, where the same groups met at different intervals. Six focus group discussions, three times each with male and female groups, were conducted in a year. Thirty-six individuals, including sixteen males and twenty females, were involved in the discussions. The study used constructivist grounded theory for the data analysis.

The study participants identify that a power play between men and women reinforce inequality and increases the likelihood of violence for women. The findings suggest that the subjugation of women occurs due to practices based on gender differences, constricted life opportunities, and internalization of constructed differences among women. The study identifies that interpersonal and socio-cultural violence can result due to established differences between men and women. Sex trafficking, as an example of the outcome of inequality and violence, occurs due to the disadvantageous position of women compounded by poverty and illiteracy. The study has developed a concept of power-play which is identified as a cause and consequence of women's subordination and violence. This power play is found operative at various levels with social approval for men to use violence and maintain/produce inequality.

The theoretical concept of power play shows that there are inequitable power relations between men and women. The male-centric socio-cultural norms and practices have endowed men with privilege, power, and an opportunity to exploit women. This lowers the status of women and the power-play help to produce and sustain inequality. The power-play exposes women to violence and manifests itself as one of the worst expressions used by men.

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Violence against women is identified as an attempt by men to maintain power and control over women [ 1 ] and is manifested as a form of structural inequality. This structural inequality is apparent with greater agency among men [ 2 ]. The differences between sexes are exhibited in the attainment of education and professional jobs, ownership of assets, the feminization of poverty, etc., and these differences increase the risk of violence towards women [ 3 ]. The global estimate identifies that thirty percent of women experience physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime, illustrating the enormity of this problem [ 4 ]. From a feminist perspective, lending ideas of patriarchy [ 5 ] and gender performativity [ 6 ], the understanding of gender roles prescribed by male-dominated social structures and processes helps further explore the violence and abuse faced by women [ 7 ]. According to Heise [ 8 ], men who adhere to traditional, rigid, and misogynistic views on gender norms, attitudes, and behaviors are more likely to use violence towards women. The individual and collective attitudes of men toward different established gender norms, and their reproduction explain men’s use of violence toward women [ 9 ]. It is known that gender norms influence violence, but at the same time violence also directs and dictates gender performance with fear, sanction, and corrective measures for enacting respective prescribed gender functions [ 10 ].

It is difficult for women subjected to violence to enjoy legitimate rights, as most of the infringement of their rights and violence takes place inside a private sphere of the home [ 11 , 12 ]. Violence against women is the major cause of death and disability for women [ 13 ] and globally a major public health concern [ 14 ]. Establishing gender equality is fundamental for fostering justice and attaining sustainable development [ 15 ]; moreover, violence against women has to be acknowledged as a fundamental abuse of human rights [ 16 ]. A report on global violence has identified that violence against women exists at all levels of the family, community, and state. The report recommended the development of frameworks for respecting, protecting, and fulfilling women’s rights [ 17 ]. Fifteen years later, a review of the same identifies that violence continues with impunity, reaffirming violence as a major obstacle to the attainment of justice [ 18 ].

The inclusion of the gender lens to violence against women has provided more contextual evidence to explore these processes of violence. This requires the identification of unequal power relationships and an inquiry into the differences-producing various gender stereotypes [ 19 ]. This analysis of violence requires an understanding of behaviors that promote women’s subordination and factors that favor men to sustain these malpractices [ 8 ]. A closer look at the male-centric structural arrangements embedded in the social, political, and economic organization of life reveals that these structures provide lesser access and lower accountability toward women, promote systemic subordination, and create hierarchies, resulting in the increase of violence against women [ 20 ]. This unequal gender power relationship reinforced and manifested by social approval of men’s authority over women is found operative at multiple levels and helps to produce diversities of inequalities and violence [ 21 , 22 ].

The inequalities faced by women in Nepal majorly stem from socio-cultural, economic, and religious factors and influencers that define traditional roles and responsibilities between men and women [ 23 ]. The inequalities are more evident and pronounced in settings exhibiting prominent patriarchal norms restricting advantages and opportunities for the majority of women [ 24 ]. Women in Nepal are restricted inside their homes, have lesser access to life opportunities, and have limited or no involvement in decision-making on important issues directly affecting their lives [ 25 , 26 ]. Figures indicative of women’s inequalities in Nepal suggest that one-third of women have no education, fifty-two percent of women are involved in non-paid jobs, and women are less likely than men to own a home or land [ 27 ]. The men in Nepalese society are positioned higher and are expected to be the breadwinner and protectors of their families. Most of these men intend to earn respect and obedience from women and are socially expected to discipline women to achieve it [ 28 ]. Many societies across the world including Nepal, recognizes violence as a private affair requiring discussion only within a family. This has led to a serious underreporting of violence committed toward women in Nepal [ 29 ]. The national gender data in Nepal is scarce, the available Nepal Demographic Health Survey 2016 identifies that since the age of fifteen, twenty-two percent of women and seven percent of women experience physical and sexual violence, respectively in the past twelve months [ 27 ].

The contributing factors for violence against women in Nepal include the lower social status of women, illiteracy, economic dependency, patriarchal society, sex trafficking, alcohol-related abuse, dowry-related violence, infidelity, extramarital affairs of husband, unemployment, and denial of sex with husband [ 30 , 31 , 32 ]. Nepalese women have been repressing violence with silence due to the fear of breaking relationships, receiving less love and affection from family, fear of social norms by going against men, lack of faith in the justice system, and the threat of increased violence [ 33 ]. Women and girls in Nepal are sex trafficked to various countries. Sex trafficking in Nepal is prevalent due to persistent gender inequality, violence, stigma, and discriminatory socio-cultural structures; however, the actual extent of sex trafficking is still undetermined [ 17 , 34 , 35 ].

The recent trends in Nepal with the increasing number of out-migration of men for employment have provided women with temporary autonomy, and a shift in the gender roles. Earlier research has identified that migration of male spouses has provided a resistance to the power dynamics for women on the other hand it has limited their mobility, required them to share decision-making with household structures, face continued social vigilance on the money received from remittance, and get central attention with their personal sexual lives [ 36 , 37 ].

Morang district lies in the eastern region of Nepal. A district profile report based on a census survey [ 38 ] identifies that the place is inhabited by a close to a million population, out of which ethnic groups ( close to forty percent) live in the district with a majority (seventy-eight percent) of its population living in the rural areas. Tharu an ethnic group is one of the dominant population in the study area and all study participants for this study were from same Tharu population. A close to thirty-six percent of women in the district are illiterate and the average age of marriage is eighteen years. The report identifies that only twenty-three percent of women engage in economic activities apart from agricultural work and less than fourteen percent of women head the household. Almost eighty percent of the population in the district practice Hinduism.

This study is a part of a large intervention project and it was focused to establish a qualitative baseline of the gender status in the study area. This study aimed to explore participants’ experiences and understanding of gender inequality, violence against women, and information on sex trafficking in the Morang district of eastern Nepal. The selection of sex trafficking topic was motivated to assess the respondents’ general understanding of one of the consequences of inequality and violence faced by women. The study focused to explore factors that help to produce and sustain the practice of gender inequality and violence against women in the local community.

Participants

This study was part of a larger control-comparison project that used Forum Theatre interventions to promote gender equality, reduce violence against women, and increase awareness of sex trafficking [ 39 , 40 ]. The participants for the focus group discussion included the intervention population from one of the randomly sampled intervention sites. A multistage focus group discussion [ 41 ] was used involving the same participants discussing various emerging topics at different periods. The participants were recruited voluntarily during an earlier quantitative data collection for the project. The study used a purposive sampling method for the selection of participants. The local field staff at the study site facilitated the recruitment of the participants. The study formulated separate male and female groups. A total of six focus groups, three each with male and female groups were conducted over twelve months. Two inclusion criteria were set for participation. First, the participants had to be part of the population of the larger study. Secondly, they had to witness and/or participate in the Forum Theatre interventions conducted in between the study. The set inclusion criteria served a dual purpose of understanding the causes of inequality and violence and further helped to develop and determine the efficacy of participatory Forum Theater intervention for awareness-raising among the study intervention groups [ 39 ].

A total of thirty-six participants consisting of sixteen males and twenty females joined the discussions. The first discussion consisted of eight participants each from groups while the second and the third discussion missed two female and four male participants respectively. The majority of the participants were 20–29 years old. Tharu, an ethnic community of Nepal, is a dominant population in the study area, and all the participants belonged to the same Tharu community. Only one female participant was unmarried, and a single married male participated in the discussions. All participants were literate, with four males completing a bachelor's level of education. Seven female participants had education below the high school level. The nuclear family with parents and their children was the major family type identified in both male and female groups. Table 1 provides the detail of the participants.

The focus group discussions were conducted in January 2017, April–May 2017, and January 2018. The discussions were conducted in a place recommended by the participants. An isolated place in an open setting at the premise of a local temple was used for conducting all discussions. The participants were briefed about the objectives of the discussion and written consent was obtained for their participation. Verbal consent was taken for the audio recording of the discussions. Each participant was assigned a unique numerical code before the discussions to ensure anonymity during recording, note-taking, and analysis. The discussions averaged ninety minutes during each session. The discussions were conducted with the same participants and no new participants were added during the follow-ups. A single male and female participant were missing in the second follow up and two male participants missed the final follow-up. The reason for missing participants was due to their unavailability as they were out of the village due to personal reasons.

The discussions were conducted in the Nepali language. The first author moderated all six discussions, a support field staff member took the notes, and the last author observed the discussions. The audio recordings were translated into English, and the transcriptions were checked with the recordings to verify accuracy. The field and the discussion notes were used during various stages of data analysis. The notes provided information on the discussion setting, as well as the verbal and nonverbal expressions of the participants. The notes helped to assess the impressions, emphasis, and feelings of the participants during the discussions.

The discussions used pre-formulated discussion guides with open-ended questions on inequalities, gender practices, violence, and sex trafficking. The guiding questions were based on the theoretical premise of discrimination, patriarchy, oppression, hegemony, and participation of women. Three separate discussion guides were developed for each of discussions. The guides were developed by the first and last authors. Probing was done on several occasions during the discussion to gain more clarity on the issue. Cross-checking among the participants and between the groups was done to triangulate received information. Any topic deemed appropriate for discussions and/or any unclear issues identified during the initial data analysis came up subsequently in the discussion guide during the follow-ups.

Data analysis

This study used the constructivist grounded theory method. This method adheres to a constructivist philosophical approach wherein both researchers and participants mutually co-construct the meaning of a phenomenon [ 42 ]. This interaction is important since it helps to impart the meaning of shared experiences [ 42 ]. The constructivist grounded theory made it possible to (re) discover gender issues, important for both the researcher and the study participants. This method allowed the study to progress with responsiveness to emerging issues with an in-depth exploration of the identified issues. This clarity was achieved through repeated interactive discussions, analysis of explanations, and sharing of emergent findings with the study participants.

The audio recordings were translated and transcribed into English. Six transcripts from discussions were initially analyzed using a line-by-line coding process. The coding process helped with the fragmentation of data through interactive comparisons. Fifty-two initial codes such as gender differences, restricting women, alcohol-related violence, underreporting of sexual violence, coping, etc. were identified. The later stage of focused coding helped to achieve categorized data, providing logical sense to the developed initial codes. Three focused codes, namely, the subjugation of women, violence, and chasing dreams were formulated during the analysis. The abductive reasoning from the codes, memos, and discussion notes helped to develop the theoretical concept. The development of conceptual abstraction involved an iterative comparison of the data, codes, categories, memos, and discussion notes.

The constant communication between the authors during the stages of data analysis such as the formulation of codes, explanations of concepts, and categories helped to refine the analysis. The shared experiences of the participants and the description of the data collection and analysis included substantial details, enabling comparisons for future research and application to other similar contexts. The reliability of the study is warranted by the theoretical saturation [ 42 ] achieved by this study. This is supported by prolonged engagement with the study participants with communication on the emerging findings, and triangulation.

Reflexivity has a greater significance for the constructivist approach. The first and the second author of Nepalese origin were aware of the socio-cultural norms, stereotypes, values, and stigmas associated with gender in the local context. This helped the study to ascertain the depth of inquiry within the acceptable local normative limits. The non-Nepalese author, familiar with the study participants and Nepalese contexts, witnessed the discussions as an observer. The prior knowledge of the authors helped to critically assess different schemas, perspectives, and explanations shared by the participants. The universality of gender inequality and violence against women and its re-examination in the local context helped the authors to build upon existing knowledge by providing contextual explanations. The diversities among the authors and research participants established a basis for co-creating the perceived and observed realities.

The section below describes the participants’ perceptions and understanding of inequality and violence. The section contains subheadings that were derived as themes in the data analysis. The first theme subjugation of women; discusses how norms, beliefs, and practices produce inferior status and positions for women. The second theme domestic and gender violence; provides a narrative of interpersonal and socio-cultural violence present in the study area. The theme of chasing dreams; discusses the process of sex trafficking as an outcome of violence. The theoretically abstracted concept of power-play identifies the cause for the generation of power imbalance producing inequality and the use of violence by men.

Subjugation of women

The subjugation of women reflected practices and beliefs imparting positional differences for women and their social situation compared to men. The participants shared a common understanding that belief systems adhering to male supremacy have positioned women in a lower status. They provided examples of social practices of male supremacy such as males being considered as the carrier of a family name, legacy, and heritage, while women were referred to as someone else’s property. The socialization of the idea that girls will be married off to a husband and relocate themselves to their homes was identified as the major reason for instilling and perpetuating early gender differences. The participants mentioned that discriminatory practices and seclusion have situated women at the bottom rung of the gender hierarchy, establishing them as socially incompetent individuals or groups. Moreover, they inferred that selective preferences provided preparatory grounds for inequalities, and they remain attached to women throughout their lives. The participants provided examples of unequal access to education and life opportunities as a practice of selective preferences occurring in the community. They mentioned that socialization with these discriminatory beliefs and their practice helped to develop specialized gender roles from an early age. The participants provided an example of how gender intersected with mobility and resource generation in the community, it was clear from the discussions that this has restricted women inside homes but provided freedom and opportunities for men. A female participant expressed,

A woman from a poor family is more than willing to work and support her family. But she is not allowed by the men in the family to work outside of the home.

The participants informed that differences between the sexes were visible for women from a young age. Sharing practical examples from the community, the participants from both groups stated that girls received education mostly in low-cost government and community schools, while boys were enrolled in expensive private schools. They raised concerns that this selective investment for education, cited as the ‘building block of life’ by the participants, installed lesser capacity, and negotiating abilities in girls. A female participant stated,

There are differences in educational opportunities for boys and girls in our community. Family provides more support for a boy’s education by enrolling him in private schools, while a girl mostly gets her education in a community school together with engagement in household work.

The discussions revealed that women required several male anchors for their survival during their various stages of life. The participants provided examples of the shift of anchors for women which traversed from a father to a husband during marriage and later to the male child during her old age. They believed that this tradition of transferring women’s identity established men as a higher social category and stripped women of their individuality and identity. A male participant added,

Women have to remain dependent on men throughout their lives, first with their fathers and later with their husbands. They remain completely dependent as they are not economically active. This makes men believe that they have higher authority.

The female participants provided an example of marriage to illustrate how someone else’s decision-making had been affecting women’s lives. A participant explained that women were held responsible for household activities after marriage and any support for career progression or education was restricted despite her desire for its continuation. It was inferred that women had to drop their hopes and aspirations as the husband and his family made decisions for them. The female participants agreed that this continuous exposure to the ideas of male supremacy makes them start to believe and internalize the idea that women have lesser cognitive abilities and intelligence compared to men. A female participant stated,

Men and women certainly have different mental abilities. Men think and act differently often in a smart way compared to women.

The participants from both groups expressed that youth in the community were developing flexible attitudes and beliefs towards gender roles and responsibilities. They agreed that both young men and women were observed altering their roles and responsibilities shifting from traditional gender ideologies. The participants expressed that instilling these fluidity and flexible approaches in the older generation was impossible as they strictly followed traditional beliefs and practices. Few of the female participants admitted that at times young women also fail to accommodate the situation and reap benefits from available opportunities. The discussions revealed that a few of the women in the community received opportunities for independence and economic empowerment. These women had received entrepreneurial training and various skill development activities for sustaining livelihoods with practical skill-based training in tailoring, beautician, and doll-making. The female participants expressed that opportunities for independence and growth slipped away from them due to a lack of family support, financial constraints, and self-passivity. They explained that starting a business required approval from a family which was difficult to obtain. Moreover, if women made a self-decision to start up on their own, they lacked the initial capital and had to rely on men for obtaining resources. The participants further explained that the denial of men to support women were majorly due to the fear that norms of staying indoors for women will be breached and economic independence may enable women to have a similar financial footing as men. The participants stated that self-passivity in women emerged due to their engagement in household multiple roles, dependency upon males, and lack of decision-making power and abilities. A female participant summed it up by stating,

Some of us women in the community have received entrepreneurial skills training, but we have not been able to use our skills for our growth and development. Once the training finishes, we get back to our household chores and taking care of the children.

The female participants admitted that acceptance of belief systems requiring women to be docile, unseen, and unheard were the reasons for this self-passivity. The female participants resonated that the external controlling and unfavorable environment influenced by practices of discriminatory norms and beliefs developed self-passivity for women. A female participant expressed the cause and consequence of self-passivity as,

Women have inhibitions to speaking their minds; something stops us from making our position clear, making us lose all the time.

The discussions identified that gender norms were deeply engraved in various social interactions and daily life, and any deviance received strict criticism. The participants shared common examples of sanctions for women based on rigid norms like restrictive movements for women, social gossiping when women communicated with outsider men, prohibition for opinion giving in public, and lesser involvement during key decision-making at home. The participants shared that norms dictating gender roles were in place for both men and women with social sanctions and approval for their performance. A male discussion participant who occasionally got involved with cooking which was a so-called “women’s job” faced outright disapproval from his female relatives and neighbors. The male participant stated,

If I cook or get engaged in any household jobs, it is mostly females from the home and neighborhood who make fun of me and remind me that I am a man and that I should not be doing a woman’s job.

The foreign migration of youth looking for job opportunities has affected the Tharu community. It was known that a large number of men were absent from the community. The participants stated that women in such households with absent men had gained authority and control over resources, moreover, these women have been taking some of the men’s roles. The participants disclosed that these women had greater access and control over resources and were involved in the key decision-making positioning them in a relatively higher position compared to other women. It was known that this higher position for women came with a price, they were under higher social vigilance and at higher risk of abuse and violence due to the absence of ‘protective men’. It was known that women's foreign employment was associated with myths and sexist remarks. The participants shared that women had to face strict social criticisms and that their plans for livelihood and independence were related to an issue of sexual immorality and chastity. The participants from both groups strictly opposed the norms that associated women with sexual immorality but lamented that it continues. A male participant provided an insight into the social remarks received by women if she dares to go for foreign employment,

If a woman wants to go for a foreign job, she is considered to be of loose character. The idea that she is corrupt and will get involved in bad work will be her first impression of anyone.

Although the participant did not explicitly describe what bad work referred to as but it was inferred that he was relating it to sex work.

Domestic and gender violence

The participants identified violence as control, coercion, and use of force against someone will occurring due to unequal status. They primarily identified men as the perpetrators and women as the victims of violence. They explained that two types of violence were observed in the community. The first type occurred in an interpersonal relationship identified as physical, emotional, and sexual violence. The second type, as explained by the participants had its roots in socio-cultural belief systems. They provided examples of dowry exchange and witchcraft accusations for the latter type. The participants identified women as primary victims and listed both men and women as the perpetrators of both types of violence. They reported that physical violence against women by men under the influence of alcohol was the most commonly occurring violence in the community. The participants from both groups confirmed that wife-beating, verbal abuse, and quarrel frequently occurred in the community. It was known from discussions that alcohol consumption among men was widespread, and its cultural acceptance was also increasing episodes of violence. One of the female participants clarified further,

The most common violence occurring in our society is wife-beating by a husband under the influence of alcohol. We see it every day.

The participants reported the occurrence of sexual violence in the community but also pointed out that people refrained from discussing it considering it a taboo and private affair. The participants had hesitation to discuss freely on sexual violence. During the discussions, participants from both groups informed only of rape and attempted rape of women by men as sexual violence present in the community. Despite repeated probing, on several occasions, none of the participants from either group brought up issues and discussions about any other forms of sexual violence. Participants from both groups confirmed that stories about incidents of rape or attempted rape emerged only after cases were registered with the local police. The participants presumed that incidents of rape and attempted rape were not known to the wider community. A female participant stated,

Sexual violence does occur in our community, but people mostly do not report or disclose it, but they tend to keep it amongst themselves and their families.

The participants explained the identity of the rape perpetrator and victim. They identified the perpetrator as a rich, influential, and relatively powerful man from the community. The victim was portrayed as a poor and isolated woman which lesser social ties. It was known from the discussions that most of the rape cases in the community were settled with financial negotiations and monetary compensations for the victim rather than finding legal remedies. It can be inferred that the victimization of women intersects with gender, wealth, social stature, and affluence. The participants feared that this practice of settlement of rape with money could make rape a commodity available for the powerful, rich, and affluent men to exploit and victimize women. A male participant clarifies,

Recently, a man in his sixties raped a young girl near our village. The victim's family was ready to settle with monetary compensation offered by the rapist, but the involvement of the community stopped it and the rapist was handed over to the police.

The participants shared available coping mechanisms against violence practiced in the community by women. It was learned that the victim of household violence mostly used community consultation and police reporting to evade further violence. They divulged that community consultation and police reporting resulted in decisions in favor of victim women, directing abusive husbands to show decency and stop committing violence. The fear of legal repercussions such as spending time in police custody and getting charged under domestic violence cases was understood as the reasons for husbands to stop abuse and violence. The discussions revealed that women who file a formal complaint about their husband’s violent behavior could face an increased risk of violence. The participants disclosed that sharing such incidents publicly brought shame to some of the men and increased their anger, and often backlashed with increased violence. The participants in both groups stated that not all women in the community reported violence. They identified that women tend to be quiet despite facing continuous violence due to the fear of encountering more violence and to keeping their families together. A female participant clarifies,

Lodging public complaints against the abusive husband can sometimes escalate the violence. The husband’s anger for being humiliated in public must be faced by the woman inside the closed doors of the house with more violence and the men’s threat of abandoning the relationship.

The participants stated that socio-cultural violence against women in dowry-related cases was widespread and increasing. The dowry exchange was explained as a traditional practice with the family of the bride paying cash and kind to the groom's family. The participants clarified that the practice of dowry in the earlier days must have been an emergency fund for the newly wedded bride in a newer setting. According to the participants, the system of dowry has now developed and evolved as a practice of forced involuntary transfer of goods and cash demanded by the groom’s family. The discussions disclosed that the demands for dowry were increasing with time and failing to provide as promised immediately resulted in violence for the newly wedded bride. The participants described that dowry-related violence starts with taunts and progresses to withholding of food, verbal abuse, and finally, physical violence. They added that perpetrators of such violence were both men and women from the groom’s family. They stated that due to poverty not all bride families in the community were able to supply all demanded dowry which has exposed a large number of women to face dowry-related abuse and violence. The discussions also informed of a newer trend among girls by demanding goods during their wedding. It was shared that this new emerging trend had increased a two-fold financial burden on the bride’s family with heavy marriage debts. The male participants when questioned about the dowry demands cunningly shifted the responsibilities towards family and stated that it was not the groom but their families who were making such dowry demands. The discussions verified that dowry practice was so engraved in the community that it was impossible to even imagine a marriage without any dowry. A male participant reflected,

If I marry without any dowry, my family, neighbors, and all whom I know would consider that I am insane.

The participants also discussed and identified harmful traditional practices present in the community. The participants informed a common practice of accusing women of as witches existed in the community. It was mentioned that women faced witchcraft allegations in different situations. They provided examples of witchcraft allegations in common situations such as when someone’s cow stops producing milk when a child has a sore eye, when someone is bedridden due to sickness for days, or when a woman undergoes a miscarriage, etc. The participants stated that women accused of witch were always elderly/single women living in seclusion, poverty, and with fewer social ties. They also shared that the witch doctors, who ascertain whether a woman is a witch or not, were surprisingly mostly always men and hold higher status, respect, and social recognition. The consequences of being labeled as a witch, as explained by the participants, haunted victim women with torture, name-calling, social boycott, and extremes of physical violence. The participants informed that inhumane practices such as forceful feeding of human excreta prevailed during the witch cleansing sessions. A female participant explaining the witchcraft situation stated,

Witchcraft accusation is very real in our community; I know someone who has tortured his mother, citing reasons for his wife being childless. The old woman was called names, beaten, and later thrown out of the home.

The participants felt that men’s use of violence and its legitimization primarily existed due to gender hierarchy and internalization of the belief that violence was the best method to resolve any conflict. They inferred that men’s use of violence was further reinforced by women's acceptance and belief that violence had occurred due to their faults and carelessness. The female participants shared examples of common household situations that could result in an episode of violence such as women cooking distasteful food, failing to provide timely care to children and the elderly due to workload, and forgetting to clean rooms. These incidents make women believe that violence majorly occurred due to their mistakes. Furthermore, the participants believed that this self-blaming of the victim resulted due to constant exposure to violence and a non-negotiable social positioning of women for raising questions. The participants stated that beliefs instilled by religion increased the likelihood of victimization for women. They explained that religious practices and ideologies required women to refer to their husbands as godly figures, and a religious belief that anything said or done against husbands was a disgrace bringing sin upon her and family positioned women in an inferior position. A male participant added,

We belong to a culture where females worship their husbands as a god, and this might be an important reason for men to feel powerful as a god to exploit and abuse women.

