Produced to: Dr. Aidah Al-Kaissi

1. Produced to: Dr. Aidah Al-Kaissi FeministResearch Nahed Abdullah Deema Al-Haqash Feda’ Odeh Qamar Boubaly Faculty Of Nursing 3/4/2011

2. Objectives: • Identify the nature of feminist research. • Become aware of principles of feminist research. • Identify the three positions of feminist research. • Identify what feminist research focuses on?! • Become aware of feminist research methods.

3. Outline: • Introduction to feminist research • The nature of feminist research • Principles of feminist research • Positions of feminist research • Focuses of Feminist research • Feminist Methods • Main points Summarization

4. Introduction: • Feminist research has popular research model. • feminist research is research on women, bywomen and forwomen. • Discuss issues of importance to women’s lives in the private world (marital rape, the experience of being a mother, violence).

5. THE NATURE OF FEMINIST RESEARCH feminist research studies the social conditions of women in a sexist, ‘male stream’ and patriarchal society, and enlightens people about taken-for-granted sexist practices and the gender-blindness of government and community practices (including publications) that displaced, ignored and silenced women, led to an unequal and discriminating social order, and held them captive for millennia.

6. Continued.. Hence, the focus of research that binds together all branches of feminist research is their strong commitment to changing the status of women in modern societies,to studying women, and to employing female.

7. Continued.. • It should also be stressed that feminist research is based on the assumption that: • the world is socially constructed, • displays a relative aversion to empirical positivistic methodology, • and rejects the value-free nature of research.

8. Continued.. • Feminist research: the quest for emancipation and change.

9. PRINCIPLES OF FEMINIST RESEARCH • Feminist research is contextual, inclusive, experiential, involved, socially relevant, complete but not necessarily replicable, open to the environment and inclusive of emotions and events as experienced.

10. PRINCIPLES OF FEMINIST RESEARCH • Puts gender in the centre of social inquiry; making women visible and representing women’s perspectives are a major part of feminist critical research. • Is preoccupied with social construction of ‘knowing and being known’. • Discloses distortions related to women’s experiences.

11. PRINCIPLES OF FEMINIST RESEARCH • Is not solely about women but primarily for women, taking up an emancipationist stance. • Employs multiple methodologies and paradigms.

12. FEMINIST RESEARCH POSITIONS The diversity of research within the feminist paradigm and the boundaries of the attributes of feminist research are reflected in the research models systematically supported, defended and employed by contemporary feminist researchers, most of which rest