The discussions put forward the idea that the existence of discriminatory beliefs, reinforcement of such beliefs, and a blind following of such practices produced differences and violence. The male participants acknowledged that the idea of male supremacy not only produced violence but also established a belief system that considered violence as an indispensable way to treat deviated women. One male participant stated this idea of male supremacy and privilege as,

The language of the feet is essential when words fail.

The participants also discussed violence committed toward men by women. The male participants burst into laughter when they stated that some men were beaten by their wives when they were drunk. The male participants admitted that intoxication reduced their strength and they got beaten. The female participants, on the other hand, assumed that women hit intoxicated men due to frustration and helplessness. They further clarified that the act of husband beating was a situational reaction towards men who had spent all of their daily earnings on alcohol. They stated that women with the responsibility to cook and feed family find themselves in an utterly helpless situation by the irresponsible drinking behavior of men. The male participants shared incidences of violence against men due to foreign migration. It was revealed in the discussions that some of the migrating men’s wives had run away with remitted money, abandoning marriage, and breaking up the family. The male participants identified this as a form of victimization of men, furthermore, the spreading of rumors and gossip caused emotional instability in those men. The female participants confirmed that some returning men failed to find their homes, property, money, and/or their wives. The discussion participants in both groups identified that this practice was on the rise in the community. It became apparent from the discussions that this increasing trend of women running away with the money and breaking away from family was a personal issue requiring social remedies.

Chasing dreams

The participants referred to sex trafficking as the exploitation of women, arising from poverty, illiteracy, and deceit. Explaining the causes of trafficking, the participants stated that women living in poverty, having dreams of prosperity and abundance were tricked by the traffickers making them victims of sex trafficking. The participants mentioned that women who had dreams larger than life and yearned for a comfortable and luxurious life in a short time were at a greater risk for sex trafficking. The participants from both groups resonated that the traffickers had been manipulating the dreams of poor women and deceiving them into trafficking. A female participant elaborated,

Women in poverty can be fooled easily with dreams. She can be tricked by a trafficker by saying I will find you employment with good pay abroad, and she gets into the trap easily.

A male participant further clarified,

Women readily fall into fraud and trickery shown by the traffickers who assure of luxurious life with foreign employment and this bait often leads to sex trafficking.

They identified that false hopes for foreign jobs were primarily used as an entry point by the traffickers to trap potential victims. Besides, they stated that some traffickers tricked women with false romantic relationships and marriages to win over their trust enabling traffickers to maneuver women as they wished.

It was identified that traffickers were not always strangers but known and familiar faces from the community, allowing the traffickers to gain the victim’s trust. The discussions divulged that traffickers strategically chose women who were less educated and poor. The participants explained that sex trafficking mostly occurred among women from a lower caste (the caste system is hierarchy-based in Hindu society which is determined by birth and unchangeable). They further explained that if one of these lower caste women went missing, it seldom raised any serious concerns in society, making these women easy targets for the traffickers. The discussions revealed that life for the survivors of sex trafficking was difficult. They identified that the survivor had to face strong stigmas and stereotypes which further increased their risk for re-victimization. The participants explained that the social acceptance of the trafficking survivors was minimal and finding a job for survival was very difficult. It was reported that social beliefs, norms, and practices were rigid for sex trafficking survivors and provided lesser opportunities for complete social integration. A female participant stated,

The story of a sex-trafficked woman does not end after her rescue. It is difficult for her to live in society, and this increases her chances of being a further victim.

The discussions in both groups highlighted that education and awareness were important for reducing sex trafficking. The participants felt that securing a livelihood for women was essential, but they identified it as a major challenge. The female participants recommended the use of education and awareness for reducing sex trafficking. They demanded effective legal actions and stringent enforcement of the law with maximum punishment for offending sex traffickers. They mentioned that the fear of law with maximum punishment for culprits could help decrease cases of trafficking.

The theoretical concept of power play

The discussions identified that gender inequality and violence against women occurred as men possessed and exercised greater authority. The participants explained that the authority emerging from male-centric beliefs was reinforced through established socio-cultural institutions. It was known that oppressive practices toward women in both public and private life have led to the domination and devaluation of women. The differences between men and women were known to be instilled by evoking discriminatory beliefs and due to internalization of them as fundamental truths by women which further helps to sustain these created differences.

The concept of power-play developed from the study has its roots in the belief systems and was found constantly used by men to maintain created differences. The power-play rise due to patriarchy, guiding discriminatory norms and unequal gender practices. These norms and practices in the canopy of patriarchy positions women inferior to men and impose control and restrictions. The power play possessed multi-dimensional effects on women such as creating further barriers, restricted life opportunities, the need for men-centered anchoring systems, and exclusion from the public arena. The power play gains its strength from the strict enforcement of stereotypical practices and committed adherence to gender performances. This leads to internalization of subordination as a natural occurrence by women. These further isolate women putting them into several non-negotiating positions. The power play at an individual level provides restrictive movement for women, barring them from quality education and other life opportunities, and is exhibited in alcohol-related assault and sexual violence. At the structural level, this power play limits women from economic opportunities, access to resources, and decision-making, and induces socio-cultural inequality exhibited in dowry and cases of witchcraft. The socio-cultural acceptance of power-play allows men to use violence as a misuse of power and use it as an effort to maintain authority. The use of power-play for committing violence was identified as the worst display of exercised power play.

Figure  1 describes the concept of power-play developed from the study. The power-play model is based on discussions and inferences made from data analysis. The model provides a description and explanation of how women are subjected to inequality and face violence. The concept of power play derives its strength from the subjugated status of women which are based on selective treatment, self-embodiment of inferiority, imposed restrictions and due to lesser life opportunities. The power play gain legitimacy through social approval of the status differences between men and women and through social systems and institutions majorly developed and favoring men. The status difference between men and women and its approval by developed social institutions and processes give rise to the concept of powerplay. It identifies that status differences allow men to gain and (mis)use power play not only to maintain differences but also enable men to use violence. The use of power-play exists at both interpersonal and cultural levels. Further, the model elaborates on influencers causing subjugation of women, display of power-play, and violence. The model identified that lodging public complaints and seeking legal remedies are the influencers that suppress violence against women. The influence of Forum Theater was perceived to have greater influence for victim, perpetrator, and bystanders. The influencers that aggravate violence are fear of further violence, the nature of the interpersonal relationship, alcohol-related abuse, and remaining silent especially on sexual violence. The cultural violence mentioned in the model refers to dowry and witchcraft-related violence and stands as systemic subordination. In the model, sex trafficking is depicted as one of the outcomes of inequality and violence faced by women majorly occurring due to deceit and fraud.

The theoretical concept of power-play developed in this study identifies that inequality produces violence and violence further reinforces inequality, creating a vicious circle. The power play situates hierarchy based on gender as the primary cause and identifies violence as an outcome of this power asymmetry. The authority to use power by men is received by social approval from embedded structures and institutions. The functioning of associated structures and norms is designed and run by men helping to perpetuate the dominance and subjugation of women. The study identifies that both interpersonal and socio-cultural violence emerges due to the positional differences and use of power. The study found that an element of control exists in interpersonal violence. The findings show that few victim women in the community took advantage of consultations and rely on the law to evade and /or cope during the occurrence of interpersonal violence. A large number of victims women however suffer silently as they are unable and unwilling to take a stand on violence due to their perceived positional differences and strict norms following. The study finds that violence originating from socio-cultural systems is widely accepted and no established means of control exists. The practice of heinous acts against a fellow human during witchcraft allegations and dowry exchanges is prohibited by the law of Nepal but is widespread. This situates that practices which are based on belief systems are more effective than prevailing national laws which try to stop them. Sex trafficking as a form of sexual violence use deceit and fraud against women. Poverty and illiteracy compel women to search for alternatives, and they become easy victims of sex trafficking when their dreams of a better life are manipulated by the traffickers. The false promise of a better life and highly paid job put women in a non-negotiating position with traffickers. The cherished dream of escaping the prevailing status-quo of oppression, subordination, violence, and poverty mesmerizes women to take risky decisions, falling into the risk and trap of sex trafficking.

The socio-cultural norms are the unwritten script of social operatives and functioning. These social norms function as codes of operation and are a major determinant for behavior and interactions between people [ 43 ]. The study has found that these norms were skewed, and most favored men, giving rise to status differences and producing inequalities for women. This is observed with lesser life opportunities, lower participation in decision-making, and a constant need to anchor women. This further helps men to maintain their hierarchical positional status and use violence. The subjugation of women does not occur in a linear process, it is influenced by the internalization of discrimination resulting in lower self-esteem, suppression, and domination of women based on norms and unequal practices. Earlier research has identified that norms and beliefs encourage men to control women, and direct them to use force to discipline women which increases the risk of violence occurrence [ 44 , 45 ]. An earlier study shows that traits of masculinity require men to become controlling, aggressive, and dominant over women to maintain status differences [ 46 ]. The study confirms that men upon receiving both normative and social approval for using violence against women can do so without hesitation.

Violence against women in Nepal mostly occurs inside the home and is only reported when it reaches higher levels of severity. The acceptance of violence as a private affair has restricted women from seeking support and discourages them from communicating their problems with outsiders [ 47 ] this increases more likelihood for men to use violence. The study finds issues related to sex and sexual violence is a taboo and are seldom reported. The study could only identify cases of sexual assault registered with the police and other cases known to the wider community as sexual violence. A community with known incidents of rape may have other cases of abuse, harassment, incest, forceful sexual contact, etc. Failure to report incidents of sexual violence infer that a large number of women could be suffering in silence. Earlier research identifies that increased stigmatization associated with sexual violence, and fear of seclusion cause reluctance in victims to report or seek support [ 48 ]. This silencing of victims provides men with greater sexual control over women [ 49 ] increasing more likelihood of use of violence. Gender-based inequality and violence intersect structures, institutions, and socio-cultural processes, making inequality and violence visible at all levels. The dowry-related violence and witchcraft allegation intersect interpersonal and structural violence. This cultural violence forces women to be a victim of lifelong abuse and trauma. The intersecting relationship between gender norms, social structures, and individual is so closely knitted that it produces varieties of inequality and violence at all levels [ 50 ]. Emotional violence in this study only emerged as a type of violence, during discussions in both groups. It did not emerge as a major concern for the participants except for dowry-related violence and violence against men. The intertwined nature of emotional violence and its occurrence with each abusive, exploitative, and violent situation may have influenced the participants understand it as a result, rather than as a specific type of violence.

The power play between sexes was found in synchronicity with the established norms and prevailing stereotypes, helping to perpetuate gender power imbalance. The gender system is influenced and governed by norms and the social arena becomes the site of its reproduction through the interaction and engagement of people. This interaction provides approval to the institutions and processes that are based on constructed differences between men and women [ 51 ]. The power, as identified by Fricker [ 52 ], controls a social group and operates and operates through the agent or established social structures. A man can actively use the vested power to either patronize and/or abuse women while passively women’s internalization of social settings and embedded norms can put them docile. The social controls as reported by Foucault [ 53 ] work with the embedded systems of internalization, discipline, and social monitoring and uses coercion rather than inflicting pain. The internalization of status differences among women as indicated by the study confirms this schema of social control. The dominance of men over women with patriarchal beliefs establishes the significance of male-centered kinship. This requires women to constantly anchor with men providing grounds for inequalities to perpetuate further. This idealizes men and reinforces the belief that women are non-existent without their presence. The requirement for male anchorage has an attachment to prevailing structural inequality. The family property and resources are mostly controlled by men and it usually transfers from father to son limiting inheritance to women [ 51 ]. These glorified idealizations of men's competence as described by Ridgeway [ 54 ] idealize men as individuals with abilities, status, power, and influences. The need for women to rely on men as anchors, fear of going against the norms and social sanctions explains the positional difference and show that men possess greater competencies. The internalization of men-centric superior beliefs by women occurs due to self-passivity and devalues women creating false impressions of their abilities. The gender roles and responsibilities were strict for both sexes but provided greater flexibility, privilege, and opportunity for men. Earlier studies in congruence with this study find that socio-cultural expectations limit women from deviation, and strictly adhere to their prescribed role and expectations [ 55 , 56 ] providing an upper hand to the men. The unequal social positioning of women, as defined by a few of the participants, can help define men's use of violence. As inferred by Kaufman [ 57 ], the disadvantageous position of women and support from the established structures enable men to use aggression and violence with considerable ease. The concept of power-play derived from this study also reflects that inequalities not only create hierarchies, putting women into a subordinating position but also legitimize norms of harmful masculinity and violence [ 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 ] creating a vicious cycle of inequality and violence. The concept of power-play developed by this study requires further exploration of gender relations, injustice, and patriarchy to identify multiple operatives of power with an outcome of inequality and violence.

Strengths and limitations of the study

The study followed the same participants over a period, which helped the study to achieve clarity on the topics through constant engagement. The data collection and the initial data analysis of the study were conducted by the same person, which reduced the risk of misrepresented findings. The study used follow-up discussions, which provided an opportunity to meet the participants again to resolve any ambiguities. The constant engagement with the participants helped to develop rapport and trust, which is essential to enable meaningful discussions. The study gathered rich data for developing the theory of power play in the Nepalese context. The study has attempted to explain the interplay of men’s use of power play, gender inequality, and violence against women, which, in itself, is a complex, but important issue. The study helped to develop a platform by identifying a level of awareness and needs for a Forum Theatre intervention study, a first of its kind in Nepal.

The major limitation of the study is that it was conducted with only one of the ethnic populations of Nepal; thus, the findings from this study cannot be generalized to a completely different setting. However, the transferability of the study is possible in a similar setting. The incidences of inequality and violence shared by the participants were self-reported, and no other means of verification were available to crosscheck those claims. The differences among the participants both in and between groups based on education and marital status might have influenced the study participants to understand, observe, and experience the phenomenon. The possibility of social desirability bias remains with the study, as a constant engagement with the study participants might have influenced them to answer differently. Furthermore, the discussions were conducted in groups, and participants might have had hesitation to bring up any opposing views. The study relied on collecting information on social norms and individual experiences and the perceptions of the study participants. It cannot be claimed that the study is devoid of any data rigidity as participants were free to choose what they wanted to share and express.

Study implications

The study explains gender practices, norms, violence against women, and sex trafficking in Nepal. The study helps to increase the understanding of how gender systems are operative in the daily lives of the Tharu community in the Morang district of Nepal. Future studies can explore the established linkages of interpersonal and socio-cultural violence. Like the complex link existing between gender inequality and violence against women, interpersonal violence and socio-cultural violence cannot be studied in isolation. The study provides an opportunity for future research on exploring how changing norms have been altering the position and victimization of women. The study finds that changing gender norms and responsibilities have, on the one hand, provided agency and empowerment for women, but on the other hand, they have also increased their risk of being a victim, an area that requires further exploration. The study has identified that constant engagement with the study participants through follow-up studies ensures the richness of data, which can be useful information for a future research study design. The study can be helpful for policy development, social activists, leaders, and researchers as it discusses prevalent gender oppressions and victimization, which need to be addressed. The findings from the study can be helpful for dialogue imitation and for designing intervention projects aimed at providing justice and equality to women.

The study identifies the presence of gender inequalities and violence against women in the study area. The positional differences based on norms, institutions, and practices have assigned greater privileges to men. The concept of power-play devised by the study ascertains the maintenance of gender hierarchy to produce inequality further and victimization of women. The subjugation of women based on the social-cultural process, embedded belief systems, and norms prevent women from life opportunities and dignified life. It situates men at the highest rung of the gender and social ladder providing a comparative advantage for men to use power. Violence emerges as men’s use of power play and as a strategy for the continued subjugation of women. Sex trafficking as a consequence of inequality and violence has its origins in illiteracy and poverty with women falling prey to the deceit of traffickers. It is important that dreams for progression provide motivation for women to develop further but at the same time, dreams should not be exchanged with trickery and fraud offered by the traffickers. Awareness and attitudinal changes are imperative to challenge unequal norms, and practices, and reduce the risks of sex trafficking. This can help to develop negotiations for power-sharing which helps to reduce inequality, violence, and preparedness in chasing dreams. Changes at both individual and societal levels are necessary to develop a collective action for establishing belief systems and practices providing women with an equal position and reducing the risk of violence.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy but are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all the focus group discussion participants. The authors are indebted to Bhojraj Sharma, Deekshya Chaudhary, Subham Chaudhary, and Dev Kala Dhungana for their coordination and facilitation in reaching the discussion participants.

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PD, SKJ, and KS were involved in the study design. PD and KS developed the discussion guides. PD was responsible for the data collection and the data analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Dahal, P., Joshi, S.K. & Swahnberg, K. A qualitative study on gender inequality and gender-based violence in Nepal. BMC Public Health 22 , 2005 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14389-x

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The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation

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Using an analysis of two independent, qualitative interview data sets: the first containing semi-structured interviews with mid-senior academics from across a range of disciplines at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK, collected between 2011 and 2013 ( n  = 51); and the second including pre- ( n  = 62), and post-evaluation ( n  = 57) interviews with UK REF2014 Main Panel A evaluators, this paper provides some of the first empirical work and the grounded uncovering of implicit (and in some cases explicit) gendered associations around impact generation and, by extension, its evaluation. In this paper, we explore the nature of gendered associations towards non-academic impact (Impact) generation and evaluation. The results suggest an underlying yet emergent gendered perception of Impact and its activities that is worthy of further research and exploration as the importance of valuing the ways in which research has an influence ‘beyond academia’ increases globally. In particular, it identifies how researchers perceive that there are some personality traits that are better orientated towards achieving Impact; how these may in fact be gendered. It also identifies how gender may play a role in the prioritisation of ‘hard’ Impacts (and research) that can be counted, in contrast to ‘soft’ Impacts (and research) that are far less quantifiable, reminiscent of deeper entrenched views about the value of different ‘modes’ of research. These orientations also translate to the evaluation of Impact, where panellists exhibit these tendencies prior to its evaluation and describe the organisation of panel work with respect to gender diversity.

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Introduction

The management and measurement of the non-academic impact Footnote 1 (Impact) of research is a consistent theme within the higher education (HE) research environment in the UK, reflective of a drive from government for greater visibility of the benefits of research for the public, policy and commercial sectors (Chubb, 2017 ). This is this mirrored on a global scale, particularly in Australia, where, at the ‘vanguard’ (Upton et al., 2014 , p. 352) of these developments, methods were first devised (but were subsequently abandoned) to measure research impact (Chubb, 2017 ; Hazelkorn and Gibson, 2019 ). What is broadly known in both contexts as an ‘Impact Agenda’—the move to forecast and assess the ways in which investment in academic research delivers measurable socio-economic benefit—initially sparked broad debate and in some instances controversy, among the academic community (and beyond) upon its inception (Chubb, 2017 ). Since then, the debate has continued to evolve and the ways in which impact can be better conceptualised and implemented in the UK, including its role in evaluation (Stern, 2016 ), and more recently in grant applications (UKRI, 2020 ) is robustly debated. Notwithstanding attempts to better the culture of equality and diversity in research, (Stern, 2016 ; Nature, 2019 ) in the broader sense, and despite the implementation of the Impact agenda being studied extensively, there has been very little critical engagement with theories of gender and how this translates specifically to more downstream gendered inequities in HE such as through an impact agenda.

The emergence of Impact brought with it many connotations, many of which were largely negative; freedom was questioned, and autonomy was seen to be at threat because of an audit surveillance culture in HE (Lorenz, 2012 ). Resistance was largely characterised by problematising the agenda as symptomatic of the marketisation of knowledge threatening traditional academic norms and ideals (Merton, 1942 ; Williams, 2002 ) and has led to concern about how the Impact agenda is conceived, implemented and evaluated. This concern extends to perceptions of gendered assumptions about certain kinds of knowledge and related activities of which there is already a corpus of work, i.e., in the case of gender and forms of public engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ). This paper explores what it terms as ‘the Impact a-gender’ (Chubb, 2017 ) where gendered notions of non-academic, societal impact and how it is generated feed into its evaluation. It does not wed itself to any feminist tradition specifically, however, draws on Carey et al. ( 2018 ) to examine, acknowledge and therefore amend how the range of policies within HE and how implicit power dynamics in policymaking produce gender inequalities. Instead, an impact fluidity is encouraged and supported. For this paper, this means examining how the impact a-gender feeds into expectations and the reward of non-academic impact. If left unchecked, the propagation of the impact a-gender, it is argued, has the potential to guard against a greater proportion of women generating and influencing the use of research evidence in public policy decision-making.

Scholars continue to reflect on ‘science as a gendered endeavour’ (Amâncio, 2005 ). The extensive corpus of historical literature on gender in science and its originators (Merton, 1942 ; Keller et al., 1978 ; Kuhn, 1962 ), note the ‘pervasiveness’ of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘objective and the scientific’. Indeed, Amancio affirmed in more recent times that ‘modern science was born as an exclusively masculine activity’ ( 2005 ). The Impact agenda raises yet more obstacles indicative of this pervasiveness, which is documented by the ‘Matthew’/‘Matilda’ effect in Science (Merton, 1942 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Perceptions of gender bias (which Kretschmer and Kretschmer, 2013 hypothesise as myths in evaluative cultures) persist with respect to how gender effects publishing, pay and reward and other evaluative issues in HE (Ward and Grant, 1996 ). Some have argued that scientists and institutions perpetuate such issues (Amâncio, 2005 ). Irrespective of their origin, perceptions of gendered Impact impede evaluative cultures within HE and, more broadly, the quest for equality in excellence in research impact beyond academia.

To borrow from Van Den Brink and Benschop ( 2012 ), gender is conceptualised as an integral part of organisational practices, situated within a social construction of feminism (Lorber, 2005 ; Poggio, 2006 ). This article uses the notion of gender differences and inequality to refer to the ‘ hierarchical distinction in which either women and femininity and men and masculinity are valued over the other ’ (p. 73), though this is not precluding of individual preferences. Indeed, there is an emerging body of work focused on gendered associations not only about ‘types’ of research and/or ‘areas and topics’ (Thelwall et al., 2019 ), but also about what is referred to as non-academic impact. This is with particular reference to audit cultures in HE such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is the UK’s system of assessing the quality of research (Morley, 2003 ; Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ; Weinstein et al., 2019 ). While scholars have long attended to researching gender differences in relation to the marketisation of HE (Ahmed, 2006 ; Bank, 2011 ; Clegg, 2008 ; Gromkowska-Melosik, 2014 ; Leathwood et al., 2008 ), and the gendering of Impact activities such as outreach and public engagement (Ward and Grant, 1996 ), there is less understanding of how far academic perceptions of Impact are gendered. Further, how these gendered tensions influence panel culture in the evaluation of impact beyond academia is also not well understood. As a recent discussion in the Lancet read ‘ the causes of gender disparities are complex and include both distal and proximal factors ’. (Lundine et al., 2019 , p. 742).

This paper examines the ways in which researchers and research evaluators implicitly perceive gender as related to excellence in Impact both in its generation and in its evaluation. Using an analysis of two existing data sets; the pre-evaluation interviews of evaluators in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework and interviews with mid-senior career academics from across the range of disciplines with experience of building impact into funding applications and/ or its evaluation in two research-intensive universities in the UK and Australia between 2011 and 2013, this paper explores the implicitly gendered references expressed by our participants relating to the generation of non-academic, impact which emerged inductively through analysis. Both data sets comprise researcher perceptions of impact prior to being subjected to any formalised assessment of research Impact, thus allowing for the identification of unconscious gendered orientations that emerged from participant’s emotional and more abstract views about Impact. It notes how researchers use loaded terminology around ‘hard’, and ‘soft’ when conceptualising Impact that is reminiscent of long-standing associations between epistemological domains of research and notions of masculinity/femininity. It refers to ‘hard’ impact as those that are associated with meaning economic/ tangible and efficiently/ quantifiably evaluated, and ‘soft’ as denoting social, abstract, potentially qualitative or less easily and inefficiently evaluated. By extending this analysis to the gendered notions expressed by REF2014 panellists (expert reviewers whose responsibility it is to review the quality of the retrospective impact articulated in case studies for the purposes of research evaluation) towards the evaluation of Impact, this paper highlights how instead of challenging these tendencies, shared constructions of Impact and gendered productivity in academia act to amplify and embed these gendered notions within the evaluation outcomes and practice. It explores how vulnerable seemingly independent assessments of Impact are to these widespread gendered- associations between Impact, engagement and success. Specifically, perceptions of the excellence and judgements of feasibility relating to attribution, and causality within the narrative of the Impact case study become gendered.

The article is structured as follows. First, it reviews the gender-orientations towards notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ excellence in forms of scholarly distinction and explores how this relates to the REF Impact evaluation criteria, and the under-representation of women in the academic workforce. Specifically, it hypothesises the role of how gendered notions of excellence that construct academic identities contribute to a system that side-lines women in academia. This is despite associating the generation of Impact as a feminised skill. We label this as the ‘Impact a-gender’. The article then outlines the methodology and how the two, independent databases were combined and convergent themes developed. The results are then presented from academics in the UK and Australia and then from REF2014 panellists. This describes how the Impact a-gender currently operates through academic cultural orientations around Impact generation, and in its evaluation through peer-review panels by members of this same academic culture. The article concludes with a recommendation that the Impact a-gender be explored more thoroughly as a necessary step towards guiding against gender- bias in the academic evaluation, and reward system.

Literature review

Notions of impact excellence as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’.

Scholars have long attempted to consider the commonalities and differences across certain kinds of knowledge (Becher, 1989 , 1994 ; Biglan, 1973a ) and attempts to categorise, divide and harmonise the disciplines have been made (Biglan, 1973a , 1973b ; Becher, 1994 ; Caplan, 1979 ; Schommer–Aikins et al., 2003 ). Much of this was advanced with a typology of the disciplines from (Trowler, 2001 ), which categorised the disciplines as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. Both anecdotally and in the literature, ‘soft’ science is associated with working more with people and less with ‘things’ (Cassell, 2002 ; Thelwall et al., 2019 ). These dichotomies often lead to a hierarchy of types of Impact and oppose valuation of activities based on their gendered connotations.

Biglan’s system of classifying disciplines into groups based on similarities and differences denotes particular behaviours or characteristics, which then form part of clusters or groups—‘pure’, ‘applied’, ‘soft’, ‘hard’ etc. Simpson ( 2017 ) argues that Biglan’s classification persists as one of the most commonly referred to models of the disciplines despite the prominence of some others (Pantin, 1968 ; Kuhn, 1962 ; Smart et al., 2000 ). Biglan ( 1973b ) classified the disciplines across three dimensions; hard and soft, pure and applied, life and non-life (whether the research is concerned with living things/organisms) . This ‘taxonomy of the disciplines’ states that ‘pure-hard’ domains tend toward the life and earth sciences,’pure-soft’ the social sciences and humanities, and ‘applied hard’ focus on engineering and physical science with ‘soft-applied’ tending toward professional practice such as nursing, medicine and education. Biglan’s classification looked at levels of social connectedness and specifically found that applied scholars Footnote 2 were more socially connected, more interested and involved in service activities, and more likely to publish in the form of technical reports than their counterparts in the pure (hard) areas of study. This resonates with how Impact brings renewed currency and academic prominence to applied researchers (Chubb, 2017 ). Historically, scholars inhabiting the ‘hard’ disciplines had a greater preference for research; whereas, scholars representing soft disciplines had a greater preference for teaching (Biglan, 1973b ). Further, Biglan ( 1973b ) also found that hard science scholars sought out greater collaborative efforts among colleagues when teaching as opposed to their soft science counterparts.

There are also long-standing gendered associations and connotations with notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ (Storer, 1967 ). Typically used to refer to skills, but also used heavily with respect to the disciplines and knowledge domains, gendered assumptions and the mere use of ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ to describe knowledge production carries with it assumptions, which are often noted in the literature; ‘ we think of physics as hard and of political science as soft ’, Storer explains, adding how ‘hard seems to imply tough, brittle, impenetrable and strong, while soft on the other hand calls to mind the qualities of weakness, gentleness and malleability’ (p. 76). As described, hard science is typically associated with the natural sciences and quantitative paradigms whereas normative perceptions of feminine ‘soft’ skills or ‘soft’ science are often equated with qualitative social science. Scholars continue to debate dichotomised paradigms or ‘types’ of research or knowledge (Gibbons, 1999 ), which is emblematic of an undercurrent of epistemological hierarchy of the value of different kinds of knowledge. Such debates date back to the heated back and forth between scholars Snow (Snow, 2012 ) and literary critic Leavis who argued for their own ‘cultures’ of knowledge. Notwithstanding, these binary distinctions do few favours when gender is then ascribed to either knowledge domain or related activity (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). This is particularly pertinent in light of the current drive for more interdisciplinary research in the science system where there is also a focus on fairness, equality and diversity in the science system.

Academic performance and the Impact a-gender

Audit culture in academia impacts unfairly on women (Morley, 2003 ), and is seen as contributory to the wide gender disparities in academia, including the under-representation of women as professors (Ellemers et al., 2004 ), in leadership positions (Carnes et al., 2015 ), in receiving research acknowledgements (Larivière et al., 2013 ; Sugimoto et al., 2015 ), or being disproportionately concentrated in non-research-intensive universities (Santos and Dang Van Phu, 2019 ). Whereas gender discrimination also manifests in other ways such as during peer review (Lee and Noh, 2013 ), promotion (Paulus et al., 2016 ), and teaching evaluations (Kogan et al., 2010 ), the proliferation of an audit culture links gender disparities in HE to processes that emphasise ‘quantitative’ analysis methods, statistics, measurement, the creation of ‘experts’, and the production of ‘hard evidence’. The assumption here is that academic performance and the metrics used to value, and evaluate it, are heavily gendered in a way that benefits men over women, reflecting current disparities within the HE workforce. Indeed, Morely (2003) suggests that the way in which teaching quality is female dominated and research quality is male dominated, leads to a morality of quality resulting in the larger proportion of women being responsible for student-focused services within HE. In addition, the notion of ‘excellence’ within these audit cultures implicitly reflect images of masculinity such as rationality, measurement, objectivity, control and competitiveness (Burkinshaw, 2015 ).

The association of feminine and masculine traits in academia (Holt and Ellis, 1998 ), and ‘gendering its forms of knowledge production’ (Clegg, 2008 ), is not new. In these typologies, women are largely expected to be soft-spoken, nurturing and understanding (Bellas, 1999 ) yet often invisible and supportive in their ‘institutional housekeeping’ roles (Bird et al., 2004 ). Men, on the other hand are often associated with being competitive, ambitious and independent (Baker, 2008 ). When an individual’s behaviour is perceived to transcend these gendered norms, then this has detrimental effects on how others evaluate their competence, although some traits displayed outside of these typologies go somewhat ‘under the radar’. Nonetheless, studies show that women who display leadership qualities (competitiveness, ambition and decisiveness) are characterised more negatively than men (Rausch, 1989 ; Heilman et al., 1995 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Incongruity between perceptions of ‘likeability’ and ‘competence’ and its relationship to gender bias is present in evaluations in academia, where success is dependent on the perceptions of others and compounded within an audit culture (Yarrow and Davis, 2018). This has been seen in peer review, reports for men and women applicants, where women were disadvantaged by the same characteristics that were seen as a strength on proposals by men (Severin et al., 2019 ); as well as in teaching evaluations where women receive higher evaluations if they are perceived as ‘nurturing’ and ‘supportive’ (Kogan et al., 2010 ). This results in various potential forms of prejudice in academia: Where traits normally associated with masculinity are more highly valued than those associated with femininity (direct) or when behaviour that is generally perceived to be ‘masculine’ is enacted by a woman and then perceived less favourably (indirect/ unconscious). That is not to mention direct sexism, rather than ‘through’ traits; a direct prejudice.

Gendered associations of Impact are not only oversimplified but also incredibly problematic for an inclusive, meaningful Impact agenda and research culture. Currently, in the UK, the main funding body for research in the UK, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) uses a broad Impact definition: ‘ the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy ’ (UKRI website, 2019 ). The most recent REF, REF2014, Impact was defined as ‘ …an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia ’. In Australia, the Australian Research Council (ARC) proposed that researchers should ‘embed’ Impact into the research process from the outset. Both Australia and the UK have been engaged in policy borrowing around the evaluation of societal impact and share many similarities in approaches to generating and evaluating it. Indeed, Impact has been deliberately conceptualised by decision-makers, funders and governments as broad in order to increase the appearance of being inclusivity, to represent a broad range of disciplines, as well as to reflect the ‘diverse ways’ that potential beneficiaries of academic research can be reached ‘beyond academia’. The adoption of societal impact as a formalised criterion in the evaluation of research excellence was initially perceived to be potentially beneficial for women, due to its emphasis on concepts such as ‘public engagement’; ‘duty’ and non-academic ‘cooperation/collaboration’ (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). In addition, the adoption of narrative case studies to demonstrate Impact, rather than adopting a complete metrics-focused exercise, can also be seen as an opportunity for women to demonstrate excellence in the areas where they are over-represented, such as teaching, cultural enrichment, public engagement (Andrews et al., 2005 ), informing public policy and improving public services (Schatteman, 2014 ; Wheatle and BrckaLorenz, 2015). However, despite this, studies highlight how for the REF2014, only 25% of Impact Case Studies for business and management studies were from women (Davies et al., 2020 ).

With respect to Impact evaluation, previous research shows that there is a direct link between notions of academic culture, and how research (as a product of that culture) is valued and evaluated (Leathwood and Reid, 2008 ; p. 120). Geertz ( 1983 ) argues that academic membership is a ‘cultural frame that defines a great part of one’s life’ influences belief systems around how academic work is orientated. This also includes gendered associations implicit in the academic reward system, which in turn influences how academics believe success is to be evaluated, and in what form that success emerges. This has implications in how academic associations of the organisation of research work and the ongoing constructions of professional identity relative to gender, feeds into how these same academics operate as evaluators within a peer review system evaluation. In this case, instead of operating to challenge these tendencies, shared constructions of gendered academic work are amplified to the extent that they unconsciously influence perceptions of excellence and the judgements of feasibility as pertaining to the attribution and causality of the narrative argument. As such, in an evaluation of Impact with its ambiguous definition (Derrick, 2018 ), and the lack of external indicators to signal success independent of cultural constructions inherent in the panel membership, effects are assumed to be more acute. In this way, this paper argues that the Impact a-gender can act to further disadvantage women.

The research combines two existing research data sets in order to explore implicit notions of gender associated with the generation and evaluation of research Impact beyond academia. Below the two data sets and the steps involved in analysing and integrating findings are described along with our theoretical positioning within the feminist literature Where verbatim quotation is used, we have labelled the participants according to each study highlighting their role and gender. Further, the evaluator interviews specify the disciplinary panel and subpanel to which they belonged, as well as their evaluation responsibilities such as: ‘Outputs only’; ‘Outputs and Impact’; and ‘Impacts only’.

Analysis of qualitative data sets

This research involved the analysis and combination of two independently collected, qualitative interview databases. The characteristics and specifics of both databases are outlined below.

Interviews with mid-senior academics in the UK and Australia

Fifty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2013 with mid-senior academics at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK. The interviews were 30–60 min long and participants were sourced via the research offices at both sites. Participants were contacted via email and invited to participate in a study concerning resistance towards the Impact agenda in the UK and Australia and were specifically asked for their perceptions of its relationship with freedom, value and epistemic responsibility and variations across discipline, career stage and national context. Mostly focused on ex ante impact, some interviewees also described their experiences of Impact in the UK and Australia, in relation to its formal assessment as part of the Excellence Innovation Australia (EIA) for Australia and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.

Participants comprised mid to senior career academics with experience of winning funding from across the range of disciplines broadly representative of the arts and humanities, social sciences, physical science, maths and engineering and the life and earth sciences. For the purposes of this paper, although participant demographic information was collected, the relationship between the gender of the participants, their roles, disciplines/career stage was not explicitly explored instead, such conditions were emergent in the subsequent inductive coding during thematic analysis. A reflexive log was collected in order to challenge and draw attention to assumptions and underlying biases, which may affect the author, inclusive of their own gender identity. Further information on this is provided in Chubb ( 2017 ).

Pre- and post-evaluation interviews with REF2014 evaluators

REF2014 in the UK represented the world’s first formalised evaluation of ex-post impact, comprising of 20% of the overall evaluation. This framework served as a unique experimental environment with which to explore baseline tendencies towards impact as a concept and evaluative object (Derrick, 2018 ).

Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted with willing participants: sixty-two panellists were interviewed from the UK’s REF2014 Main Panel A prior to the evaluation taking place; and a fifty-seven of these were re-interviewed post-evaluation. Main Panel A covers six Sub-panels: (1) Clinical Medicine; (2) Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care; (3) Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy; (4) Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; (5) Biological Sciences; and (6) Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Sciences. Again, the relationship between the gender of the participants and their discipline is not the focus for the purposes of this paper.

Database combination and identification of common emergent themes

The inclusion of data sets using both Australian and UK researchers was pertinent to this study as both sites were at the cusp of implementing the evaluation of Impact formally. These researcher interviews, as well as the evaluator interviews were conducted prior to any formalised Impact evaluation took place, but when both contexts required ex ante impact in terms of certain funding allocation, meaning an analysis of these baseline perceptions between databases was possible. Further, the inclusion of the post-evaluation interviews with panellists in the UK allowed an exploration of how these gendered perceptions identified in the interviews with researchers and panellists prior to the evaluation, influenced panel behaviour during the evaluation of Impact.

Initially, both data sets were analysed using similar, inductive, grounded-theory-informed approaches inclusive of a discourse and thematic analysis of the language used by participants when describing impact, which allowed for the drawing out of metaphor (Zinken et al., 2008 ). This allowed data combination and analysis of the two databases to be conducted in line with the recommendations for data-synthesis as outlined in Weed ( 2005 ) as a form of interpretation. This approach guarded against the quantification of qualitative findings for the purposes of synthesis, and instead focused on an initial dialogic approach between the two authors (Chubb and Derrick), followed by a re-analysis of qualitative data sets (Heaton, 1998 ) in line with the outcomes of the initial author-dialogue as a method of circumventing many of the drawbacks associated with qualitative data-synthesis. Convergent themes from each, independently analysed data set were discussed between authors, before the construction of new themes that were an iterative analysis of the combined data set. Drawing on the feminist tradition the authors did not apply feminist standpoint theory, instead a fully inductive approach was used to unearth rich empirical data. An interpretative and inductive approach to coding the data using NVIVO software in both instances was used and a reflexive log maintained. The availability of both full, coded, qualitative data sets, as well as the large sample size of each, allowed this data-synthesis to happen.

Researcher’s perceptions of Impact as either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’

Both UK and Australian academic researchers (researchers) perceive a guideline of gendered productivity (Davies et al., 2017 ; Sax et al., 2002 ; Astin, 1978 ; Ward and Grant, 1996 ). This is where men or women are being dissuaded (by their inner narratives, their institutions or by colleagues) from engaging in Impact either in preference to other (more masculine) notions of academic productivity, or towards softer (for women) because they consider themselves and are considered by others to be ‘good at it’. Participants often gendered the language of Impact and introduced notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. On the one hand, this rehearses and resurfaces long-standing views about the ‘Matthew Effect’ because often softer Impacts were seen as being of less value by participants, but also indicates that the word impact itself carries its own connotations, which are then weighed down further by more entrenched gender associations.

Our research shows that when describing Impact, it was not necessarily the masculinity or femininity of the researcher that was emphasised by participants, rather researchers made gendered presumptions around the type of Impact, or the activity used to generate it as either masculine or feminine. Some participants referred to their own research or others’ research as either ‘hard’ or as ‘soft and woolly’. Those who self-professed that their research was ‘soft’ or woolly’ felt that their research was less likely to qualify as having ‘hard’ impact in REF terms Footnote 3 ; instead, they claimed their research would impact socially, as opposed to economically; ‘ stuff that’s on a flaky edge — it’s very much about social engagement ’ (Languages, Australia, Professor, Male) . One researcher described Impact as ‘a nasty Treasury idea,’ comparing it to: a tsunami, crashing over everything which will knock out stuff that is precious ’ . (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) . This imagery associates the concept of impact with force and weight (or hardness as mentioned earlier) particularly in disciplines where the effect of their research may be far more nuanced and subtle. One Australian research used force to depict the impact of teaching and claimed Impact was like a footprint, and teaching was ‘ a pretty heavy imprint ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Participants characterised ‘force and weight’ as masculine, suggesting that some connotations of Impact and the associated activities may be gendered. The word ‘Impact’ was inherently perceived by many researchers as problematic, bound with linguistic connotations and those imposed by the official definitions, which in many cases are perceived as negative or maybe even gendered (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ The etymology of a word like impact is interesting. I’ve always seen what I do as being a more subtle incremental engagement, relevance, a contribution ’. (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) .

Researchers associated the word ‘impact’ with hard-ness, weight and force; ‘ anything that sorts of hits you ’ (Languages, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . One researcher suggested that Impact ‘ sounds kind of aggressive — the poor consumer! ’ (History, Australia, Professor, Female) . Talking about her own research in the performing arts, one Australian researcher commented: ‘ It’s such a pain in the arse because the Arts don’t fit the model. But in a way they do if you look at the impact as being something quite soft ’ (Music, Australia, Professor, Female) . Likewise, a similar comparison was seen by a female researcher from the mechanical engineering discipline: ‘ My impact case study wasn’t submitted mainly because I’m dealing with that slightly on the woolly side of things ’ (Mechanical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Largely, gender related comments hailed from the ‘hard’ science and from arts and humanities researchers. Social scientists commented less, and indeed, one levelled that Impact was perhaps less a matter of gender, and more a matter of ability (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ It’s about being articulate! Both guys and women who are very articulate and communicate well are outward looking on all of these things ’ ( Engineering Education, Australia, Professor, Female).

Gendered notions of performativity were also very pronounced by evaluators who were assessing the outputs only, suggesting how these panel cultures are orientated around notions of gender and scientific outputs as ‘hard’ if represented by numbers. The focus on numbers was perceived by the following panellist as ‘ a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types ’ within the panel that relate to findings about the association of certain traits—risk aversion, competitiveness, for example, with a masculinised market logic in HE;

And I like that a lot because I think that there is a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types of always looking at the numbers, like the numbers and everything. And I just did feel that steer that we got from the panel chairs, both of them were men by the way, but they were very clear, the impact factors and citations and the rank order of a journal is this is information that can be useful, but it’s not your immediate first stop. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

However, a metric-dominant approach was not the result of a male-dominated panel environment and instead, to the panels credit, evaluators were encouraged not to use one-metric as the only deciding factor between star-rating of quality. However, this is not to suggest that metrics did not play a dominant role. In fact, in order to resolve arguments, evaluators were encouraged to ‘ reflect on these other metrics ’ (Panel 3, Outputs only, Male) in order to rectify arguments where the assessment of quality was in conflict. This use of ‘other metrics’ was preferential to a resolution of differences that are based on more ‘soft’ arguments that are based on understanding where differences in opinion might lie in the interpretation of the manuscript’s quality. Instead, the deciding factor in resolving arguments would be the responsibility, primarily, of a ‘hard’ concept of quality as dictated by a numerical value;

Read the paper, judge the quality, judge the originality, the rigour, the impact — if you have to because you’re in dispute with another assessor, then reflect on these other metrics. So I don’t think metrics are that helpful actually if and until you’ve got a real issue to be able to make a decision. But I worry very much that metrics are just such a simple way of making the process much easier, and I’m worried about that because I think there’s a bit of game playing going on with impact factors and that kind of thing. (Panel 3, Outputs Only, Male)

Table 1 outlines the emergent themes, which, through inductive coding participants broadly categorised domains of research, their qualities and associations, types of activities and the gendered assumption generally made by participants when describing that activity. The table is intended only to provide an indicative overview of the overall tendencies of participants toward certain narratives as is not exhaustive, as well as a guide to interpret the perceptions of Impact illustrated in the below results.

Table one describes the dichotomous views that seemed to emerge from the research but it’s important to note that researchers associated Impact as related to gender in subtle, and in some cases overt ways. The data suggests that some male participants felt that female academics might be better at Impact, suggesting that female academics might find it liberating, linked it to a sense of duty or public service, implying that it was second nature. In addition, some male participants associated types of Impact domains as female-orientated activity and the reverse was the case with female and male-orientated ‘types’ of Impact. For example, at one extreme, a few male researchers seemed to perceive public engagement as something, which females would be particularly good at, generalising that they are not competitive ‘ women are better at this! They are less competitive! ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Indeed, one male researcher suggested that competitiveness actually helps academics have an impact and does not impede it:

I get a huge buzz from trying to communicate those to a wider audience and winning arguments and seeing them used. It’s not the use that motivates me it’s the process of winning, I’m competitive! (Economics, UK, Professor, Male)

Analysis also revealed evidence that some researchers has gendered perceptions of Impact activities just as evaluators did. Here, women were more likely to promote the importance of engaging in Impact activities, whereas men were focused on producing indicators with hard, quantitative indicators of success. Some researchers implied that public engagement was not something entirely associated with the kinds of Impact needed to advance one’s career and for a few male researchers, this was accordingly associated with female academics. Certain female researchers in the sciences and the arts suggested similarly that there was a strong commitment among women to carry out public engagement, but that this was not necessarily shared by their male counterparts who, they perceived, undervalued this kind of work:

I think the few of us women in the faculty will grapple with that a lot about the relevance of what we’re doing and the usefulness, but for the vast majority of people it’s not there… [She implies that]…I think there is a huge gender thing there that every woman that you talk to on campus would consider that the role of the university is along the latter statement (*to communicate to the public). The vast majority of men would not consider that’s a role of the university. There’s a strong gender thing. (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

Notwithstanding, it is important to distinguish between engagement and Impact. This research shows that participants perceive Impact activities to be gendered. There was a sense from one arts female researcher that women might be more interested in getting out there and communicating their work but that crucially, it is not the be-all and end- all of doing research: ‘ Women feel that there’s something more liberating, I can empathise with that, but that couldn’t be the whole job ’. Music, Australia, Professor, Female Footnote 4 . When this researcher, who was very much orientated towards Impact, asked if there were enough interviewees, she added ‘ mind you, you’ve probably spoken to enough men in lab coats ’. This could imply that inward-facing roles are associated with male-orientated activity and outward facing roles as perceived as more female orientated. Such sentiments perhaps relate to a binary delineation of women as more caring, subjective, applied and of men as harder, scientific and theoretical/ rational. This links to a broader characterisation of HE as marketised and potentially, more ‘male’ or at least masculinised—where increasing competitiveness, marketisation and performativity can be seen as linked to an increasingly macho way of doing business (Blackmore, 2002 ; Deem, 1998 ; Grummell et al., 2009 ; Reay, n.d. ). The data is also suggestive of the attitude that communication is a ‘soft’ skill and the interpersonal is seen as a less masculine trait. ‘ This is a huge generalisation but I still say that the profession is so dominated by men, undergraduates are so dominated by men and most of those boys will come into engineering because they’re much more comfortable dealing with a computer than with people ’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Again, this suggests women are more likely to pursue those scientific subjects, which will make a difference or contribute to society (such as nursing or environmental research, certainly those subjects that would be perceived as less ‘hard’ science domains).

There was also a sense that Impact activity, namely in this case public engagement and community work, was associated with women more than men by some participants (Amâncio, 2005 ). However, public engagement and certain social impact domains appeared to have a lower status and intellectual worth in the eyes of some participants. Some inferred that social and ‘soft’ impacts are seen as associated. With discipline. For instance, research concerning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) subjects with females. They in turn may be held in low esteem. Some of the accounts suggest that soft impacts are perceived by women as not ‘counting’ as Impact:

‘ At least two out of the four of us who are female are doing community service and that doesn’t count, we get zero credit, actually I would say it gets negative credit because it takes time away from everything else ’. (Education Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

This was intimated again by another female UK computer scientist who claimed that since her work was on the ‘woolly side’ of things, and her impacts were predominantly in the social and public domain, she would not be taken seriously enough to qualify as a REF Impact case study, despite having won an award for her work:

‘ I don’t think it helps that if I were a male professor doing the same work I might be taken more seriously. It’s interesting, why recently? Because I’ve never felt that I’ve not been taken seriously because I’m a woman, but something happened recently and I thought, oh, you’re not taking me seriously because I’m a woman. So I think it’s a part ’. (Computer Science, UK, Professor, Female)

Researchers also connect the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ associations with Impact described earlier to male and female traits. The relationship between Impact and gender is not well understood and it is not clear how much these issues are directly relatable to Impact or more symptomatic of the broader picture in HE. In order to get a broader picture, it is important to examine how these gendered notions of Impact translate into its evaluation. Some participants suggested that gender is a factor in the securing of grant money—certainly this comment reveals a local speculation that ‘the big boys’ get the grants, in Australia, at least: ‘ ARC grants? I’ve had a few but nothing like the big boys that get one after the other ,’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . This is not dissimilar to the ‘alpha male’ comments from the evaluators described below who note a tendency for male evaluators to rely on ‘hard’ numbers whose views are further examined in the following section.

Gendered excellence in Impact evaluation

In the pre-evaluation interviews, panellists were asked about what they perceived to be ‘excellent’ research and ‘excellent’ Impact. Within this context, are mirrored conceptualisations of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ as was seen with the interviews with researchers described above. These conceptualisations were captured prior to the evaluation began. They can therefore be interpreted as the raw, baseline assumptions of Impact that are free from the effects of the panel group, showed that there were differences in how evaluators perceived Impact, and that these perceptions were gendered.

Although all researchers conceptualised Impact as a linear process for the purposes of the REF2014 exercise (Derrick, 2018 ), there was a tendency for female evaluators to be open to considering the complexity of Impact, even in a best-case scenario. This included a consideration that Impact as dictated within the narrative might have different indicators of value to different evaluators; ‘ I just think that that whole framing means that there is a form of normative standard of perfect impact ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Female) . This evaluator, in particular, went further to state how that their impression of Impact would be constructed from the comparators available during the evaluation;

‘ Given that I’m presenting impact as a good story, it would be like you saying to me; ‘Can you describe to me a perfect Shakespearean play?’…. well now of course, I can’t. You can give me lots of plays but they all have different kinds of interesting features. Different people would say that their favourite play was different. To me, if you’re taking interpretivist view, constructivist view, there is no perfect normative standard. It’s just not possible ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female)

Female evaluators were also more sensitive to other complex factors influencing the evaluation of Impact, including time lag; ‘ …So it takes a long time for things like that to be accepted…it took hundreds of studies before it was generally accepted as real ’ (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female ); as well as the indirect way that research influences policy as a form of Impact;

‘ I don’t think that anything would get four stars without even blinking. I think that is impossible to answer because you have to look at the whole evidence in this has gone on, and how that does link to the impact that is being claimed, and then you would then have to look at how that impact, exactly how that research has impacted on the ways of the world, in terms of change or in terms of society or whatever. I don’t think you can see this would easily get four stars because of the overall process is being looked at, as well as the actual outcome ’ . (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Although these typologies were not absolute, there was a lack of complexity in the nuances around Impact. There was also heavily gendered language around Impacts as measurable, or not, that mirrored the association of Impact as being either ‘hard’, and therefore measurable, or ‘soft, and therefore more nuanced in value. In this way, male evaluators expressed Impact as a causal, linear event that occurred ‘ in a very short time ’ (P2, Outputs and Impact, Male) and involved a single ‘ star ’ (P3, Impacts only, Male) or ‘ impact champion ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Male) that drove it from start (research), to finish (Impact). These associations about Impact being ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ made by evaluators, mirror the responses from researchers in the above sections. In the example below, the evaluator used words such as ‘ strong ’ and ‘ big way ’ to describe Impact success, as well as emphasises causality in the argument;

‘ …if it has affected a lot of people or affected policy in a strong way or created change in a big way, and it can be clearly linked back to the research, and it’s made a difference ’. (Panel 2, Outputs and Impact, Male)

These perhaps show disciplinary differences as much as gendered differences. Further, there was a stronger tendency for male evaluators to strive towards conceptualisations of excellence in Impact as measurable or ‘ it’s something that is decisive and actionable ’ (Panel 6, Impacts, Male) . One male evaluator explained his conceptualised version of Impact excellence as ‘ straightforward ’ and therefore ‘ obviously four-star ’ due to the presence of metrics with which to measure Impact. This was a perception more commonly associated with male evaluators;

‘ …if somebody has been able to devise a — let’s say pancreatic cancer — which is a molecular cancer, which hasn’t made any progress in the last 40 years, and where the mortality is close to 100% after diagnosis, if someone devised a treatment where now suddenly, after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, 90 percent of the people are now still alive 5 years later, where the mortality rate is almost 0%, who are alive after 5 years. That, of course, would be a dramatic, transformative impact ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Male)

In addition, his tendency to seek various numeric indicators for measuring, and therefore assessing Impact (predominantly economic impact), as well as compressing its realisation to a small period of time ( ‘ suddenly ’ ) in a causal fashion, was more commonly expressed in male evaluators. This tendency automatically indicates the association of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ and divided along gendered norms, but also expresses Impact in monetary terms;

‘ Something that went into a patient or the company has pronounced with…has spun out and been taken up by a commercial entity or a clinical entity ’ (Panel 3, Outputs and Impacts, Male) , as well as impacts that are marketised; ‘ A new antimicrobial drug to market ’. (Panel 6, Outputs and Impact, Male) .

There was also the perception that female academics would be better at engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ) due to its link with notions of ‘ duty ’ (as a mother), ‘ engagement ’ and ‘ public service ’ are reflected in how female evaluators were also more open to the idea that excellent Impact is achieved through productive, ongoing partnerships with non-academic stakeholders. Here, the reflections of ‘duty’ from the evaluators was also mirrored by in interviews with researchers. Indeed, the researchers merged perceptions of parenthood, an academic career and societal impact generation. One female researcher drew on her role as a mother as supportive of her ability to participate in Impact generation, ‘ I have kids that age so… ’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . Indeed, parenthood emerged from researchers of both genders in relation to the Impact agenda. Two male participants spoke positively about the need to transfer knowledge of all kinds to society referencing their role as parents: ‘ I’m all for that. I want my kids to have a rich culture when they go to school ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E2) , and ‘ My children are the extension of my biological life and my students are an extension of my thoughts ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E1) . One UK female biologist commented that she indeed enjoys delivering public engagement and outreach and implies a reference to having a family as enabling her ability to do so: ‘ It’s partly being involved with the really well-established outreach work ,’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) .

For the evaluators, the idea that ‘public service’ as second nature for female academics, was reflected in how female evaluators perceived the long, arduous and serendipitous nature of Impact generation, as well as their commitment to assessing the value of Impact as a ‘pathway’ rather than in line with impact as a ‘product’. Indeed, this was highlighted by one male evaluator who suggested that the measurement and assessment of Impact ‘ …needs to be done by economists ’ and that

‘ you [need] to put in some quantification one everything…[that] puts a negative value on being sick and a positive large value on living longer. So, yeah, the greatest impact would be something that saves us money and generates income for the country but something broad and improves quality of life ’. (Panel 2, Impacts, Male)

Since evaluators tend to exercise cognitive bias in evaluative situations (Langfeldt, 2006 ), these preconceived ideas about Impact, its generation and the types of people responsible for its success are also likely to permeate the evaluative deliberations around Impact during the peer review process. What is uncertain is the extent that these messages are dominant within the panel discourse, and therefore the extent that they influence the formation of a consensus within the group, and the ‘dominant definition’ of Impact (Derrick, 2018 ) that emerges as a result.

Notions of gender from the evaluators post-evaluation

Similar notions of gender-roles in academia pertaining to notions of scientific productivity were echoed by academics who were charged with its evaluation as part of the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Interviews with evaluators revealed not only that the panel working-methods and characteristics about what constituted a ‘good’ evaluator were implicitly along gendered norms, but also that the assumed credit assumptions of performativity were also based on gender.

In assessments of the Impact criterion, an assessment that is not as amenable to quantitative representation requiring panels to conceptualise a very complex process, with unstandardised measures of significance and reach, there was still a gendered perception of Impact being ‘women’s work’ in academia. This perception was based on the tendency towards conceptualising Impact as ‘slightly grubby’ and ‘not very pure’, which echoes previously reported pre-REF2014 tensions that Impact is a task that an academic does when they cannot do real research (de Jong et al., 2015 );

But I would say that something like research impact is — it seems something slightly grubby. It’s not seen as not — by the academics, as not very pure. To some of them, it seems women’s work. Talking to the public, do you see what I mean? (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, gendered roles also relate to how the panel worked with the assessment of Impact. Previous research has outlined how the equality and diversity assessment of panels for REF2014 were not conducted until after panellists were appointed (Derrick, 2018 ), leading to a lack of equal-representation of women on most panels. Some of the female panellists reflected that this resulted not only in a hyper-awareness of one’s own identity and value as a woman on the panel, but also implicitly associating the role that a female panellist would play in generating the evaluation. One panellist below, reflected that she was the only female in a male-dominated panel, and that the only other females in the room were the panel secretariat. The panellist goes further to explain how this resulted in a gendered-division of labour surrounding the assessment of Impact;

I mean, there’s a gender thing as well which isn’t directing what you’re talking about what you’re researching, but I was the only woman on the original appointed panel. The only other women were the secretariat. In some ways I do — there was initially a very gendered division of perspective where the women were all the ones aggregate the quantitative research, or typing it all up or talking about impact whereas the men were the ones who represented the big agenda, big trials. (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, evaluators expressed opinions about what constituted a good and a bad panel member. From this, the evaluation showed that traits such as the ability to work as a ‘team’ and to build on definitions and methods of assessment for Impact through deliberation and ‘feedback’ were perceived along gendered lines. In this regard, women perceived themselves as valuable if they were ‘happy to listen to discussions’, and not ‘too dogmatic about their opinion’. Here, women were valued if they played a supportive, supplementary role in line with Bellas ( 1999 ), which was in clear distinction to men who contributed as creative thinkers and forgers of new ideas. As one panellist described;

A good panel member is an Irish female. A good panel member was someone who was happy to — someone who is happy to listen to discussions; to not be too dogmatic about their opinion, but can listen and learn, because impact is something we are all learning from scratch. Somebody who wasn’t too outspoken, was a team player. (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Likewise, another female evaluator reflected on the reasons for her inclusion as a panel member was due to her ‘generalist perspective’ as opposed to a perspective that is over prescribed. This was suggestive of how an overly specialist perspective would run counter to the reasons that she was included as a panellist which was, in her opinion, due to her value as an ethnic and gender ‘token’ to the panel;

‘ I think it’s also being able to provide some perspective, some general perspective. I’m quite a generalist actually, I’m not a specialist……So I’m very generalist. And I think they’re also well aware of the ethnic and gender composition of that and lots of reasons why I’m asked on panels. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Women perceived their value on the panel as supportive, as someone who is prepared to work on the team, and listen to other views towards as a generalist, and constructionist, rather than as an enforced of dogmatic views and raw, hard notions of Impact that were represented through quantitative indicators only. As such, how the panel operated reflects general studies of how work can be organised along gender lines, as well as specific to workload and power in the academy. The similarity between the gendered associations towards conceptualising Impact from the researchers and evaluators, combined with how the panel organises its work along gendered lines, suggests how panel culture echoes the implicit tendencies within the wider research community. The implications of this tendency in relation to the evaluation of non-academic Impact is discussed below.

Discussion: an Impact a-gender?

This study shows how researchers and evaluators in two, independent data sets echoed a gendered orientation towards Impact, and how this implies an Impact a-gender. That gendered notions of Impact emerged as a significant theme from two independent data sets speaks to the importance of the issue. It also illustrates the need for policymakers and funding organisations to acknowledge its potential effects as part of their efforts towards embedding a more inclusive research culture around the generation and evaluation of research impact beyond academia.

Specifically, this paper has identified gendered language around the generation of, and evaluation of Impact by researchers in Australia and the UK, as well as by evaluators by the UK’s most recent Research Excellence Framework in 2014. For the UK and Australia, the prominence of Impact, as well as the policy borrowing between each country (Chubb, 2017 ) means that a reliable comparison of pre-evaluation perceptions of researchers and evaluators can be made. In both data sets presumptions of Impact as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ by both researchers and evaluators were found to be gendered. Whereas it is not surprising that panel culture reflects the dominant trends within the wider academic culture, this paper raises the question of how the implicit operation of gender bias surrounding notions of scientific productivity and its measurement, invade and therefore unduly influence the evaluation of those notions during peer-review processes. This negates the motivation behind a broad Impact definition and evaluation as inclusive since unconscious bias towards women can still operate if left unchecked and unmanaged.

Gendered notions of excellence were also related to the ability to be ‘competitive’, and that once Impact became a formalised, countable and therefore competitive criterion, it also become masculine where previously it existed as a feminised concept related to female academic-ness. As a feminised concept, Impact once referred to notions of excellence requiring communication such as public engagement, or stakeholder coordination—the ‘softer’ impacts. However, this association only remains ‘soft’ insofar as Impact remains unmeasurable, or more nuanced in definition. This is especially pertinent for the evaluation of societal impact where already conceived ideas of engagement and ‘ women’s work ’ influence how evaluators assess the feasibility of impact narratives for the purposes of its assessment. This paper also raises the question that notions of gender in relation to Impact persist irrespective of the identities assumed for the purposes of its evaluation (i.e., as a peer reviewer). This is not to say that academic culture in the UK and Australia, where Impact is increasingly being formalised into rewards systems, is not changing. More that there is a tendency in some evaluations for the burden of evidence to be applied differently to genders due to tensions surrounding what women are ‘good’ at doing: engagement, versus what ‘men’ are good at doing regarding Impact. In this scenario, quantitative indicators of big, high-level impacts are to be attributable to male traits, rather than female. This has already been noted in student evaluations of teaching (Kogan et al., 2010 ) and of academic leadership performance where the focus on the evaluation is on how others interpret performance based on already held gendered views about competence based on behaviours (Williams et al., 2014 ; Holt and Ellis, 1998 ). As such, when researchers transcend these gendered identities that are specific to societal impact, there is a danger of an Impact-a-gender bias arising in the assessment and forecasting of Impact. This paper extends this understanding and outlines how this may also be the case for assessments of societal impact.

By examining perceptions, as well as using an inductive analysis, this study was able to unearth unconsciously employed gendered notions that would not have been prominent or possible to pick up if we asked the interviewees about gender directly. This was particularly the case for the re-analysis of the post-evaluation interviews. However, future studies might consider incorporating a disciplinary-specific perspective as although the evaluators were from the medical/biomedical disciplines, researchers were from a range of disciplines. This would identify any discipline-specific risk towards an Impact a-gender. Nonetheless, further work that characterises the impact a-gender, as well as explores its wider implications for gender inequities within HE is currently underway.

How research evidence is labelled as excellent and therefore trustworthy, is heavily dictated by an evaluation process that is perceived as impartial and fair. However, if evaluations are compounded by gender bias, this confounds assessments of excellence with gendered expectation of non-academic impact. Consequently, gendered expectations of excellence for non-academic impact has the potential to: unconsciously dissuade women from pursuing more masculinised types of impact; act as a barrier to how female researchers mobilise their research evidence; as well as limit the recognition female researchers gain as excellent and therefore trustworthy sources of evidence.

The aim of this paper was not to criticise the panellists and researchers for expressing gendered perspectives, nor to present evidence about how researchers are unduly influenced by gender bias. The results shown do not support either of these views. However, the aim of this paper was to acknowledge how gender bias in research Impact generation can lead to a panel culture dominated by academics that translate the implicit and explicit biases within academia that influence its evaluation. This paper raises an important question regarding what we term the ‘Impact a-gender’, which outlines a mechanism in which gender bias feeds into the generation and evaluation of a research criterion, which is not traditionally associated with a hard, metrics-masculinised output from research. Along with other techniques used to combat unconscious bias in research evaluation, simply by identifying, and naming the issue, this paper intends to combat its ill effects through a community-wide discussions as a mechanism for developing tools to mitigate its wider effect if left unchecked or merely accepted as ‘acceptable’. In addition, it is suggested that government and funding organisations explicitly refer to the impact a-gender as part of their wider EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) agendas towards minimising the influence of unconscious bias in research impact and evaluation.

Data availability

Data is available upon request subject to ethical considerations such as consent so as not to compromise the individual privacy of our participants.

Change history

19 may 2020.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

For the purposes of this paper, when the text refers to non-academic, societal impact, or the term ‘Impact’ we are referring to the change and effect as defined by REF2014/2021 and the larger conceptualisation of impact that is generated through knowledge exchange and engagement. In this way, the paper refers to a broad conceptualisation of research impact that occurs beyond academia. This allows a distinction between Impact as central to this article’s contribution, as opposed to academic impact, and general word ‘impact’.

Impact scholars or those who are ‘good at impact’ are often equated with applied researchers.

One might interpret this as meaning ‘economic impact’.

This is described in the next section as ‘women’s work’ by one evaluator.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leaders Programme (ES/K008897/2). We would also like to acknowledge their peers for offering their views on the paper in advance of publication and in doing so thank Dr. Richard Watermeyer, University of Bath, Professor Paul Wakeling, University of York and Dr. Gabrielle Samuel, Kings College London.

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Chubb, J., Derrick, G.E. The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation. Palgrave Commun 6 , 72 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0438-z

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8 Feminist Qualitative Research: Toward Transformation of Science and Society

Maureen C. McHugh, Department of Psychology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

• Published: 04 August 2014
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Feminist research is described in terms of its purposes of knowledge about women’s lives, advocacy for women, analysis of gender oppression, and transformation of society. Feminist critiques of social science research are reviewed in relation to the development of methodological and epistemological positions. Feminist research is viewed as contributing to the transformation of science from empiricism to postmodernism. Reflexivity, collaboration, power analysis, and advocacy are discussed as common practices of feminist qualitative research. Several qualitative approaches to research are described in relation to feminist research goals, with illustrations of feminist research included. Validity and voice are identified as particular challenges in the conduct of feminist qualitative research. Intersectionality and double consciousness are reviewed as feminist contributions to transformation of science. Some emerging and innovative forms of feminist qualitative research are highlighted in relation to potential future directions.

What Is Feminist Research?

A starting principle of feminist research is that psychology should, at minimum, be nonsexist. Feminist scholars have identified numerous sexist biases in the existing psychological literature; psychological research is sexist to the extent that it incorporates stereotypic thinking about women or gender ( McHugh, Koeske, & Frieze, 1986 ). Sexist bias also refers to theories or research that do not have equal relevance to individuals of both sexes and to research in which greater attention or value is given to the life experiences of one sex ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). Research practices and methods that produce, promote, or privilege sex/gender inequalities are sexist and unacceptable.

Feminist research is research that is not only nonsexist, but also works actively for the benefit and advancement of women ( McHugh et al., 1986 ) and puts gender at the center of one’s inquiry. Specifically, feminist research examines the gendered context of women’s lives, exposes gender inequalities, empowers women, advocates for social change, and/or improves the status or material reality of women’s lives ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 1998 ; 2002 ). According to Letherby (2003) , feminist researchers have a “political commitment to produce useful knowledge that will make a difference in women’s lives through social and individual change” (p. 4). Feminist research is not research about women, but research for women; it is knowledge to be used in the transformation of sexist society ( Cook & Fonow, 1990 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 1998 ).

Feminist research cannot be fully identified by its focus on women or its focus on gender disparity, as sexist research may entail a similar focus. Furthermore, feminist research cannot be specified by any single approach to the discovery or creation of knowledge, and feminist research is not defined by any orthodox substantive position ( Jaggar, 2008a ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). However, feminist researchers share common perspectives. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) identified three shared concerns: giving voice to women’s lives and experiences, overcoming gender inequities at the personal and social level, and improving women’s opportunities and the quality of women’s lives. Hawkesworth (2006) argues for three similar commitments of feminist research: “to struggle against coercive hierarchies linked to gender (and other statuses); to revolt against practices, values and knowledge systems that subordinate and denigrate women; and to promote women’s freedom and empowerment” (p. 7). Jaggar (2008a) described feminist research as distinguished by its dedication to the value of gender justice and its “commitment to producing knowledge useful in opposing the many varieties of gender injustice” (p. ix). According to Jaggar (2008a) , feminist research can be uniquely identified by its dedication to the value of gender justice in knowledge and in the world. And the feminist commitment to women’s emancipation requires knowing the situations and circumstances of women’s lives; to determine what needs to be “criticized, challenged or changed,” feminists need valid knowledge of the oppressions and marginalization of women ( Code, 1995 , p. 20). Feminist research is an approach to research that seeks knowledge for the liberation and equality of women.

To what extent can research, qualitative or otherwise, contribute to feminist goals of transforming society toward gender equality? Some feminists have questioned the liberation potential of research and especially the possibility of traditional (i.e., experimental, quantitative, and objective) research to produce knowledge that will alleviate gender inequity and oppression (e.g., Hollway, 1989 ). Keller (1982) viewed feminism and science as in conflict, but argued that the exploration of the conflict between feminism and science could be both productive and transformative. Some feminists have specifically called for the transformation of science to incorporate feminist values (e.g., Wiley Okrulik, Thielen-Wilson, & Morton, 1989 ). Feminist researchers, in their quest to transform society, have argued for and contributed to the transformation of (social) science research. In this chapter, I identify the dimensions and characteristics of feminist research and examine research practices and methodological and epistemological positions in relation to feminist tenets. Feminist research is not viewed as a static entity, but as a transforming and transformative practice.

(Trained as a social psychologist, I identify as a feminist psychologist. I studied at the University of Pittsburgh, working with Dr. Irene Frieze. My first research study, conducted as an undergraduate student at Chatham College, a woman’s college in Pittsburgh, examined problem-solving performance of women students as impacted by context; students completed a series of mathematical word problems in an all-female or a mixed-sex group. Women students performed better in a single-sex context in what today might be considered a study of stereotype threat. I pursued an interest in sex differences in graduate school, and my doctoral dissertation examined the intrinsic motivation of women and men as a function of task feedback. Over the course of my career, I became increasingly critical of both the experimental method of research and the study of sex differences. My own epistemological and methodological path parallels the progression of feminist research as described here.)

Feminist Research as Corrective

Feminists challenged the neglect of women’s lives and experiences in existing social science research (e.g., Wallston, 1981 ; Weisstein, 2006. Feminists have criticized psychology (and other disciplines) both for not studying the lives and experiences of women and for the development of sexist research theory and practice ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). One contribution of feminist research has been to offer a corrective to traditional research that either neglected women or presented a stereotypic or biased view of women. For example, early feminist research identified experiences of women including widespread gender discrimination and violence against women ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ; Jaggar, 2008a ). As a corrective to research that neglects the study of women’s lives, feminist research has transformed the content of research in most disciplines. The expansion of feminist research over the past four decades has transformed knowledge in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). The transformation of psychological science was examined by a task force of the Society of Women in Psychology ( Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, & McHugh, 2012 ). Eagly and the task force members documented the growth of published research on women and gender in the psychological literature and its movement from the periphery of the discipline toward its center. They concluded that research on women is now situated as a methodologically and theoretically diverse content area within contemporary psychological science. Yet, by their broad definition, psychology of women and gender articles accounted for few (4.0 percent from 1960 to 2009 and 4.3 percent from 2000 to 2009) of the articles in the prominent journals of psychology. And for most of the research that Eagly and her colleagues documented, researchers did not label their research as feminist nor did the research explicitly address feminist goals of gender equality or advocacy for women.

A second important contribution of feminist researchers and theorists has been their critical analysis of research and the production of knowledge. Feminists have criticized research that characterizes women as having deficits and critically examined asymmetrical and inequitable constructions of the cultural masculine over the cultural feminine ( Jaggar, 2008a ). Similarly, Geiger (1990) characterizes feminist research as challenging the androcentric (male-centered) construction of women’s lives, and Wiley (2000) notes that feminists question androcentric or sexist frameworks or assumptions that had been unchallenged. Pushing against that which is taken for granted, feminist inquiry probes absences, silences, omissions, and distortions and challenges commonsense understandings that are based on inadequate research. For example, feminists challenge conclusions about human behavior based on evidence taken from narrow (e.g., male, European-American, educated, and middle-class) samples of human populations ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Furthermore, feminists exposed the (gender) power dynamics that operate in many aspects of women’s lives, including in research, and have challenged existing explanatory accounts of women’s experiences ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). One goal of feminist research then is to attend to the power dynamics in the conduct of research, to expose invisible or concealed power dynamics. The demonstration that gender and other contextual variables can create bias in the scientific research of individuals, and that such bias exists in the science accepted as valid by scientific community, is an important contribution of feminism to science ( Rosser, 2008 ). Thus, one function of feminist research has been to call for the transformation/correction of science as a series of sexist and stereotypic depictions of women and of research that devalues women. Hawkesworth (2006) acknowledges the transformational character of feminist research as “interrogating accepted beliefs, challenging shared assumptions and reframing research questions” (p. 4).

(In 1975, I began teaching Psychology of Women, and I was keenly aware that there was very little research published on the experiences or concerns of women. As a member of Alice Eagly’s Task Force on the Feminist Transformation of Psychology, I agreed that there has been an explosion of research on women and gender over the past four decades, which Eagly et al. effectively document. However, I am ambivalent about the degree to which most of that research has improved the status or lives of women.)

Challenging Traditional Methods

The experimental approach has been critiqued as inauthentic, reductionistic, and removed from the social context in which behavior is embedded ( Bohan, 1993 ; Sherif, 1979 ). Others have exposed the laboratory experiment as a social context in which the (male) experimenter controls the situation, manipulates the independent variable, observes women as the “objects” of study, and evaluates and interprets their behavior based on his own perspective ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). From this critical perspective, the traditional psychological experiment is a replication of the power dynamics that operate in other social and institutional settings. The interests and concerns of the research subjects are subordinated to the interests of those of the researcher and theorist ( Unger, 1983 ). Feminists have argued that the controlled and artificial research situation may elicit more conventional behavior from participants, may inhibit self-disclosure, and may make the situation “unreal” to the participants ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). From this perspective, the experiment is not the preferred method of research.

Feminists challenged the pervasive androcentrism evidenced in empirical research. For example, in the 1980s, a task force of the Society for Women in Psychology examined the ways in which psychological research could be conducted in a nonsexist way ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). The task force’s guidelines ( McHugh et al., 1986 ) challenged traditional empirical psychology by examining the role that the values, biases, and assumptions of researchers have on all aspects of the research process. There is always a relationship of some kind between the scientist and the “object” of study since the scientist cannot absent himself from the world ( Hubbard, 1988 ). Selection of topics and questions, choice of methods, recruitment of participants, selection of audience, and the potential uses of research results all occur within a sociohistorical context that ultimately influences what we “know” about a topic or a group of people ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). The realization of the operation of sexist bias in science/psychology led some feminist researchers to question the value of the scientific method and to more carefully consider issues of methods, methodology, and epistemology. The study of gender raised the issue of how context and values challenge traditional conceptions of objectivity ( Rosser, 2008 ). The feminist challenge to the possibility of impartial knowledge and the recognition of the operation of values in science impacted the research conducted in some of the sciences ( Rosser, 2008 ; Schiebinger, 1999 ).

Feminists, including Hollway (1989) and Hubbard (1988) , provided a critique of the “context-stripping” and alleged objectivity of scientific research. According to Hubbard, the illusion that the scientist can observe the “object” of his inquiry as if in a vacuum gives the scientist the authority to “make facts.” She observed that science is made by a self-perpetuating group of chosen people; scientists obtain the education and credentials required and then follow established procedures to “make” science. The illusion of objectivity gives the scientist the power to name, describe, and structure reality and experience. The pretense that science is objective obscures the politics of research and its role in supporting a certain construction of reality. By pretending to be neutral, scientists often support the status quo. “By claiming to be objective and neutral, scientists align themselves with the powerful against the powerless” ( Hubbard, 1988 , p. 13). In terms of gender, male scientists’ alleged objectivity has given scientific validity to their mistaken contentions about women’s inferiority.

Feminist Epistemology

Prior to conducting research designed to address feminist goals, Harding (1987) advised feminists to understand the distinctions among methods, methodology, and epistemology. Others have similarly called for feminists to be aware of their epistemological positions and biases (e.g., Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; Unger, 1988 ). Methods are the concrete techniques for gathering evidence or data such as experiments, interviews, or surveys. Methodology is the study of methods, the philosophical position on how research should proceed. Epistemology is the most central issue for feminist research according to Harding (1987) , Stanley and Wise (1993) , and others. Epistemology involves the study of answers to the question: How can we know? Epistemology is a framework for specifying what constitutes knowledge and how we know it. An epistemological framework specifies not only what knowledge is and how to recognize it, but who are the knowers and by what means someone becomes a knower or expert ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Epistemological frameworks also outline the means by which competing knowledge claims are adjudicated ( Stanley & Wise, 1993 ). Harding (1986) identified three distinct feminist epistemological perspectives: empiricism, standpoint, and social construction. These epistemological perspectives are briefly reviewed here prior to a description of feminist qualitative research.

Feminist Empiricists

Feminist empiricism adopts the scientific method as the way to understand or know the world. Feminist empiricists believe in the scientific method for discovering reality; they assert that science is an approach that can provide value-neutral data and objective findings ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). Their position is consistent with the modernist perspective. The modernist perspective endorses adherence to a positivist-empiricist model, a model that privileges the scientific method of the natural sciences as the only valid route to knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). From this perspective, there is a single reality that can be known through the application of the methods of science, including repeated objective observations. Objectivity refers to a dispassionate, impartial, and disengaged position and is valued. Bias is acknowledged as impacting scientific research but is viewed as a distortion that can be eliminated or corrected ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). The Guidelines for Nonsexist Research provide examples of errors and biases in research that should be eliminated ( McHugh et al, 1986 ). Feminist empiricists attempt to produce a feminist science that, without androcentric bias, more accurately reflects the world ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). To varying degrees, many feminists continue to conduct empirical research based on approved scientific methods.

(As a graduate student, I co-chaired (with Irene Frieze) the Task Force to Establish Guidelines for Nonsexist Research in Psychology for Division 35 of the American Psychological Association (APA). We started the project as empiricists hoping to help eliminate sexist bias from psychological research, especially research on sex difference. This experience introduced me to the diverse positions taken by feminist scientists, and, in the process of addressing sexist bias in research, my own understanding of the limits of empirical research developed. I became increasingly critical of the scientific method even as I conducted a social psychological experiment involving some deception for my degree.)

Feminists have refuted “scientific” evidence that women are inherently different from and inferior to men. Feminist empiricists have employed the experimental methods of science to provide evidence for gender equality ( Deaux, 1984 ; McHugh & Cosgove, 2002 ). However, there is debate over the success of using science to refute sexism in science. Shields (1975) contended that research comparing men and women has never been value-free or neutral but rather has typically been used to justify the subordination of women. Alternatively, Deaux (1984) concluded that empirical evidence has been used to effectively change belief that differences between men and women are universal, stable, and significant, and Hyde (1986) endorsed the use of scientific and quantitative measures to debunk gender stereotypes. Eagly and her colleagues (2012) concluded that research on women and gender has transformed psychology over the past fifty years and has influenced public policy. However, McHugh and Cosgrove (2002) , among others, have questioned whether the tools of science are adequate for the feminist study of women and gender. Burman (1997) argued that by employing empirical methods, feminist empiricists help to maintain a commitment to existing methods that neglect, distort, or stereotype women.

The study of sex differences is central to feminist psychology ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ); arguments for the inclusion of women in social science research are based, in part, on the recognition that women have different experiences and perspectives. Critics, however, contend that research on sex differences typically leads to the devaluation and discrimination of women and confirms stereotypes (through biased methods) (e.g., Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1990 ; 1994a ). MacKinnon (1990) argued that “A discourse of difference serves as ideology to neutralize, rationalize, and cover up disparities of power” (p. 213). Feminists have argued that interest in sex differences involves interest in justifying differential treatment of women and men and that there is a confirmation bias operating. Research that “finds” a sex difference is more likely to be published, publicized, and cited than is research refuting the existence of a difference between men and women (e.g., Epstein, 1988 ; Hyde, 1994 ; Kimball, 1995 ; Unger, 1998 ). Furthermore, research is often constructed to produce sex differences ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). For example, Kimball (1995) demonstrates how the research on sex differences in math ability has been carefully constructed to produce differences (i.e., the use of standardized tests administered to very large samples) and related research not demonstrating difference (i.e., classroom tests and research using smaller, more heterogeneous groups) is ignored.

Through the debate on the study of sex differences, feminists continued to recognize the politics of research. Increasingly, feminists recognized that research that supports the status quo and the view of women as less than men is more likely to be funded, conducted, published, and widely cited ( Epstein, 1988 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ; Unger, 1998 ). Sexist bias not only impacts the design and conduct of research but is apparent in the interpretation and distribution of the research results. Differences between women and men were typically labeled “sex differences.” This label implies that the demonstrated differences are essential (i.e., reside inside men and women) and are related to biology. Feminists argued that differences that were found were frequently due to prior experiences, gender roles, and/or the context and not to biology ( Deaux, 1984 ; Hyde, 1986 ; Unger, 1998 ). Others argued that the behavior seen as characteristic of women is actually the behavior evidenced by people with low power and status ( Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1994a ). Unger (1979) recommended that we use the term “gender” to avoid the biological connotation of the term “sex.” Despite this increasing sophistication in our understanding of gender as a function of context, roles, and power, gender differences continue to be constructed as essentialist ( Cosgrove, 2003 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Also, the research findings, even when they were published, did not impact the beliefs held by professionals or the general public about women and men and their performance on tasks. For example, despite the pattern of results across many studies ( Frieze, McHugh & Hanusa, 1982 ; Frieze, Whitley, Hanusa, & McHugh, 1982 ), people continued to believe that women attributed their failures to lack of ability and their success as due to luck.

(Early in my career, I studied sex differences in response to task performance success and failure. I gave subjects ambiguous tasks that had no right or wrong answers and gave them false feedback about their performance. Some subjects were given success feedback; others were told that they had failed. I then asked them how they explained their performance and about their expectancies for future performance. I abandoned this line of research when I realized that the debriefing I gave might not have been successful in erasing their emotional response to failing the experimental task. Others documented that women’s response to novel tasks revealed low expectancies for success, thus biasing our understanding of women’s (lack of) confidence. I did not want to contribute to individuals’ feelings of failure, or to stereotypic and invalid characterizations of women.)

The realization that the questions asked by male theorists and researchers reflect their position in the world challenged the assumptions of logical positivism—including objectivity and value neutrality. Feminist research and theory has been criticized as political and biased, even as these critics continued to view research conducted by men as scientific and objective. Some feminist psychologists came to see the connection between individuals’ status and identity in the world, the questions they were interested in, and their approaches to research. Thus, many feminist psychologists recognized that unexamined androcentric biases at both the epistemological and methodological levels resulted in women’s experiences being devalued, distorted, marginalized, and pathologized (e.g., Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ).

Feminist Standpoint Perspective

The feminist criticism of science as biased led to a recognition of the importance of perspective or standpoint. Some critics have contended that individuals who are outsiders to a culture or group are more likely than insiders to recognize cultural or group assumptions (e.g., Mayo, 1982 ). Feminism provoked some feminist scholars to recognize male bias and to view aspects of male-dominated society, including the practice of research, through an alternative lens. The realization that women and men might view the world differently, ask different questions, and use different methods to answer those questions led some feminists to adopt a standpoint position. Hartstock (1983) argued that women’s lives offered them a privileged vantage point on patriarchy and that such an epistemological perspective had liberatory value.

In the feminist standpoint perspective, women’s ways of knowing are considered to be different from and potentially superior to men’s ways of knowing ( Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986 ). As outsiders or marginalized individuals, women have a unique perspective on their own experience, on men, and on sociocultural patterns of domination and subordination ( Mayo, 1982 ; Westkoff, 1979 ). Like feminist empiricists, advocates of a feminist standpoint perspective typically accept the existence of a reality but recognize that one’s position within a social system impacts one’s understanding of that reality ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). A standpoint epistemological perspective argues that there are important research questions that originate in women’s lives that do not occur to researchers operating from the dominant androcentric frameworks of the disciplines ( Harding, 2008 ). Furthermore, standpoint theory has allowed some of us to recognize that traditional research has typically served the purpose of the researcher rather than the researched ( Letherby, 2003 ); the experiences of marginalized people are not viewed as a source of interesting or important questions. For example, research on motherhood and women’s experience of embodiment was not conducted prior to feminist influence on social science ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ).

Standpoint epistemology views the relationship between knowing and politics as central and examines how different types of sociopolitical arrangements impact the production of knowledge ( Harding, 2008 ). The answers to questions about women and other marginalized groups may originate in the lives of marginalized individuals but typically involve an analysis of the social and power relations of dominant and marginalized groups to answer. Feminist standpoint epistemology calls for a critical analysis of women’s experiences as described through women’s eyes ( Leavy, 2007 ). For example, DeVault (1990) documents the skills that women have developed from their work feeding their families, and Jaggar (2008b) examines women’s skills at reading emotion as having developed through their care-taking roles.

In an important contribution to feminist standpoint, Smith (1987) argued that social science knowledge systems are used as systems of control and that those who develop knowledge are typically separated from everyday life. She describes knowledge as controlled by an elite (i.e., racially and economically privileged men) who have no interest in or knowledge of the women who serve their needs. Smith (2008) notes that questions regarding women’s work originate in the consideration of women’s lives, which have historically not been examined. Consideration of women’s daily lives leads to the recognition that women are assigned the work that men do not want to complete and to the realization of the processes by which that work is devalued and trivialized. Such insights are not constructed by the elite and may have liberatory value for women.

In an early consideration of this perspective, Westkott (1979) recognized that feminist researchers were both insiders and outsiders to science and that this was a source of both insight and a form of self-criticism. Furthermore, Westkott argued that the concern with the relationship of scientist/observer to the target/object stereotypically represents the focus of women on relationships, whereas the detachment of the traditional researcher is consistent with a stereotypic masculine role. Similarly, Letherby (2003) commented that androcentric (male) epistemologies deny the importance of the personal and the experiential, whereas the feminist researcher often values the experiential, the personal, and the relational rather than the public and the abstract.

In feminist standpoint theory, knowledge is mediated by the individual’s particular position in a sociopolitical system at a particular point in time ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). In feminist standpoint perspectives, an oppressed individual can see through the ideologies and obfuscations of the oppressor class and more correctly “know” the world ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Recognition of a feminist standpoint raises the possibility of other standpoints, and Fine (1992) argued that a single woman’s or feminist standpoint was not plausible. Thus, race and class and other identities within the sociocultural system impact the individual’s understanding of the world.

In particular, black feminist theorists (e.g., Collins, 1989 ) have articulated the existence of a black feminist standpoint, arguing that the position of black women allows them to recognize the operation of both racism and sexism in the sociopolitical system. According to Collins (1989) , black women have experienced oppression and have developed an analysis of their experience separate from that offered by formal knowledge structures. The knowledge of black women is transmitted through alternatives like storytelling. Such knowledge has been invalidated by epistemological gatekeepers. Thus, black feminist standpoint theorists contend that at least some women have an ability referred to as “double visions” or “double consciousness” ( Brooks, 2007 ). Smith (1990) similarly recognized in women the ability to attend to localized activities oriented to maintenance of the family and, at the same time, to understand the male world of the marketplace and rationality. The narrative of hooks (2000) as a black child in Kentucky reveals a double consciousness with regard to her own community and the white world across the tracks.

Postmodern Perspectives on Research

The third epistemological position, the postmodern approach, challenges traditional conceptions of truth and reality. Postmodernists view the world and our understanding of the world as socially constructed and therefore challenge the possibility of scientists producing value-neutral knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; 2008 ). Postmodern scholars view attempts to discover the truth as an impossible project and equally reject grand narratives and the experimental method. From a postmodern perspective, life is multifaceted and fragmented, and a postmodern position challenges us to recognize that there are multiple meanings for an event and, especially, multiple perspectives on a person’s life. Postmodern approaches examine the social construction of concepts and theories and question whose interests are served by particular constructions ( Layton, 1998 ). Social constructionism requires a willingness to make explicit the implicit assumptions embedded in psychological concepts (e.g., identity, gender, objectivity, etc.). By doing so, social constructionists encourage researchers to recognize that the most dangerous assumptions are those we don’t know we’re making. From the postmodern position, all knowledge, including that derived from social science research, is socially produced and therefore can never be value free. Someone’s interests, however implicit, are always being served ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ).

The postmodern perspective emphasizes the relationship between knowledge and power. The postmodern perspective suggests that, rather than uncovering truths, the methods we use construct and produce knowledge and privilege certain views and discount or marginalize others ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; Gergen, 2001 ; Hare-Musten & Maracek, 1994b). Social constructionists are less interested in the answer to research questions and more interested in the following: What are the questions? Who gets to asks the questions? Why are those methods used to examine those questions? Postmodern thought can open a new and more positive way of understanding and can contribute to the transformation of intellectual inquiry ( Gergen, 2001 ). Although some feminists have rejected the postmodern approach, Hare-Musten and Maracek (1994b) argued that interrogation of the tension between feminism and postmodern perspectives can be used to transform psychological research. The conduct of feminist research from within the postmodern approach involves conducting research in which women’s interests are served.

Postmodern feminists view empiricist and standpoint feminists as reverting to essentialist claims, viewing women as an identity. Cosgrove (2003) explains essentialism as viewing women as a group, as having a single point of view, or as sharing a trait (i.e., that women are caring). The standpoint position is that women have a shared perspective or a unique capacity (different from men’s) or voice; the standpoint position is viewed as problematic from a postmodern perspective. Brooks (2007) explains the problem of essentialism of feminist standpoint theory: “Beyond the difficulty of establishing that women, as a group, unlike men as a group, have a unique and exclusive capacity for accurately reading the complexities of social reality, it is equally problematic to reduce all women to a group” (p. 70). Thus, the essentialism inherent in empirical and standpoint positions does not acknowledge the diversity and complexity of women’s perspectives and voices and does not attend to the ways that gender is produced through socialization, context, roles, policies, and interactions. Cosgrove (2003) similarly explained that “the hegemony of the essentialist claim of women’s experience or voice has had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing normative gendered behavior” (p. 89). Essentialism that views gendered behaviors as universal, biological in origin, and/or residing within women as traits or inherent characteristics is essentially problematic.

Gergen (1988) explained the relationship of research methods to essentialism. The decontextualized approach to traditional research results in studying women apart from the circumstances of their lives. Social and cultural factors including discrimination, violence, sexism, and others’ stereotypes are eliminated from the view of the researcher. Subsequently, researchers are likely to attribute observed behavior as due to women’s traits or natural dispositions. Gergen concluded that research should be conducted without violating the social embeddedness of the participant.

(I met Lisa Cosgrove when I was a faculty member at Duquesne University in 1985, having recently completed my degree. She was completing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Duquesne; at Duquesne, she was trained in phenomenological psychology with a very strong background in philosophy of science. A few years after she had graduated and moved to Boston, we began collaborating. Both feminists, I had experience as an empiricist and she was trained as a clinician and a phenomenologist. We wrote a series of papers on feminist research, the study of gender and gender differences, and epistemological issues that are cited here and are the basis for this chapter. Discussions with Lisa led me to the adoption of a postmodern position in regards to feminist research.)

Implications for Feminist Qualitative Methods

I have briefly reviewed the feminist epistemological positions to illustrate alternative feminist positions and to trace transformations in the theory and conduct of feminist research and the development of feminist postmodernism. Equally important is the demonstration of how feminist criticism of logical positivist science relates to the development and use of qualitative research approaches. Feminist critiques of research led some psychologists to a loss of confidence in the scientific method; postmodern feminists object to the privileged status given to scientific researchers, especially the scientific method in the positivist tradition ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). Feminist critics argued that the experimental method, including its reductionism, the creation of an artificial context, the failure to understand the context of women’s lives, and the inherent inequality of psychological experiments is not a superior method for understanding the psychology of women. For example, McHugh, Koeske, and Frieze (1986) reviewed feminist arguments that context matters and that the methods of empiricism that decontextualize the individual may support oppressive status quo conditions. McHugh and her colleagues argued that the controlled and artificial research situation may elicit more conventional behavior from participants, may inhibit self-disclosure, and may make the situation “unreal” to the participants ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). The impetus for the adoption of alternative epistemological positions came, in part, from the criticism that the scientific method put the experimenter in the position of influencing, deceiving, manipulating, and/or interpreting “subjects.” Feminists working from a social constructionist perspective are interested in examining the implicit assumptions embedded in traditional psychological research and theory. For example, Unger (1979) acknowledged that our position regarding what constitutes knowledge is the basis for our choice of research methods and the usefulness of our research to advance women. Feminist researchers seek approaches to research that advance our understanding of women without committing essentialist errors or contributing to gender inequities.

The idea that women need to express themselves (i.e., find their own voice and speak for themselves), rather than have their experience interpreted, coded, or labeled by men, is consistent with feminist standpoint theory. Qualitative methods are preferred by many feminist psychologists because they allow marginalized groups, such as women of color, to have a voice and to impact the conduct of research. Feminists value the representation of marginalized groups and the use of subjective and qualitative approaches that allow such participants to speak about their own experiences. Postmodern feminists might argue that liberation or equality may be enacted or experienced when women resist patriarchal conceptualizations of their/our experience and grasp the power to speak for ourselves ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ).

Values of Feminist Research

In contrast to traditional research, feminist research has paid special attention to the role that the values, biases, and assumptions of the researcher has on all aspects of the research process. Selection of topics and questions, choice of methods, recruitment of participants, selection of the audience, and the potential uses of the research results are choices made within a sociohistorical context that ultimately influence what we “know” about a topic or a group of people (cf. Bleir, 1984 ; Harding 1986 ; Keller, 1985 ; Sherif, 1979 ). Feminist research recognizes that, as a result of unexamined androcentric biases at both the epistemological and methodological levels, women’s experiences have been neglected, marginalized, and devalued. Feminist scholars, recognizing that values play a formative role in research, believe that values should be made explicit and critically examined ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Feminist research is explicit in its ethical and political stance; feminist research seeks epistemic truth and social justice and challenges social bias as existing in some existing knowledge claims ( Jaggar, 2008a ).

Feminist researchers have explicated their value systems, realizing that an unbiased, objective position is not possible. Feminists are aware that the product cannot be separated from the process ( Kelly, 1986 ) and strive to conduct research in an open, collaborative, and nonexploitative way. The voice of the participants is often the focus of the research, but the researchers themselves are encouraged to reflect on and report their own related experiences and point of view ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ; Morawski, 1994 ).

Reflexivity

Feminists have questioned the possibility of and the preference for value-free or neutral research and the value of the detached, disengaged researcher who is objective in the conduct of research. Not only do we all and always have some relation to the subject under study, but a connection to or experience with the phenomena may actually be an asset. As Brooks and Hesse-Biber (2007) suggest, “rather than dismissing human emotions and subjectivities, unique lived experiences, and world views as contaminants or barriers in the quest for knowledge, we might embrace these elements to gain new insight and understandings or, in other words, new knowledge” (p. 14). The feminist epistemological perspective pays attention to personal experience, position, emotions, and worldview as influencing the conduct of research ( Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2007 ). In feminist research, there is a realization that such connections cannot be removed, bracketed, or erased, but we do consider it important to reveal them. The researcher is expected to acknowledge her situated perspective, to reflect on and share how her life experiences might have influenced her choice of topics and questions.

In a related vein, Reinharz (1992) recommended that valid listening to the voices of others requires self-reflection on “who we are, and who we are in relation to those we study” (p. 15). Feminist research has frequently engaged in this process of questioning, referred to as “reflexivity.” The reflexive stance may involve critically examining the research process in an attempt to explicate the assumptions about gender (and other oppressive) relations that may underlie the research project ( Maynard, 1992 ). Incorporating reflexivity is a complex and multidimensional project, one that necessitates a constant vigilance with regard to the epistemic commitments that ground our research ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ).

In feminist research, a commonly used reflective approach is one in which the researcher provides an “intellectual autobiography” ( Stanley & Wise, 1993 ) tracing her interest in relationship with and approach to the questions and to the research participants. Ussher (1991) for example, traces her interest in women’s madness to her mother’s “mental illness,” thus eliminating the illusion that she is a detached or disinterested knower. Hollway (1989) also offers such an extended reflexive stance by deliberately and thoroughly examining how she made decisions and interpretations throughout her research on heterosexual relationships. Fine (1992) offers multiple examples of reflections on the research process, arguing that we should demystify the ways in which we select, use, and exploit respondents’ voices. Letherby (2003) provides an extended examination and analysis of feminist research issues by describing her own history and her experience conducting individual and collaborative research interviewing women who experienced infertility and childlessness.

(In this chapter, I have included some of my own biography as a feminist psychologist. I hope to share part of my own journey, starting as an enthusiastic empiricist, then becoming a critic of biases in research, to the adoption of a view of research as political. Having traced that journey, I recognize the potential contribution and the potential risks that exist in any research undertaken, and I appreciate the diversity of feminist positions in research. Currently, I view myself as encouraging feminist researchers to recognize the problems identified by postmodern critics and to realize the potential for a postmodern perspective to resolve issues and dilemmas in feminist research.)

Feminist researchers are cognizant of the impact of power on the research process. Jaggar (2008a) described feminist research as concerned with the complex relationship between social power (and inequalities in social power) and the production of knowledge. Part of the feminist critique of traditional research includes the power and authority of the researcher to construct and control the research process and product. In traditional science, the power of the researcher is connected to his position as an objective expert “knower” in relation to the uninformed and ignorant subject of his inquiry ( Hubbard, 1988 ). Similarly Smith (1987) and Collins (1989) have examined the power of the educated elite to ignore and invalidate the experiences and knowledge of women and other marginalized groups. Feminist researchers challenge this oppressive status hierarchy in a number of ways. Feminists challenge both the objectivity and the expertise/knowledge of the scientist and view women (or men) participants as knowing about their own experiences. Feminists more than nonfeminists see power as a socially mediated process as opposed to a personal characteristic and recognize the role of power in efforts to transform science and society ( Unger, 1988 ). Thus, feminist research recognizes the power inherent in the process of research and attempts to use that power to transform society. If the purpose of feminist research is to challenge or dismantle hierarchies of oppression, then it is crucial that the research process not duplicate or include power differentials. Yet it is difficult to dismantle the competitive and hierarchical power relations present across most contexts of our lives, including the research context.

An identifying aspect of feminist research is the recognition of power dilemmas in the research process ( Hesse-Biber, 2007b ). Consistent with this perspective, feminist research is based on a respect for the participants as equals and agents rather than subjects. In an attempt to dismantle power hierarchies, the feminist researcher is concerned with the relationships among the research team; feminist research teams are ideally nonhierarchical collaborations (discussed later). Another dilemma is how to interpret or represent the voices of the women respondents; researchers are cautioned not to tell their story, but, in the postmodern perspective, one’s own position always as part of the research process.

Collaboration

Based on critiques of the experimental method, feminist research has emphasized the need for a collaborative (rather than objectifying) focus. Feminist research seeks to establish nonhierarchical relations between researcher and respondent and to respect the experience and perspective of the participants ( Worrell & Etaugh, 1994 ). Feminist psychologists challenge the regulatory practices of traditional research by developing more explicitly collaborative practices (cf. Marks, 1993 ). Collaboration necessitates an egalitarian context from the inception of the research process to the distribution of results. For example, instead of conducting an outcome assessment of a battered women’s shelter based on the preferred outcomes suggested by agencies, researchers, or shelter staff (i.e., how many women have left their abusive relationships?), Maguire (2008) conducted participatory research with battered women examining a question they raised. As Lather (1991) notes, empowerment and empirical rigor are best realized through collaborative and participatory efforts.

Often, relationships among researchers and respondents, although referred to in the literature as partnerships, collaborations, or otherwise egalitarian relations, may be better characterized as ambivalent, guarded, or conflicted ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). Being committed to seeing things from the respondents’ position is a necessary aspect of feminist research, but it is also important to recognize our privileged position within our relationships with respondents and with co-workers. Often credentials and our status within the academy place us in a privileged position.

(Feminists idealize the collaborative approach, but I, like others, have experienced difficulties in some of my collaborations. Often, collaborations are not an experience of equality or sisterhood. Rather, differences in power, status, and experience can impact the collaborations, which may be more hierarchical than feminists might want. Feminist researchers may not recognize that they do not share the same epistemological perspectives. I also experienced differences in styles of working and writing as especially painful and problematic, in that class and worldview are incorporated in nonconscious ways.)

Research as Advocacy and Empowerment

Although I believe that feminist research should explicitly address issues of social injustice, the issue of doing research as advocacy is complex. It is impossible to know in advance how best to empower women and other marginalized groups. Indeed, many scholars have argued that researchers tend to position themselves as active emancipators and see participants as passive receivers of emancipation (e.g., Lather, 1991 ). Conducting and using research for advocacy requires the researcher to engage in critical reflection on his or her epistemic commitments. Feminists try to design studies that avoid objectifying participants and foster a particular kind of interaction. For example, participatory researchers work with communities to develop “knowledge” that can be useful in advocacy and provide the basis for system change. In terms of doing research with and for women, it is important to develop knowledge collaboratively and, whenever possible, share the knowledge with a wider audience. Often, empowerment is viewed as the process by which we allow or encourage respondents to speak for themselves or to find their voice. Certainly, teaching women to engage in speech or actions that are of our choosing is not empowering, but empowerment of other women is a complicated issue, as discussed below. Wilkinson and Kitzinger (1995) suggest that, in feminist research, we speak for ourselves and create conditions under which others will speak.

Challenges to Feminist Research

An important contribution made by feminist researchers has been giving voice to women’s experiences. Davis (1994) suggests that the notion of voice resonates with feminists who hope that women’s practices and ways of knowing may be a source of empowerment and that speaking represents an end to the silencing and suppression of women in patriarchal culture. Many theorists have addressed the silencing of women, the ways in which the construction of knowledge by “experts” resulted in women’s voices not being heard, not being taken seriously, or questioned as not trustworthy. “Women’s testimony, women’s reports of their experiences, is as often discredited... from their testifying about violence and sexual assault through their experiential accounts of maladies, to their demonstrations of the androcentricity of physics” ( Code, 1995 , p. 26).

At first thought, it might appear that the metaphor of voice and the methods designed around it (i.e., the qualitative analysis of women’s narratives) have allowed feminist psychology to articulate women’s experiences. However, closer examination of this metaphor and the research methods used to support it argue for a more critical examination of research that attempts to give women voice ( Alcoff, 2008 ). The position that women can and must speak for women and/or that women can listen to each other differently than men has been challenged. Substituting a woman’s standpoint for an androcentric position privileges women’s way of way of being, speaking, viewing the world, and knowing, but the idea of women’s voice also essentializes femininity and can reify the constructs of men and women. Feminist theorists have cautioned that in our attempts to correct psychology’s androcentric perspective, we must avoid a position that essentializes masculinity and femininity ( Bohan, 1993 ; Cosgrove, 2003 ; Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1990 ) (i.e., one that views differences between men and women as universal and as originating or residing within men and women). Similarly, Davis (1994) questions whether the notion of voice is a useful one for feminist theory. Do women have voice (i.e., an “authentic” feminine self)? Does voice refer to “the psychological focus of femininity, the site of women’s subordination, or the authentic expression of what women really feel” (p. 355)? The use of the voice metaphor raises questions of essentialism. Is there such a thing as femininity, which can be discovered or uncovered?

Other feminists (e.g., Tavris, 1994 ) reminded us that women (and girls) do not speak the same in all situations, pointing out that there is more than a single “women’s voice” and that there is more than one way to hear the same story. Similarly, Gremmen (1994) questions whether authentic and false voices can be distinguished in the qualitative analysis of transcripts. Others have questioned whether women are speaking for themselves when their responses are reported, presented, organized, or otherwise produced by the researcher. The emancipatory potential of research is undermined when the researcher positions herself as an arbitrator of truth and knowledge or as a judge of what is or is not an authentic voice ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000 ).

There is great value in questioning who speaks for whom; indeed, who speaks may be more important than what is said (cf. Lather, 1991 ; 1992 ; Rappaport & Stewart, 1997 ). When we speak for women or about women’s experience, we may distort or silence women’s own voices ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000 ). Can we presume to know how to express the experiences of other women? The issues are further complicated when we attempt to “speak for others across the complexities of difference” ( Code, 1995 , p. 30); that is, speak for women who differ from us in terms of age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, region, and other dimensions ( Alcoff, 2008 ). As feminist researchers, we might recognize the degree to which we have positioned ourselves as “universalizing spokesperson” and abandon that role, choosing instead the role of “cultural workers who do what they can to lift the barriers which prevent people from speaking for themselves” ( Lather, 1991 , p. 47).

Relinquishing the role of “universalizing spokesperson” requires a shift in how we conduct our research and in how we analyze our data. Marks (1993) encouraged us to reflect on the institutional power we have as researchers in order to avoid buying into the illusion of empowerment or democracy. To ensure that our hypotheses and questions are relevant, meaningful, and helpful to participants, we might ask participants to comment on, modify, add to, or even change the questions developed by the researcher. Standard research practice might include conducting a needs assessment and obtaining pilot data on the appropriateness of the focus, structure, and design of the research. The research process might begin with an opportunity for participants to voice their concerns and collaborate in the development of the research questions. In addition, Cosgrove and McHugh (2000) suggest that researchers adopt a cautious and reflective approach when editing participants’ narrative accounts. We need to acknowledge and attend to the fact that editing changes the voice(s) heard. The way in which we frame and present quotes may involve implicit assumptions about our interpretive authority; when we are not including the entire narrative, we need to include a rationale for and a detailed description of our editing choices. The question of “who can/should speak for whom engages with issues of power and the politics of knowledge that are especially delicate in present day feminist and other postcolonial contexts” ( Code, 1995 , p. 26).

Struggles for the “power to name” are continually played out in politics, the media, and in the academy. Specific words are needed to describe concepts that are important to people; without those words, it is very difficult to think about—and nearly impossible to talk about—objects, ideas, and situations. Feminists have provided words and concepts to describe the previously unspoken experiences of women and girls ( Smith, Johnston-Robledo, McHugh & Chrisler, 2010 ) including stalking, date rape, coercive sex, and intimate partner violence. Yet, our constructions and operational definitions of the phenomenon under study can also introduce limitations and distortions in women’s understanding of their own experiences ( McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008 ). When we give a woman a label for her experience and outline for her the particulars of the phenomenon, we direct her attention and memory and impact her own construction of her experiences. In this way, science has claimed the power to name reality and has sometimes challenged the credibility of women to articulate and name their own experiences. Postmodern feminists are attentive to the power of words and examine how language or discourse is used to frame women’s experience.

Traditionally, objectivity has been equated with quantitative measurement and logical positivist approaches to science and is valued as the path to truth and knowledge. Qualitative research and research rooted in standpoint and postmodern epistemologies are frequently seen as subjective and are devalued as such. Feminist and other postmodern critics of logical positivism argue that objectivity is an illusion that has contributed (illegitimately) to the power of science and scientists to make knowledge claims (e.g., Hubbard, 1988 ). The position of a disengaged or impartial researcher who studies others as objects, without investing in their well-being, or the outcomes of the research, has been rejected. Objectivity in this sense is not seen as a superior way to understand the world or the people in it. From a postmodern perspective, all knowledge involves a position or perspective that results in partial or situated knowledge. Furthermore, postmodern positions reject claims of grand theories and discoveries of some truth that exists “out there.” Knowledge is viewed as co-created or constructed in social interactions. Developing a theory of human behavior based on the study of a limited sample of people is viewed as inappropriate and universalizing. Some have exposed the issue of scientific objectivity as an elitist effort to exclude others from making meaning, a system by which all who are not trained to participate are devaluated and objectified ( Hubbard, 1988 ; Schewan, 2008 ).

Feminist qualitative research as described here has not sought universal truths about women but has increasingly been focused on particular communities of women (people), and the research is “judged” as useful in terms of its contribution to the improvement of women’s lives or to the (re)solution of a locally defined problem. Yet, some feminist theorists have grappled with the issue of validity claims. Is every interpretation or conclusion based on qualitative “data” equally valid? How can we know or evaluate our research as valid, if not objective? Questions of validity and credibility (which are sometimes discussed in terms of objectivity) remain unanswered or contested in regards to feminist qualitative research.

Schewan (2008) addresses the question of objectivity, asking “What is it about objectivity that helps to make a claim acceptable?” She argues that we do want our claims to be acceptable to some broader constituency. What do we have to do to establish such credibility? Schewan’s (2008) answer to these questions revolves around questions of trustworthiness. Her argument for an epistemological trustworthiness involves multiple dimensions of credibility including, for example, research that is critical, contextual, committed, and co-responsible; and practical, political, pluralist, and participatory. Furthermore, Schewan contends that trust is ultimately a product of community, and a basic question we might ask about our own research is in which (and how broad a) community would we look for consensus on the validity of our research? In which context do want to articulate our claims, and how might we be evaluated in that context. In participatory action research, the researcher typically would have the participants in the project provide feedback as to the accuracy, validity, and usefulness of the project “data.”

Similarly, Collins (2008) views community and connectedness as essential to establishing the validity of black feminist theory. She observes that in the African-American community new knowledge claims are not worked out in isolation, but in dialogue. An example of the dialogue for assessing the validity of black women’s concerns is the call-and-response interaction in African-American communities, including churches. Ideas are tested and evaluated in one’s own community, which is also the context in which people become human and are empowered. Black feminist thought emerges in the context of subjugated individuals. Each idea or form of knowledge involves a specific location from which to examine points of connection; each group speaks from its own unique standpoint and shares its own partial and situated knowledge. There are no claims to universal truth. Collins also notes that this approach to validation is distinctly different from scientific objectivity in that this dialogue involves community rather than individualism, speaking from the heart, and the integration of reason and emotion.

The feminist scientist may question objectivity but continue to return to the concept when designing a feminist science ( Keller, 1985 ). Haraway (2008) and Harding (2008) are searching for a broader form of validation of claims; they articulate their ideas for a successor science and a feminist version of objectivity. Coming from the epistemology of standpoint theory, Harding (2008) anticipates the emergence of a successor science that offers an acknowledged better and richer account of the world. In response to questions of how to maintain validity and reliability in research when objectivity is challenged, Harding (1991) proposed the solution of strong objectivity . Her idea of strong objectivity is based on the outsider perspective ( Mayo, 1982 ) or the double consciousness attributed to African Americans ( Collins, 1990 ). In Harding’s approach to validity, individuals at the margins of the institutions of knowledge may provide an outsider perspective on the conceptualization not evident to the insiders at the center. Harding argued that outsiders can bring awareness of the ways in which values, interests, and practices impact the production of knowledge. Harding argued that including the perspectives of the outsider or marginalized perspectives can strengthen the objectivity of science while retaining validity ( Rosser, 2008 ).

Haraway (2008) offers her vision of a usable doctrine of objectivity, embodied vision . Consistent with Collins (2008) and Schewan (2008) , Haraway’s ideas about validity relate to conversation and community; situated knowledge is about communities not individuals. Haraway proposes that our capacity for knowing involves embodied vision; that is, we are limited to partial and situated knowledge because our vision is limited by our body in a physical location. She contrasts this idea of situated and partial knowledge with the omnipotence and omnipresence of a male (god); thus, her conception of objectivity relates to where we are located in the world, as opposed to an objectivity that comes from being above the fray. Haraway recommended that we share our knowledge with others who occupy a different space to help construct a larger vision. Haraway calls for objectivity as positioned rationality , rational and fuller knowledge as a process of ongoing critical interpretations among a community of interpreters and (de)coders. In her vision, feminist objectivity would make for both surprises and irony (since we are not in charge of the world). As indicated here, feminist researchers employing qualitative and post-positivist methods continue to contend with the issue of validity. Current approaches emphasize knowledge as partial and situated (as opposed to universal truth) and the validity of knowledge as established through dialogue with participant communities.

Forms of Feminist Qualitative Research

In this section, I introduce a number of qualitative forms of research and examine them in relation to feminist goals for research. All possible forms of qualitative research are not introduced or described; the selection represents in part my own areas of interest or expertise. The forms of research addressed here can be undertaken from any feminist epistemological positions, and each of these is consistent with a postmodern perspective.

In-Depth Interviews

Interviewing is a valued method for feminist researchers, allowing them to gain insight into the lives and experiences of their respondents and potentially helping others to understand a group of women. Feminists are often concerned with experiences that are hidden, for example, the lives of marginalized women ( Geiger, 1990) . When the goal of the research is in-depth understanding, a smaller sample is used since the interviewer is interested in the process and meanings and not in the generalization of the findings ( Hesse-Biber, 2007 a ). In more unstructured interviews, the researcher exerts very little control over the process, letting the interview flow where the respondent goes.

Interviewing as a feminist research strategy is designed to get at the lived experience of the respondent ( Nelson, 1989 ). Often, a goal of interviewing is to have women express their ideas, insights, or experiences in their own words. According to Letherby (2003) , the method chosen in a feminist project should allow the voices of the respondents to be distinct and discernible. Feminist interviewing is conscious of the relationship between the researcher and the researched and of the ways that power operates in the interview and in the product of the project. Letherby (2003) describes variation in how much two-way conversation she engaged in, and she also describes the relationship between the researcher and respondent as dynamic and changing over time.

One feminist perspective on interviewing is that the researcher and the respondent co-construct meaning. Oakley (1981) espoused a participatory model that involves the researcher sharing aspects of her own biography with the researched. A more conversational and sharing approach invites intimacy. Oakley also sees this as a way to break down the power hierarchy. As an example, Parr (1998) traced her own development from a positivist researcher to a more feminist and grounded approach in her interviews of mature women who returned to education. Parr (1998) started with a barriers framework that she eventually abandoned when the respondents’ stories did not fit this framework: the women did not perceive themselves as experiencing barriers. Her subsequent analysis was rooted in the data, and the respondents influenced the research process. Importantly and unexpectedly, her participants gave more personal reasons for their reentry, and more than one-half of the women reported serious incidents or traumatic experiences as linked to their return to education. Parr (1998) reported that listening closely and paying attention to the women’s nonverbal behaviors helped her to hear what they were telling her about the links between trauma and education “once she allowed the women’s voices to be heard” (p. 100).

Narratives as Research

The use of narratives as research is compatible with a postmodern or social constructionist perspective. Narratives are the stories people tell about their lives. Narrative research focuses on the ways in which individuals choose to tell their stories, in relation to the frameworks or master narratives provided by the culture for organizing and describing life experiences ( Sarbin, 1986 ). Master narratives refer to the cultural frameworks that limit and structure the way that stories are told in order to support the status quo and the dominant groups’ perspective on reality. Gergen (2010) described her analysis of how women’s narratives differed from the cultural heroic myths of male narratives; she argued that women’s narratives were more embodied, and that in women’s narratives, love and achievement themes were interwoven. Story telling can be used, however, to disrupt or challenge accepted perceptions and master narratives. Stories are used to communicate experience, but they can also articulate ideology and can move people to action ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ).

A narrative approach can be employed to further feminist goals. Narratives have been discussed as an innovative feminist method ( Gergen, Chrisler, & LoCicero, 1999 ) designed to reveal cultural constructions. Recognizing, resisting, or deconstructing the master narratives that have been used to restrict or limit the experiences of women is one feminist form of narrative research ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ). Other examples of feminist narrative research are presented in Franz and Stewart’s (1994) edited volume of narratives, in which they explore the way in which narratives “create” a psychology of women. Thus, storytelling can lead to “ideological transformations and to political mobilization” ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 , p. xii). Storytelling is seen as a way of including women’s experience, of breaking the silence of women, and as a way of giving women a voice for the expression and analysis of their own experiences ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ). They argue that social transformative work is done through the telling of previously untold stories and through women’s naming and analyzing their own experience ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ).

Narrative research reveals our desire to provide a unified and coherent story and to gloss over or ignore paradoxes, inconsistencies, and contradictions in women’s lives ( Cabello, 1999 ; Franz & Stewart, 1994 ). The challenge for feminist researchers is to find methods for including and representing dualities and contradictions present in women’s lives ( Cabello, 1999 ). Cabello (1999) describes the methodological challenge of including the incoherence and contradictions in narrative research. She also discusses the tensions between the researcher’s interpretation and the subject’s active participation in the telling and interpretation of her life story.

Discourse Analysis

The main goal of discourse analysis is to investigate how meanings are produced within narrative accounts (e.g., in conversations, newspapers, or interviews). Thus, the label discourse analysis does not describe a technique or a formula, but rather it describes a set of approaches that can be used when researchers work with texts ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Researchers who use a discourse analytic approach emphasize the constitutive function of language, and they address the ways in which power relations are reproduced in narrative accounts ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). A discourse analytic approach is grounded in the belief that meaning and knowledge are created by discourse; discourse analysts views language/discourse as constituting our experience. Based on the belief that all forms of discourse serve a function and have particular effects, and the research focus is on “how talk is constructed and what it achieves” ( Potter & Wetherell, 1996 , p. 164). The researcher cannot, simply by virtue of switching from a quantitative to a qualitative approach, uncover an experience or identity that exists prior to and distinct from human interaction. There are no true, real, or inner experiences or identities that somehow reside underneath the words a woman uses to describe that experience or identity. The paradigm shift from analyzing interview data to analyzing discourse involves a different perspective on the goals of research and what we can know ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ). It encourages us to examine the practices, technologies, and ideologies that allow for the experiences that we are investigating. This shift may help us focus on structural rather than individual change strategies.

In the conduct of discourse analysis, the researcher is explicitly interested in the sociopolitical context that creates particular discourses and discourages other constructions and linguistic practices ( Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1995 ). The implications of this epistemological shift for developing alternative methodologies can be seen in how interview-based data would be approached and analyzed. The researcher does not assume that she will discover some underlying truth about women’s essential nature or personality. Instead, the researcher is interested in identifying dominant and marginalized discourses and in addressing how women position themselves in the available discourses. As previously noted, rather than denying or trying to overcome the inconsistencies, contradictions, or ambivalence in women’s accounts of their experience, the researcher pursues these contradictions. This allows for a better understanding of how women might position themselves otherwise ( Burr, 1995 ; Hollway, 1989 ; Kitzinger, 1995 ; Potter & Wetherell, 1996 ). This social constructionist approach moves the researcher from the analysis of narratives as revealing inner subjectivity (i.e., of a woman’s story as revealing who she is) to an analysis of discourse as constituting subjectivity. Thus, the question shifts from “what does this account reveal about women’s underlying or true nature?” to “what does this account reveal about the dominant discourses to which women have been subjected?” and “what does this account reveal about discourses which have become marginalized?” The analysis of data is then carried out with a focus on the questions “when and how do women resist dominant discourses when those discourses cause them distress, and how might we allow for greater opportunities to position ourselves in alternative discourses?”

The implications for feminist research are dramatic and complex. If there is no method to “get to the bottom of things,” what does it mean to create a space for women to speak for themselves? A researcher using discourse analysis would understand meaning to be produced rather than revealed. An account of an individual’s experience is always located in a complex network of power relations ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Thus, in analyzing women’s accounts, a social constructionist approach applies an analysis of power. The interview, and analysis, is not about discovering “truths” but about identifying dominant and marginalized discourses. The analysis examines the degree and the ways in which individuals resist oppressive discourses. For example, a psychologist interested in the experience of motherhood would first recognize that the discourses of motherhood shape and confine one’s understanding of oneself as a mother and as not a mother ( Letherby, 2003 ). The analysis of the data on the experience of being a mother would be contextualized in terms of how discourses produce certain identities (e.g., “supermom,” mother as the primary care-giver, etc.) while marginalizing others ( Cosgrove, 1999 ).

Focus Groups

Wilkinson (1998) argues for the use of focus groups as a feminist method in that focus groups can meet the feminist goals of examining women’s behavior in naturalistic social contexts and in a way that shifts the power from the researcher to the participants. A focus group might be described as an informal discussion among a group of people, which is focused on a specific topic and is either observed or taped by the researcher ( Morgan & Krueger, 1993 ). Focus groups are typically facilitated by a trained moderator who fosters a comfortable environment. Kitzinger (1994) suggests that focus group interviews might be used as an effective method when gaining information from participants is difficult; that is, when people feel disenfranchised, unsafe, or reluctant to participate. Focus groups may be useful in mining subjugated knowledge or in giving a voice to members of marginalized groups or empowering clients ( Leavy, 2007 ; Morgan, 2004 ). Focus groups have been used to bridge a gap in perspective between the researcher and the informants ( Morgan, 2004 ). The communication in focus groups may be dynamic and create a sense of a “happening” ( Leavy, 2007 ). In successful focus groups, participants express or share some of their experiences with others using their own language and frameworks ( Leavy, 2007 ).

Focus groups avoid the artificiality of many psychological methods. Focus groups mimic the everyday experience of talking with friends, family, and others in our social networks. The focus group itself may be seen as a social context and, at the same time, as a parallel to the social context in which people typically operate. The group-based approach of nondirective interviewing allows the participants to identify, discuss, disagree about, and contextualize issues of importance to them ( Hennink, 2008 ). At times, the focus group may reveal the extent of consensus and diversity of opinion within groups ( Morgan, 2004 ). The group environment can provide rich data regarding complex behaviors and human interactions.

People establish and maintain relationships, engage in activities, and make decisions through daily interactions with other people. Focus groups may use these preexisting or naturally occurring groups, or may set up groups of people who do not know each other ( Wilkinson, 1998 ). For example, Press (1991) studied female friends talking about abortion by having them meet in one woman’s home to view and discuss an episode of a popular television show. The focus group can thus avoid artificiality by making naturalistic observations of the process of communication in everyday social interaction ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). More importantly, the focus group provides the opportunity to observe how people form opinions, influence each other, and generate meaning in the context of discussion with others ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). For feminists who see the self as relational or identity as constructed (e.g., Kitzinger, 1994 ), the focus group can be an ideal method. In focus groups, the influence of the researcher is minimized as women in the group speak for themselves and voice their own concerns and themes. Focus groups may also provide an opportunity to access the views of individuals who have been underrepresented in traditional methods ( Wilkinson, 1998 ). Focus groups may lead to consciousness raising or to the articulation of solutions to women’s problems ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). Focus groups may be a component of participatory action projects ( Morgan, 2004 ). The increased use of focus groups by social scientists over the past two decades argues for their usefulness as a qualitative method ( Morgan, 2004 ).

Feminist Phenomenological Approaches

A phenomenological approach emphasizes a (paradigm) shift from observed behaviors to the importance of an individual’s lived experience as the proper subject matter for psychology. Phenomenology is committed to the articulation of individuals’ experience as description and does not subscribe to hypothesis testing. Husserl (1970) argued that psychologists should use descriptive methods to try and capture the meaning of individuals’ experience; he emphasized the need for social scientists to investigate the personal, the life-world to capture the experiential nature of human experience. Criticizing psychology (and other social sciences) for its adherence to positivist methods, he challenged the subjective/objective distinction. ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Thus, a phenomenological approach is not just another method that might be employed by a feminist researcher, but an alternative approach to knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Phenomenological research uses a descriptive method that attempts to capture the experiential meaning of human experience ( Nelson, 1989 ). Phenomenologically informed researchers do not test hypotheses but generate theory from the data (i.e., individuals’ experiences). This approach does not distinguish between objective and subjective methods but does privilege description over measurement and quantification ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). The phenomenological researcher does not subscribe to the goal of uncovering or discovering truths about the participants’ experience but has a commitment to articulating the lived experience of the participants and analyzing the sociopolitical context in which the experience occurs ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). For example, a research team could investigate the lived experience of being “at home.” The descriptive differences in men and women’s lived experience might be described without essentializing or reifying gender.

According to Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) , phenomenology shares the feminist commitment to creating a space to hear (women’s) stories. In phenomenologically grounded research, the researcher may examine the ways in which gender (along with race, class, and culture) plays a key role in shaping women’s experiences. Phenomenologists also share the feminist commitment to test theory against experience. Both feminists and phenomenologists recognize the limits of laboratory-based research, emphasize the importance of listening to individuals’ experiences, and appreciate the possibilities of a descriptive science ( Nelson, 1989 ). Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) suggest that some feminists would agree with the phenomenological perspective that relying, epistemologically and methodologically, on quantification and measurement to the exclusion of life-world description is a limited approach that produces alienated rather than emancipatory knowledge.

Both feminists and phenomenologists view research as an interaction or dialogue between the researcher and the participant ( Garko, 1999 ). The phenomenological approach emphasizes connections among self, world, and others and allows the researcher to hear women’s experiences as contextualized within the larger social order. Consistent with feminist research, a phenomenological perspective demands that we hear, describe, and try to articulate the meaning of women’s experiences, including stories that have been marginalized and/or silenced ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ).

Participatory Action Research

“Participatory research offers a way to openly demonstrate solidarity with oppressed and disempowered people through our work as researchers” ( Maguire, 2008 , p. 417). Maguire (1987 ; 2008 ) described participatory action research as involving investigation, education, and action. By involving ordinary people in the process of posing problems and solving them, participatory research can create solidarity and social action designed to radically change social reality, as opposed to other methods that describe or interpret reality ( Maguire, 2008 ). Goals of feminist research, including self-determination, emancipation, and personal and social transformation, are approached by working with oppressed people, not studying them ( Maguire, 2008 ). When working with a community group to address a problem they define, the traditional distinctions between knower and participant and between knowledge and action are dissolved ( Hall, 1979) .

In contrast to the traditional valuation of theoretical and pure science over applied science, participatory action research challenges the dichotomous view of applied versus theoretical research. In action research, theory is political and action has theoretical implications ( Hoshmand & O’Byrne, 1996 ; Reinharz, 1992 ). Hoshmand and O’Byrne (1996) view action research as consistent with postmodern and post-positivist revisions of science; action research takes an explicitly contextual focus and thus action researchers may be less likely to commit the “errors” of essentialism and universalism ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ). Participatory research is built on the (feminist) critique of positivist science, and the androcentrism of much of traditional social science research ( Maguire, 2008 ) and the emancipatory impact of participatory research is dependent on feminist analysis. Researchers should explicitly consider gender and patriarchy as important components of the project ( Maguire, 1987 ). A challenge for feminist researchers is to consider the operation of class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of oppression in the research agenda.

In addition to improving the lives of the participants, education and the development of critical consciousness is a component of participatory action research ( Maguire, 2008 ). The research process can assist the community members to develop skills in information gathering and use and in analysis. Perhaps more significantly, the community members may develop a critical understanding of social problems and underlying causes and possible ways to overcome them. By having ordinary people participate in the research, affirming and extending their knowledge about their own lives, participatory action research exposes and helps to dismantle the industry of knowledge production. Knowledge production and traditional research exclude ordinary people from meaningful participation in knowledge creation, intimidate marginalized groups through academic degrees and jargon, and dehumanize people as objects of research ( Maguire, 2008 ).

In this spirit of research designed to create critical consciousness (of the sexual double standard), McHugh and her students facilitated discussions in class and in focus groups of undergraduate students about their experience and observation of slut bashing and the walk of shame (McHugh, Sciarillo, Pearlson, & Watson, 2011; Sullivan & McHugh, 2009 ). Students shared their understanding and experience of who gets called a slut and why. In the discussion, many students recognized the operation of the sexual double standard and developed some understanding of how this impacted their own and other women’s expression of sexuality. This “research” emphasizes the students as experts on this topic, helps students develop critical consciousness, and documents the existence of the sexual double standard as common social practice, in contrast to quantitative research that does not confirm the existence of the sexual double standard ( Crawford & Popp, 2003 ).

In most social action research, the researchers design the research project to empower the individuals and communities with whom they work ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). In participatory research, the shared agenda is set by the community; traditional research is based on the researcher’s agenda. The engagement and solidarity with participants is an important feature of participatory research, in contrast to the traditional objectivity and disengagement of the experimenter. For example, in contrast to traditional research (e.g., why battered women stay), Maguire (1987) reported on her participatory research with a group of battered women in Gallup, New Mexico. Maguire talked with former battered women in their kitchens, employing Freire’s (1970) concept of dialogue. The researcher and participants moved through a cycle of reflection and action; Maguire presented the women (in their own words) as they searched for how to move forward after living with violent men. These results are in contrast to the psychologizing and victim-blaming approaches often taken in research with women who experience intimate partner violence ( McHugh, 1993 ; McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008) . Fine (1992) also identified the victim-blaming interpretations made by researchers. In a critical examination of articles published in The Psychology of Women Quarterly, Fine documented that authors “psychologized the structural forces that construct women’s lives by offering internal explanations for social conditions, and through the promotion of individualistic change strategies, authors invited women to alter some aspect of self in order to transform social arrangements” (p. 6).

A variety of qualitative methods were described here with an emphasis on why and how each method might be used by feminist researchers. For each of the methods, feminist researchers with differing epistemological positions are likely to share certain concerns regarding the research: “attention to women’s voices, differences between and within groups of women, women’s contextual and concrete experiences, and researcher positionality” ( Leckenby & Hess-Biber, 2007 , p. 279). As feminist researchers, we might mine each approach for its liberatory potential.

Innovations in Feminist Research

Intersectionality.

Feminist analytic strategies have been used to challenge biological reductionism, demonstrating how race and gender hierarchies are produced and maintained ( Hawkesworth, 2006 , p. 207). Increasingly, feminists have realized that individuals’ experiences are influenced by both race and gender and by the intersection of various identities (intersectionality). Intersectionality is an innovative approach that applies an analytic lens to research on gender, racial, ethnic, class, age, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of disparities ( Dill & Zambrana, 2009 ). The approach of intersectionality analyzes the intersections of oppressions, recognizing that race, sexual orientation, social class, and other oppressed identities are socially constructed. Intersectionality challenges traditional approaches to the study of inequality that isolated each factor of oppression (e.g., race) and treated it as independent of other forms of oppression ( Dill & Zambrana 2009 ). Interpersonal interactions and institutional practices can create marginalization and subsequently constrain women of color and women marginalized by other identities. In response to such recognition, feminist scholars of color have coined the term “intersectionality” to refer to the complex interplay of social forces that produce particular women and men as members of particular classes, races, ethnicities, and nationalities ( Crenshaw, 1989 ). McCall (2005) has referred to intersectionality as the most important contribution of women’s studies; intersectionality challenges the dominant perspectives within multiple disciplines including psychology. Intersectionality recognizes the interrelatedness of racialization and gendering. The term “racing-gendering” highlights the interactions of racialization and gendering in the production of difference ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). The identities of women of color result from an amalgam of practices that construct them as Other. Such practices include silencing, excluding, marginalizing, stereotyping, and patronizing.

For example, in a study of congresswomen (103rd Congress), Hawkesworth (2006) found the narratives of congresswomen of color to be markedly different from the interview responses of white congresswomen. African-American congresswomen, especially, related experiences of insults, humiliation, frustration, and anger. Hawkesworth (2006) provides a series of examples to demonstrate that Congress was/is a race-gendered institution, that race-specific constructions of acting as a man and a woman are intertwined in daily interactions in that setting. She further relates the experiences of invisibility and subordination of black congresswomen to congressional action on welfare reform and concludes that the data indicate ongoing race-gendering in the institutional practices of Congress and in the interpersonal interactions among members of Congress.

Developing Consciousness

Consciousness raising (CR) was an important method of the second wave of feminism in the United States ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). Through group discussions, women recognized commonalities in their experiences that they had previously believed to be personal problems ( Brodsky, 1973 ). Such discussions had the potential to reveal aspects of sexism and patriarchy and led to the realization that the personal is political; that is, that the power imbalance between women and men and the way that society was structured along gender lines contributed to women’s experiences of distress (Hanish, 1970). Undertaken as political action, CR groups were later facilitated by psychologists and became a model for therapeutic women’s groups ( Brodsky, 1973 ). Consciousness raising groups are a form of participatory action research. Consciousness raising is a method for understanding and experiencing women’s experiences, and for understanding and resisting patriarchy. Consciousness-raising is an important contribution of feminism.

Double Consciousness

In an elaboration of consciousness raising, some theorists have discussed women’s double consciousness in relation to feminist standpoint theory. In one version of double consciousness, women, as a result of their subordinated position, have an awareness of their own daily lives and work (which are invisible to members of the dominant group), but they also have an understanding of the lives of the dominant group (Nielsen, 1989. Or, women scientists, by participating in science and yet experiencing the subordinated position of women, have a unique perspective as both an insider and an “other,” to examine the operation of sexist bias in science ( Rosser, 2008 ). Most frequently, double consciousness refers to the position of black feminist theorists that black women hold a unique position that allows them to understand the operation of both sexism and racism ( Collins, 1990 ; 2008 ). Collins argues that such consciousness, based on lived experience, involves both knowledge and wisdom and that such consciousness is essential to black women’s survival. Black women share their truth by way of storytelling or narrative, and the black community values their stories. The consciousness of black women is thus forged in connection with community. Collins (2008) suggests “the significance of a Black feminist epistemology may lie in its ability to enrich our understanding of how subordinate groups create knowledge that fosters both empowerment and social justice” ( Collins, 2008 , p. 256).

In an elaboration of double consciousness, feminist standpoint approaches have developed into a method, as well as an epistemological position ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ; Sandoval, 2000 ). Feminist standpoint as a method begins with the “collection and interrogation of competing claims about a single phenomenon” ( Hawkesworth, 2006 , p. 178). The method involves the contrast and analysis of competing situated (theoretical and value-laden) claims to understand the role theoretical presuppositions play in cognition. The feminist standpoint analysis may suggest ways to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Hawkesworth (2006) illustrates the method with an analysis of multiple feminist positions on Affirmative Action.

Oppositional Consciousness

Authors and theorists from varied backgrounds and geographies have described and theorized a form of consciousness referred to as “oppositional consciousness.” The recognition and development of “oppositional consciousness” is considered both a social movement and a method ( Sandoval, 2000 ). As a method, cultural theorists aim to specify and reinforce particular forms of resistance to the dominant social hierarchy. “The methodology of the oppressed is a set of processes, procedures and technologies for de-colonizing the imagination” ( Sandoval, 2000 , p. 68). The theory and method of oppositional consciousness is a consciousness developed within women of color feminism ( Sandoval, 2000 , p. 180), where it has been employed as a methodology of the oppressed. The methodology of oppositional consciousness, as theorized by a racially diverse (US) coalition of women of color, demonstrates the procedures for achieving affinity and alliance across difference ( Sandoval, 2000 ). Through a series of dialogues, processes, meaning-making, deconstructions, and consciousness, people in search of emancipation from oppression voice, interrogate, and theorize their experiences, recognize (resist) ideologies and practices of oppression, and transcend differences to achieve an alliance, a coalition of consciousness that opposes oppression and transcends difference ( Sandoval, 2000 ).

Trans/Feminist Methodology

In a related approach, Pryse (2000) argued that the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies can contribute to the development of a “trans/feminist methodology.” Pryse (2000) contends that there is a special opportunity in the study of women’s studies scholars; faculty and students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds collaborate over questions regarding gender and its interconnections with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and culture. Envisioning a hybrid or “trans” methodology is the challenge of interdisciplinary collaborations ( Friedman, 1998 ; Pryse, 2000 ). She examines interdisciplinarity as involving intellectual flexibility and engagement in cross-cultural analyses, both of which can be conducive to cross-cultural insight and may enhance receptivity to difference. Pryse is hopeful that the work of interdisciplinary teams can develop the transversal political perspective described by Yuval-Davis (1997) . Transversal political perspectives are contrasted with identity politics in which women from different classes, regions, nations, races, or ethnicities recognize and emphasize the differences in their material and political realities. In a transversal political perspective, women could “enter into a dialogue concerning their material and political realities without being required to assert their collective identity politics in such a way that they cannot move outside their ideological positioning” ( Pryse, 2000 , p. 106). Yuval-Davis (1997) described interactions of Palestinian and Israeli women who engaged in a dialogue that could be indicative of transversalism. Each member of the interaction remained rooted in her own identity, but shifted to a position that allowed an exchange with a women with another identity. This dialogue, labeled transversalism was contrasted with universalism. In transversalism, a bridge that can cross borders or differences is constructed, whereas universalism assumes homogeneity among women. In her vision, Pryse sees transversalism as a methodology that can allow feminist researchers to construct questions that emerge from women’s lives without committing the error of universalizing women and by remaining specific about the differences among women. Furthermore, the transversal approach can help researchers transcend disciplinary boundaries and methods. A transversal approach is consistent with a postmodern perspective in that multiple realities and partial truths are recognized and essentialism is avoided ( Pryse, 2000 ). The transversal viewpoint allows both difference and similarity to be simultaneously recognized and appreciated as we study women’s lives. This can be seen as a form of dialectic thinking, as opposed to the traditional tendency to engage in dichotomous thinking.

Dialectic Thinking

In a similar approach, Kimball argued that “The major goal of practicing double visions is to resist the choice of either similarities or differences as more true or politically valid than the other” ( Kimball, 1995 , p. 12). Kimball (1995) called for a rejection of simplistic dichotomous thinking (about gender) and for the practice of double visions with regard to feminist theory and research on gender. Kimball’s reference to double visions originates in the postmodern position that we can only have partial knowledge and that partial knowledge is, by definition, not fully accurate. Accordingly, Kimball is suggesting that we are not forced to choose between one piece of partial knowledge and another. Thus, we do not have to choose between evidence that women are caring and evidence that women are aggressive. One might chose a particular position in a certain context or prefer a given perspective on gender, but, as Kimball has noted, practicing double visions means that neither alternative is foreclosed; feminist psychologists would recognize the partiality of any perspective and respect theoretical diversity. This means that we should actively resist making a choice and instead maintain a tension between/among the alternative positions. The way forward for feminist research, according to Tuana (1992) , is to avoid dichotomous thinking and either/or choices. In terms of the sex/gender difference debate, this could mean that we recognize that men and women are both alike and different or are alike in some settings and different in others ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ).

Double visions, or a dialectic approach to sex/gender, describes the movement between or among positions as a sophisticated and theoretically grounded practice. Previously, the perspective of individuals who vacillated between denying gender differences and focusing on the common experiences of women may have been labeled as contradictory, inconsistent, incoherent, or confused. This is similar to the problem of either focusing on the differences among women or examining the common experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Privileging the dialectic perspective legitimizes our current confusion, giving us permission to hold contradictory, paradoxical, and fragmented perspectives on gender and women’s experiences.

Applying a postmodern or dialectic approach can help to resolve epistemological and theoretical debates. For example, feminists and family researchers have been engaged in an ongoing debate about intimate partner violence as battering (of women by their male partners) or as family violence (equally perpetrated by men and women) ( McHugh, Livingston, & Ford, 2005 ). A postmodern or dialectic approach allows us to recognize how issues of method, sample, and conceptualization have contributed to the debate and to realize that, in a postmodern world, there is not a single truth, but multiple, complex, and fragmented perspectives. Thus, women may contribute to family violence, and battering may be perpetrated mostly by men against female intimates ( McHugh et al., 2005 ).

Ferguson (1991) and Haraway (1985) recommend irony as a way to resolve the dichotomous tensions created by two (seemingly opposing) projects or perspectives. In irony, laughter dissuades us from premature closure and exposes both the truth and the non-truth of each perspective. Ferguson (1991) describes irony as “a way to keep oneself within a situation that resists resolution in order to act politically without pretending that resolution has come” (p. 338). Similarly, Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) have encouraged the use of satire to expose and challenge the limitations of the scientific method; irony and satire can contribute to the transformation of both science and society.

Feminist scholars have taken issue with dominant disciplinary approaches to knowledge production. Feminist researchers have asked a range of questions, examined and adopted varied epistemological positions, and employed diverse methods. While employing varied methods, feminist researchers share a commitment to promote women’s freedom, to examine/expose oppression based on gender (and other subordinated statuses), and to revolt against institutions, practices, and values that subordinate and denigrate women.

Feminists have a long tradition of challenging the theories, methods, and “truths” that traditional social scientists believe to be real, objective, and value-free. Feminists have posed a serious challenge to the alleged value neutrality of positivistic social science. In an attempt to transform social science, feminists have developed innovative ideas, methods, and critiques, some of which were reviewed here. Classic and emergent qualitative methods have been deployed in a variety of contexts as feminist researchers critique traditional methods and assumptions and struggle to conduct research that empowers women or improves their lives. The current chapter represents an attempt to help researchers understand the methodological and epistemological underpinning of feminist research, to reflect on their own choice of methods, and to practice feminist research by engaging in a nonhierarchical and collaborative process that leads to an understanding of some aspect of women’s lives and contributes to the transformation of society. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2007) have provided a guide to feminist research practice. In conclusion to their guide, Hesse-Biber (2007) characterized the research process as a “journey... where the personal and the political merge and multiple truths are discovered and voiced where there had been silence” (p. 348).

One possibility for the future is that increasing numbers of researchers will be exposed to the feminist critique of science and will contribute to the transformation of research by developing a postmodern or dialectical approach to research. According to a postmodern approach, the transformation of society begins with a transformation of our understanding of how and what we can know. Traditional approaches to knowledge constructed, confirmed, and constrained our understanding of gender and our ideas of what is possible. The postmodern position provides a powerful epistemological position for deconstructing rather than regulating gender ( Cosgrove, 2003 ). Thus, the transformation of science and research is an initial step toward the feminist transformation of gender and the dismantling of male dominance. Larner (1999) viewed the postmodern perspective as encouraging us to “think the unthought and ask questions unasked.”

However, changing the practices of science and social science so that we can better attend to issues of social injustice is neither an easy nor straightforward task. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) note that quantitative methods continue to be privileged over qualitative in a variety of ways. In my own experience, despite the varied epistemological perspectives and the array of methodological approaches available, the majority of research reported in journals and textbooks continues to employ empirical and quantitative methods. When qualitative methods are employed, they tend to be the established classic approaches, like open-ended survey interview questions that are thematically coded. Furthermore, in a systematic review of the top undergraduate research methods texts of 2009, I observed that qualitative methods were not substantially described or discussed in most texts, and feminist critiques or research were not mentioned ( Eagly, Eaton, & McHugh, 2011 ). Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) cite research and university culture as supporting the status quo and limiting the use of innovative and emergent methods. Funding sources may contribute to conservativism in science, and gatekeepers, such as journal editors, may also limit researchers’ willingness to engage in innovative feminist research.

Although she was writing in 1988, Morawski could be talking about today when she suggests that a new (US) conservatism is indicated by recent losses in Affirmative Action, challenges to reproductive rights, and legislation that negatively affects large numbers of American women. She notes that feminist progress is transforming traditional social science but may easily become or remain mired in such a climate. In response to such a societal impasse, Morawski considers some possibilities for feminist deconstruction and reconstruction. She recommends that we continue to be critical and reflective and that we not commit the same errors that we have identified, for example, essentialism. She encourages us to develop a vision of emancipation, to use our imagination, creativity, and irony to overcome our current impasse.

Future Directions

Satire and irony represent one approach to the future of feminist research. “Through the resources of irony, we can think both about how we do feminist theory, and about which notions of reality and truth make our theories possible” ( Ferguson, 1991 , p. 339). Irony is also recognized by Shotter and Logan (1988) as a requisite for feminist research as it attempts to resist patriarchal thinking and practices even as it produces meaning within the current patriarchal context. They see the feminist research project as developing new practices while still making use of resources that are part of the old. Shotter and Logan argue for a feminist alternative that would “allow a conversation within which the creative, formative power of talk could be put to use in reformulating, redistributing and redeveloping both people’s knowledge of themselves and their immediate circumstances, and the nature of their practical-historical relations to one another” (p. 82). Moving forward toward an egalitarian community requires a reflection and understanding of our immediate practical relationships to one another, a consideration of “in what voices we allow to speak, and which voices we take seriously” (p. 83).

One form of irony, farce, involves exaggerated versions of a phenomena resulting in both laughter and sometimes a new understanding of the issues involved. Taking an ironic approach can lead to a richer and more complex picture and necessitates a re-visioning of the epistemological and methodological frameworks that underlie psychological research and feminist theory ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Although the empirical satiricism described by Cosgrove and McHugh (2008 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ) is a quantitative method, qualitative methods based on irony and satire can certainly be developed within the participatory action or performative approaches.

(Whereas my younger colleagues may need to limit their research to methods that are acceptable to funding sources and journal editors, I realize that I am not limited by these factors. A decade preretirement, I am in a position to use emergent methods to conduct research that challenges existing ideas regarding women and gender or advocates for marginalized women. I am willing to rethink (again) my epistemological and ontological perspectives, to go beyond my disciplinary boundaries, and to engage in dialectic thinking and irony. Although I may not be successful in jumping publication hurdles, there are alternative methods for distributing or performing transformative knowledge. I hope to conduct participatory and performative research that is ironic, even farcical, to incite new knowledge).

Multidisciplinary collaborations can contribute to the adoption of new perspectives and methods that ignore or transgress boundaries set by traditional disciplines that have served to restrict or constrain our conceptions on how to conduct research. The interdisciplinary practice of women’s studies has contributed to innovations in feminist research practice. Through women’s studies and other multidisciplinary approaches, feminists from more conservative disciplines can be introduced to postmodern perspectives and other post-postmodern and emerging forms of research. Feminists can contribute to progress by affirming, approving, and applauding the attempts at methodological innovation employed by others.

For example, feminist psychology in the United States has not yet taken the “performative turn,” although feminist researchers from other disciplinary contexts have. Leavy (2008) characterized performance as an interdisciplinary methodological genre used in a variety of fields including sociology, health, and education. Performance can be viewed as a new epistemological stance that disrupts conventional ways of knowing ( Gray, 2003 ). In a performance, individuals act out, and the performance is experienced “in the moment.” Profound theoretical insight can occur to researcher and audience alike when we shift from the representation of reality in written records to the flow of performance. In performance, the actors and the audience help to make or co-create the meaning, and understanding involves an interaction among members of the cast and the audience ( Leavy, 2008 ). Audience members do not need special skills or training to understand or appreciate a performance, and different perspectives on the performance may result in different interpretations or insights. Thus, the knowing that results from a performance is different from the meaning constructed by the researcher in more traditional research. Leavy (2008) points out the relevance of performance to feminist perspectives that emphasize the embodied experience of women (e.g., Bardo, 1989 ). Leavy (2008) described arts-based methods as a hybrid of arts and science; she characterized performative methods as innovative, dynamic, holistic, creative, as involving reflection and problem solving.

An aspect of the performative turn is the emerging interest in research on the mundane, or the study of the everyday. Contemporary nonrepresentational theory calls us to study the flow of everyday practices in the present rather than constructing post hoc interpretations of past events. Profound theoretical insight and innovations in methods could result if we were to shift from the representation of reality to the flow of performance, if we were to take the mundane or everyday practices of women seriously ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). This philosophical position builds on the phenomenological approach, an approach Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) have recommended for integration into feminist methods. This approach is also consistent with the position taken by some feminists that women’s ways of being in the world (i.e., as emotional and connected beings) have validity and importance and should not be eliminated in the name of rationality and science.

As early as 1988, Aebischer marveled at the feminist transformation that social science had undergone, when it had become possible to intellectually study “aspects of everyday life and everyday people and to be taken seriously.” Even then, she recognized the study of personal experiences, intimate relationships, emotional reactions, and body experiences as a significant transition from one value system to another. Contemporary calls for the exploration of the everyday reveal the extent to which social science in the past had been focused on the unusual, the non-normative, or the pathological. Emphasis on the exceptional, on public domains, on cognition, and on achievements (of men) reflects the androcentric bias of social science. Furthermore, traditional approaches to research such as the experiment, the survey, and systematic observation are not conducive to the study of everyday routines and experiences. Women’s everyday experiences such as gossip ( McHugh & Hambaugh, 2010) , feeling at home ( McHugh, 1996 ), and street harassment ( Sullivan, Lord, & McHugh, 2010 ) have traditionally not been valued as significant topics. In some ways, the current emphasis on the study of everyday lives is a continuation or an extension of an angle of vision adopted primarily within sociology ( Scott, 2009 ). Perhaps what is more innovative is the development of new and emerging methods, including the performative, for the study of affect and the everyday.

The study of the everyday experiences and routines of women is just one example of the directions that future US feminist researchers may take as they shift away from the limitations of logical positivism and, with postmodern permission, strategically adopt multiple ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Removing the methodological shackles of positivism, modernism, and empiricism, we can exercise epistemological and methodological freedom and move toward feminist research that transforms science and society and liberates women.

(Writing this chapter has been challenging and has caused me to further reflect on myself as a feminist researcher. I have recognized the barriers that have impeded my research in the past decades. Some of these barriers are personal and others are more about the reception that I have received as a feminist researcher and a postmodern theorist. I have reaffirmed the importance to myself of intrinsic motivation and finding meaning in my work, as opposed to external recognition. Through writing this chapter, I have come to an appreciation of the value of research that I have conducted (for example, on the meaning of home and the positive aspects of gossip) and could continue to conduct that provides partial and situated knowledge and research that adopts an emergent research method. I am inspired to pursue more feminist research and to encourage my students to employ varied and more innovative feminist methods.)

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Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

• Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

• feminist theories
• qualitative research
• educational research
• positionality
• methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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Diverse Gender Identity Development: A Qualitative Synthesis and Development of a New Contemporary Framework

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• Published: 11 December 2023
• Volume 90 , pages 1–18, ( 2024 )

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• Molly Speechley   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4056-5404 1 ,
• Jaimee Stuart   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4376-1913 2 &
• Kathryn L. Modecki   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9937-9748 3  

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Traditional models of gender identity development for individuals who do not identify with their assigned birth sex have generally treated medical intervention as normative, and non-binary identification as relatively rare. However, changing demographics within gender diverse populations have highlighted the need for an updated framework of gender identity development. To address this gap in the research, this study systematically reviewed the qualitative literature assessing the lived experiences of identity development of over 1,758 gender diverse individuals, across 72 studies. Reflexive thematic analysis of excerpts were synthesised to produce a novel, integrative perspective on identity development, referred to as the Diverse Gender Identity Framework. The framework is inclusive of binary and non-binary identities and characterises the distinctive identity processes individuals undergo across development.

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This work was supported by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues as part of the 2021 Spring Grand-in-Aid program; and an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, granted to the first author.

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Speechley, M., Stuart, J. & Modecki, K.L. Diverse Gender Identity Development: A Qualitative Synthesis and Development of a New Contemporary Framework. Sex Roles 90 , 1–18 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01438-x

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How to use and assess qualitative research methods

Loraine busetto.

1 Department of Neurology, Heidelberg University Hospital, Im Neuenheimer Feld 400, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

Wolfgang Wick

2 Clinical Cooperation Unit Neuro-Oncology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany

Christoph Gumbinger

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This paper aims to provide an overview of the use and assessment of qualitative research methods in the health sciences. Qualitative research can be defined as the study of the nature of phenomena and is especially appropriate for answering questions of why something is (not) observed, assessing complex multi-component interventions, and focussing on intervention improvement. The most common methods of data collection are document study, (non-) participant observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. For data analysis, field-notes and audio-recordings are transcribed into protocols and transcripts, and coded using qualitative data management software. Criteria such as checklists, reflexivity, sampling strategies, piloting, co-coding, member-checking and stakeholder involvement can be used to enhance and assess the quality of the research conducted. Using qualitative in addition to quantitative designs will equip us with better tools to address a greater range of research problems, and to fill in blind spots in current neurological research and practice.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of qualitative research methods, including hands-on information on how they can be used, reported and assessed. This article is intended for beginning qualitative researchers in the health sciences as well as experienced quantitative researchers who wish to broaden their understanding of qualitative research.

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is defined as “the study of the nature of phenomena”, including “their quality, different manifestations, the context in which they appear or the perspectives from which they can be perceived” , but excluding “their range, frequency and place in an objectively determined chain of cause and effect” [ 1 ]. This formal definition can be complemented with a more pragmatic rule of thumb: qualitative research generally includes data in form of words rather than numbers [ 2 ].

Why conduct qualitative research?

Because some research questions cannot be answered using (only) quantitative methods. For example, one Australian study addressed the issue of why patients from Aboriginal communities often present late or not at all to specialist services offered by tertiary care hospitals. Using qualitative interviews with patients and staff, it found one of the most significant access barriers to be transportation problems, including some towns and communities simply not having a bus service to the hospital [ 3 ]. A quantitative study could have measured the number of patients over time or even looked at possible explanatory factors – but only those previously known or suspected to be of relevance. To discover reasons for observed patterns, especially the invisible or surprising ones, qualitative designs are needed.

While qualitative research is common in other fields, it is still relatively underrepresented in health services research. The latter field is more traditionally rooted in the evidence-based-medicine paradigm, as seen in " research that involves testing the effectiveness of various strategies to achieve changes in clinical practice, preferably applying randomised controlled trial study designs (...) " [ 4 ]. This focus on quantitative research and specifically randomised controlled trials (RCT) is visible in the idea of a hierarchy of research evidence which assumes that some research designs are objectively better than others, and that choosing a "lesser" design is only acceptable when the better ones are not practically or ethically feasible [ 5 , 6 ]. Others, however, argue that an objective hierarchy does not exist, and that, instead, the research design and methods should be chosen to fit the specific research question at hand – "questions before methods" [ 2 , 7 – 9 ]. This means that even when an RCT is possible, some research problems require a different design that is better suited to addressing them. Arguing in JAMA, Berwick uses the example of rapid response teams in hospitals, which he describes as " a complex, multicomponent intervention – essentially a process of social change" susceptible to a range of different context factors including leadership or organisation history. According to him, "[in] such complex terrain, the RCT is an impoverished way to learn. Critics who use it as a truth standard in this context are incorrect" [ 8 ] . Instead of limiting oneself to RCTs, Berwick recommends embracing a wider range of methods , including qualitative ones, which for "these specific applications, (...) are not compromises in learning how to improve; they are superior" [ 8 ].

Research problems that can be approached particularly well using qualitative methods include assessing complex multi-component interventions or systems (of change), addressing questions beyond “what works”, towards “what works for whom when, how and why”, and focussing on intervention improvement rather than accreditation [ 7 , 9 – 12 ]. Using qualitative methods can also help shed light on the “softer” side of medical treatment. For example, while quantitative trials can measure the costs and benefits of neuro-oncological treatment in terms of survival rates or adverse effects, qualitative research can help provide a better understanding of patient or caregiver stress, visibility of illness or out-of-pocket expenses.

How to conduct qualitative research?

Given that qualitative research is characterised by flexibility, openness and responsivity to context, the steps of data collection and analysis are not as separate and consecutive as they tend to be in quantitative research [ 13 , 14 ]. As Fossey puts it : “sampling, data collection, analysis and interpretation are related to each other in a cyclical (iterative) manner, rather than following one after another in a stepwise approach” [ 15 ]. The researcher can make educated decisions with regard to the choice of method, how they are implemented, and to which and how many units they are applied [ 13 ]. As shown in Fig.  1 , this can involve several back-and-forth steps between data collection and analysis where new insights and experiences can lead to adaption and expansion of the original plan. Some insights may also necessitate a revision of the research question and/or the research design as a whole. The process ends when saturation is achieved, i.e. when no relevant new information can be found (see also below: sampling and saturation). For reasons of transparency, it is essential for all decisions as well as the underlying reasoning to be well-documented.

Iterative research process

While it is not always explicitly addressed, qualitative methods reflect a different underlying research paradigm than quantitative research (e.g. constructivism or interpretivism as opposed to positivism). The choice of methods can be based on the respective underlying substantive theory or theoretical framework used by the researcher [ 2 ].

Data collection

The methods of qualitative data collection most commonly used in health research are document study, observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups [ 1 , 14 , 16 , 17 ].

Document study

Document study (also called document analysis) refers to the review by the researcher of written materials [ 14 ]. These can include personal and non-personal documents such as archives, annual reports, guidelines, policy documents, diaries or letters.

Observations

Observations are particularly useful to gain insights into a certain setting and actual behaviour – as opposed to reported behaviour or opinions [ 13 ]. Qualitative observations can be either participant or non-participant in nature. In participant observations, the observer is part of the observed setting, for example a nurse working in an intensive care unit [ 18 ]. In non-participant observations, the observer is “on the outside looking in”, i.e. present in but not part of the situation, trying not to influence the setting by their presence. Observations can be planned (e.g. for 3 h during the day or night shift) or ad hoc (e.g. as soon as a stroke patient arrives at the emergency room). During the observation, the observer takes notes on everything or certain pre-determined parts of what is happening around them, for example focusing on physician-patient interactions or communication between different professional groups. Written notes can be taken during or after the observations, depending on feasibility (which is usually lower during participant observations) and acceptability (e.g. when the observer is perceived to be judging the observed). Afterwards, these field notes are transcribed into observation protocols. If more than one observer was involved, field notes are taken independently, but notes can be consolidated into one protocol after discussions. Advantages of conducting observations include minimising the distance between the researcher and the researched, the potential discovery of topics that the researcher did not realise were relevant and gaining deeper insights into the real-world dimensions of the research problem at hand [ 18 ].

Semi-structured interviews

Hijmans & Kuyper describe qualitative interviews as “an exchange with an informal character, a conversation with a goal” [ 19 ]. Interviews are used to gain insights into a person’s subjective experiences, opinions and motivations – as opposed to facts or behaviours [ 13 ]. Interviews can be distinguished by the degree to which they are structured (i.e. a questionnaire), open (e.g. free conversation or autobiographical interviews) or semi-structured [ 2 , 13 ]. Semi-structured interviews are characterized by open-ended questions and the use of an interview guide (or topic guide/list) in which the broad areas of interest, sometimes including sub-questions, are defined [ 19 ]. The pre-defined topics in the interview guide can be derived from the literature, previous research or a preliminary method of data collection, e.g. document study or observations. The topic list is usually adapted and improved at the start of the data collection process as the interviewer learns more about the field [ 20 ]. Across interviews the focus on the different (blocks of) questions may differ and some questions may be skipped altogether (e.g. if the interviewee is not able or willing to answer the questions or for concerns about the total length of the interview) [ 20 ]. Qualitative interviews are usually not conducted in written format as it impedes on the interactive component of the method [ 20 ]. In comparison to written surveys, qualitative interviews have the advantage of being interactive and allowing for unexpected topics to emerge and to be taken up by the researcher. This can also help overcome a provider or researcher-centred bias often found in written surveys, which by nature, can only measure what is already known or expected to be of relevance to the researcher. Interviews can be audio- or video-taped; but sometimes it is only feasible or acceptable for the interviewer to take written notes [ 14 , 16 , 20 ].

Focus groups

Focus groups are group interviews to explore participants’ expertise and experiences, including explorations of how and why people behave in certain ways [ 1 ]. Focus groups usually consist of 6–8 people and are led by an experienced moderator following a topic guide or “script” [ 21 ]. They can involve an observer who takes note of the non-verbal aspects of the situation, possibly using an observation guide [ 21 ]. Depending on researchers’ and participants’ preferences, the discussions can be audio- or video-taped and transcribed afterwards [ 21 ]. Focus groups are useful for bringing together homogeneous (to a lesser extent heterogeneous) groups of participants with relevant expertise and experience on a given topic on which they can share detailed information [ 21 ]. Focus groups are a relatively easy, fast and inexpensive method to gain access to information on interactions in a given group, i.e. “the sharing and comparing” among participants [ 21 ]. Disadvantages include less control over the process and a lesser extent to which each individual may participate. Moreover, focus group moderators need experience, as do those tasked with the analysis of the resulting data. Focus groups can be less appropriate for discussing sensitive topics that participants might be reluctant to disclose in a group setting [ 13 ]. Moreover, attention must be paid to the emergence of “groupthink” as well as possible power dynamics within the group, e.g. when patients are awed or intimidated by health professionals.

Choosing the “right” method

As explained above, the school of thought underlying qualitative research assumes no objective hierarchy of evidence and methods. This means that each choice of single or combined methods has to be based on the research question that needs to be answered and a critical assessment with regard to whether or to what extent the chosen method can accomplish this – i.e. the “fit” between question and method [ 14 ]. It is necessary for these decisions to be documented when they are being made, and to be critically discussed when reporting methods and results.

Let us assume that our research aim is to examine the (clinical) processes around acute endovascular treatment (EVT), from the patient’s arrival at the emergency room to recanalization, with the aim to identify possible causes for delay and/or other causes for sub-optimal treatment outcome. As a first step, we could conduct a document study of the relevant standard operating procedures (SOPs) for this phase of care – are they up-to-date and in line with current guidelines? Do they contain any mistakes, irregularities or uncertainties that could cause delays or other problems? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the results have to be interpreted based on what they are: a written outline of what care processes in this hospital should look like. If we want to know what they actually look like in practice, we can conduct observations of the processes described in the SOPs. These results can (and should) be analysed in themselves, but also in comparison to the results of the document analysis, especially as regards relevant discrepancies. Do the SOPs outline specific tests for which no equipment can be observed or tasks to be performed by specialized nurses who are not present during the observation? It might also be possible that the written SOP is outdated, but the actual care provided is in line with current best practice. In order to find out why these discrepancies exist, it can be useful to conduct interviews. Are the physicians simply not aware of the SOPs (because their existence is limited to the hospital’s intranet) or do they actively disagree with them or does the infrastructure make it impossible to provide the care as described? Another rationale for adding interviews is that some situations (or all of their possible variations for different patient groups or the day, night or weekend shift) cannot practically or ethically be observed. In this case, it is possible to ask those involved to report on their actions – being aware that this is not the same as the actual observation. A senior physician’s or hospital manager’s description of certain situations might differ from a nurse’s or junior physician’s one, maybe because they intentionally misrepresent facts or maybe because different aspects of the process are visible or important to them. In some cases, it can also be relevant to consider to whom the interviewee is disclosing this information – someone they trust, someone they are otherwise not connected to, or someone they suspect or are aware of being in a potentially “dangerous” power relationship to them. Lastly, a focus group could be conducted with representatives of the relevant professional groups to explore how and why exactly they provide care around EVT. The discussion might reveal discrepancies (between SOPs and actual care or between different physicians) and motivations to the researchers as well as to the focus group members that they might not have been aware of themselves. For the focus group to deliver relevant information, attention has to be paid to its composition and conduct, for example, to make sure that all participants feel safe to disclose sensitive or potentially problematic information or that the discussion is not dominated by (senior) physicians only. The resulting combination of data collection methods is shown in Fig.  2 .

Possible combination of data collection methods

Attributions for icons: “Book” by Serhii Smirnov, “Interview” by Adrien Coquet, FR, “Magnifying Glass” by anggun, ID, “Business communication” by Vectors Market; all from the Noun Project

The combination of multiple data source as described for this example can be referred to as “triangulation”, in which multiple measurements are carried out from different angles to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under study [ 22 , 23 ].

Data analysis

To analyse the data collected through observations, interviews and focus groups these need to be transcribed into protocols and transcripts (see Fig.  3 ). Interviews and focus groups can be transcribed verbatim , with or without annotations for behaviour (e.g. laughing, crying, pausing) and with or without phonetic transcription of dialects and filler words, depending on what is expected or known to be relevant for the analysis. In the next step, the protocols and transcripts are coded , that is, marked (or tagged, labelled) with one or more short descriptors of the content of a sentence or paragraph [ 2 , 15 , 23 ]. Jansen describes coding as “connecting the raw data with “theoretical” terms” [ 20 ]. In a more practical sense, coding makes raw data sortable. This makes it possible to extract and examine all segments describing, say, a tele-neurology consultation from multiple data sources (e.g. SOPs, emergency room observations, staff and patient interview). In a process of synthesis and abstraction, the codes are then grouped, summarised and/or categorised [ 15 , 20 ]. The end product of the coding or analysis process is a descriptive theory of the behavioural pattern under investigation [ 20 ]. The coding process is performed using qualitative data management software, the most common ones being InVivo, MaxQDA and Atlas.ti. It should be noted that these are data management tools which support the analysis performed by the researcher(s) [ 14 ].

From data collection to data analysis

Attributions for icons: see Fig. ​ Fig.2, 2 , also “Speech to text” by Trevor Dsouza, “Field Notes” by Mike O’Brien, US, “Voice Record” by ProSymbols, US, “Inspection” by Made, AU, and “Cloud” by Graphic Tigers; all from the Noun Project

How to report qualitative research?

Protocols of qualitative research can be published separately and in advance of the study results. However, the aim is not the same as in RCT protocols, i.e. to pre-define and set in stone the research questions and primary or secondary endpoints. Rather, it is a way to describe the research methods in detail, which might not be possible in the results paper given journals’ word limits. Qualitative research papers are usually longer than their quantitative counterparts to allow for deep understanding and so-called “thick description”. In the methods section, the focus is on transparency of the methods used, including why, how and by whom they were implemented in the specific study setting, so as to enable a discussion of whether and how this may have influenced data collection, analysis and interpretation. The results section usually starts with a paragraph outlining the main findings, followed by more detailed descriptions of, for example, the commonalities, discrepancies or exceptions per category [ 20 ]. Here it is important to support main findings by relevant quotations, which may add information, context, emphasis or real-life examples [ 20 , 23 ]. It is subject to debate in the field whether it is relevant to state the exact number or percentage of respondents supporting a certain statement (e.g. “Five interviewees expressed negative feelings towards XYZ”) [ 21 ].

How to combine qualitative with quantitative research?

Qualitative methods can be combined with other methods in multi- or mixed methods designs, which “[employ] two or more different methods [ …] within the same study or research program rather than confining the research to one single method” [ 24 ]. Reasons for combining methods can be diverse, including triangulation for corroboration of findings, complementarity for illustration and clarification of results, expansion to extend the breadth and range of the study, explanation of (unexpected) results generated with one method with the help of another, or offsetting the weakness of one method with the strength of another [ 1 , 17 , 24 – 26 ]. The resulting designs can be classified according to when, why and how the different quantitative and/or qualitative data strands are combined. The three most common types of mixed method designs are the convergent parallel design , the explanatory sequential design and the exploratory sequential design. The designs with examples are shown in Fig.  4 .

Three common mixed methods designs

In the convergent parallel design, a qualitative study is conducted in parallel to and independently of a quantitative study, and the results of both studies are compared and combined at the stage of interpretation of results. Using the above example of EVT provision, this could entail setting up a quantitative EVT registry to measure process times and patient outcomes in parallel to conducting the qualitative research outlined above, and then comparing results. Amongst other things, this would make it possible to assess whether interview respondents’ subjective impressions of patients receiving good care match modified Rankin Scores at follow-up, or whether observed delays in care provision are exceptions or the rule when compared to door-to-needle times as documented in the registry. In the explanatory sequential design, a quantitative study is carried out first, followed by a qualitative study to help explain the results from the quantitative study. This would be an appropriate design if the registry alone had revealed relevant delays in door-to-needle times and the qualitative study would be used to understand where and why these occurred, and how they could be improved. In the exploratory design, the qualitative study is carried out first and its results help informing and building the quantitative study in the next step [ 26 ]. If the qualitative study around EVT provision had shown a high level of dissatisfaction among the staff members involved, a quantitative questionnaire investigating staff satisfaction could be set up in the next step, informed by the qualitative study on which topics dissatisfaction had been expressed. Amongst other things, the questionnaire design would make it possible to widen the reach of the research to more respondents from different (types of) hospitals, regions, countries or settings, and to conduct sub-group analyses for different professional groups.

How to assess qualitative research?

A variety of assessment criteria and lists have been developed for qualitative research, ranging in their focus and comprehensiveness [ 14 , 17 , 27 ]. However, none of these has been elevated to the “gold standard” in the field. In the following, we therefore focus on a set of commonly used assessment criteria that, from a practical standpoint, a researcher can look for when assessing a qualitative research report or paper.

Assessors should check the authors’ use of and adherence to the relevant reporting checklists (e.g. Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR)) to make sure all items that are relevant for this type of research are addressed [ 23 , 28 ]. Discussions of quantitative measures in addition to or instead of these qualitative measures can be a sign of lower quality of the research (paper). Providing and adhering to a checklist for qualitative research contributes to an important quality criterion for qualitative research, namely transparency [ 15 , 17 , 23 ].

Reflexivity

While methodological transparency and complete reporting is relevant for all types of research, some additional criteria must be taken into account for qualitative research. This includes what is called reflexivity, i.e. sensitivity to the relationship between the researcher and the researched, including how contact was established and maintained, or the background and experience of the researcher(s) involved in data collection and analysis. Depending on the research question and population to be researched this can be limited to professional experience, but it may also include gender, age or ethnicity [ 17 , 27 ]. These details are relevant because in qualitative research, as opposed to quantitative research, the researcher as a person cannot be isolated from the research process [ 23 ]. It may influence the conversation when an interviewed patient speaks to an interviewer who is a physician, or when an interviewee is asked to discuss a gynaecological procedure with a male interviewer, and therefore the reader must be made aware of these details [ 19 ].

Sampling and saturation

The aim of qualitative sampling is for all variants of the objects of observation that are deemed relevant for the study to be present in the sample “ to see the issue and its meanings from as many angles as possible” [ 1 , 16 , 19 , 20 , 27 ] , and to ensure “information-richness [ 15 ]. An iterative sampling approach is advised, in which data collection (e.g. five interviews) is followed by data analysis, followed by more data collection to find variants that are lacking in the current sample. This process continues until no new (relevant) information can be found and further sampling becomes redundant – which is called saturation [ 1 , 15 ] . In other words: qualitative data collection finds its end point not a priori , but when the research team determines that saturation has been reached [ 29 , 30 ].

This is also the reason why most qualitative studies use deliberate instead of random sampling strategies. This is generally referred to as “ purposive sampling” , in which researchers pre-define which types of participants or cases they need to include so as to cover all variations that are expected to be of relevance, based on the literature, previous experience or theory (i.e. theoretical sampling) [ 14 , 20 ]. Other types of purposive sampling include (but are not limited to) maximum variation sampling, critical case sampling or extreme or deviant case sampling [ 2 ]. In the above EVT example, a purposive sample could include all relevant professional groups and/or all relevant stakeholders (patients, relatives) and/or all relevant times of observation (day, night and weekend shift).

Assessors of qualitative research should check whether the considerations underlying the sampling strategy were sound and whether or how researchers tried to adapt and improve their strategies in stepwise or cyclical approaches between data collection and analysis to achieve saturation [ 14 ].

Good qualitative research is iterative in nature, i.e. it goes back and forth between data collection and analysis, revising and improving the approach where necessary. One example of this are pilot interviews, where different aspects of the interview (especially the interview guide, but also, for example, the site of the interview or whether the interview can be audio-recorded) are tested with a small number of respondents, evaluated and revised [ 19 ]. In doing so, the interviewer learns which wording or types of questions work best, or which is the best length of an interview with patients who have trouble concentrating for an extended time. Of course, the same reasoning applies to observations or focus groups which can also be piloted.

Ideally, coding should be performed by at least two researchers, especially at the beginning of the coding process when a common approach must be defined, including the establishment of a useful coding list (or tree), and when a common meaning of individual codes must be established [ 23 ]. An initial sub-set or all transcripts can be coded independently by the coders and then compared and consolidated after regular discussions in the research team. This is to make sure that codes are applied consistently to the research data.

Member checking

Member checking, also called respondent validation , refers to the practice of checking back with study respondents to see if the research is in line with their views [ 14 , 27 ]. This can happen after data collection or analysis or when first results are available [ 23 ]. For example, interviewees can be provided with (summaries of) their transcripts and asked whether they believe this to be a complete representation of their views or whether they would like to clarify or elaborate on their responses [ 17 ]. Respondents’ feedback on these issues then becomes part of the data collection and analysis [ 27 ].

Stakeholder involvement

In those niches where qualitative approaches have been able to evolve and grow, a new trend has seen the inclusion of patients and their representatives not only as study participants (i.e. “members”, see above) but as consultants to and active participants in the broader research process [ 31 – 33 ]. The underlying assumption is that patients and other stakeholders hold unique perspectives and experiences that add value beyond their own single story, making the research more relevant and beneficial to researchers, study participants and (future) patients alike [ 34 , 35 ]. Using the example of patients on or nearing dialysis, a recent scoping review found that 80% of clinical research did not address the top 10 research priorities identified by patients and caregivers [ 32 , 36 ]. In this sense, the involvement of the relevant stakeholders, especially patients and relatives, is increasingly being seen as a quality indicator in and of itself.

How not to assess qualitative research

The above overview does not include certain items that are routine in assessments of quantitative research. What follows is a non-exhaustive, non-representative, experience-based list of the quantitative criteria often applied to the assessment of qualitative research, as well as an explanation of the limited usefulness of these endeavours.

Protocol adherence

Given the openness and flexibility of qualitative research, it should not be assessed by how well it adheres to pre-determined and fixed strategies – in other words: its rigidity. Instead, the assessor should look for signs of adaptation and refinement based on lessons learned from earlier steps in the research process.

Sample size

For the reasons explained above, qualitative research does not require specific sample sizes, nor does it require that the sample size be determined a priori [ 1 , 14 , 27 , 37 – 39 ]. Sample size can only be a useful quality indicator when related to the research purpose, the chosen methodology and the composition of the sample, i.e. who was included and why.

Randomisation

While some authors argue that randomisation can be used in qualitative research, this is not commonly the case, as neither its feasibility nor its necessity or usefulness has been convincingly established for qualitative research [ 13 , 27 ]. Relevant disadvantages include the negative impact of a too large sample size as well as the possibility (or probability) of selecting “ quiet, uncooperative or inarticulate individuals ” [ 17 ]. Qualitative studies do not use control groups, either.

Interrater reliability, variability and other “objectivity checks”

The concept of “interrater reliability” is sometimes used in qualitative research to assess to which extent the coding approach overlaps between the two co-coders. However, it is not clear what this measure tells us about the quality of the analysis [ 23 ]. This means that these scores can be included in qualitative research reports, preferably with some additional information on what the score means for the analysis, but it is not a requirement. Relatedly, it is not relevant for the quality or “objectivity” of qualitative research to separate those who recruited the study participants and collected and analysed the data. Experiences even show that it might be better to have the same person or team perform all of these tasks [ 20 ]. First, when researchers introduce themselves during recruitment this can enhance trust when the interview takes place days or weeks later with the same researcher. Second, when the audio-recording is transcribed for analysis, the researcher conducting the interviews will usually remember the interviewee and the specific interview situation during data analysis. This might be helpful in providing additional context information for interpretation of data, e.g. on whether something might have been meant as a joke [ 18 ].

Not being quantitative research

Being qualitative research instead of quantitative research should not be used as an assessment criterion if it is used irrespectively of the research problem at hand. Similarly, qualitative research should not be required to be combined with quantitative research per se – unless mixed methods research is judged as inherently better than single-method research. In this case, the same criterion should be applied for quantitative studies without a qualitative component.

The main take-away points of this paper are summarised in Table ​ Table1. 1 . We aimed to show that, if conducted well, qualitative research can answer specific research questions that cannot to be adequately answered using (only) quantitative designs. Seeing qualitative and quantitative methods as equal will help us become more aware and critical of the “fit” between the research problem and our chosen methods: I can conduct an RCT to determine the reasons for transportation delays of acute stroke patients – but should I? It also provides us with a greater range of tools to tackle a greater range of research problems more appropriately and successfully, filling in the blind spots on one half of the methodological spectrum to better address the whole complexity of neurological research and practice.

Take-away-points

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations, authors’ contributions.

LB drafted the manuscript; WW and CG revised the manuscript; all authors approved the final versions.

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Ethics approval and consent to participate, consent for publication, competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Methodology

• What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

Published on June 19, 2020 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research , which involves collecting and analyzing numerical data for statistical analysis.

Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, history, etc.

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Table of contents

Approaches to qualitative research, qualitative research methods, qualitative data analysis, advantages of qualitative research, disadvantages of qualitative research, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about qualitative research.

Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.

Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography , action research , phenomenological research, and narrative research. They share some similarities, but emphasize different aims and perspectives.

Note that qualitative research is at risk for certain research biases including the Hawthorne effect , observer bias , recall bias , and social desirability bias . While not always totally avoidable, awareness of potential biases as you collect and analyze your data can prevent them from impacting your work too much.

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Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods . These are some of the most common qualitative methods:

• Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
• Interviews:  personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
• Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
• Surveys : distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
• Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
• You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the company culture.
• You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
• You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their experiences and perspectives in greater detail.

Qualitative researchers often consider themselves “instruments” in research because all observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.

For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and analyzing the data.

Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural settings.

Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:

• Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up fieldnotes.
• Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that emerge.
• Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that you can apply to categorize your data.
• Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if necessary.
• Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.

There are several specific approaches to analyzing qualitative data. Although these methods share similar processes, they emphasize different concepts.

Qualitative research often tries to preserve the voice and perspective of participants and can be adjusted as new research questions arise. Qualitative research is good for:

• Flexibility

The data collection and analysis process can be adapted as new ideas or patterns emerge. They are not rigidly decided beforehand.

• Natural settings

Data collection occurs in real-world contexts or in naturalistic ways.

• Meaningful insights

Detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, feelings and perceptions can be used in designing, testing or improving systems or products.

• Generation of new ideas

Open-ended responses mean that researchers can uncover novel problems or opportunities that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

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Researchers must consider practical and theoretical limitations in analyzing and interpreting their data. Qualitative research suffers from:

• Unreliability

The real-world setting often makes qualitative research unreliable because of uncontrolled factors that affect the data.

• Subjectivity

Due to the researcher’s primary role in analyzing and interpreting data, qualitative research cannot be replicated . The researcher decides what is important and what is irrelevant in data analysis, so interpretations of the same data can vary greatly.

• Limited generalizability

Small samples are often used to gather detailed data about specific contexts. Despite rigorous analysis procedures, it is difficult to draw generalizable conclusions because the data may be biased and unrepresentative of the wider population .

• Labor-intensive

Although software can be used to manage and record large amounts of text, data analysis often has to be checked or performed manually.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Chi square goodness of fit test
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

There are five common approaches to qualitative research :

• Grounded theory involves collecting data in order to develop new theories.
• Ethnography involves immersing yourself in a group or organization to understand its culture.
• Narrative research involves interpreting stories to understand how people make sense of their experiences and perceptions.
• Phenomenological research involves investigating phenomena through people’s lived experiences.
• Action research links theory and practice in several cycles to drive innovative changes.

Data collection is the systematic process by which observations or measurements are gathered in research. It is used in many different contexts by academics, governments, businesses, and other organizations.

There are various approaches to qualitative data analysis , but they all share five steps in common:

• Prepare and organize your data.
• Review and explore your data.
• Develop a data coding system.
• Assign codes to the data.
• Identify recurring themes.

The specifics of each step depend on the focus of the analysis. Some common approaches include textual analysis , thematic analysis , and discourse analysis .

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Bhandari, P. (2023, June 22). What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/qualitative-research/

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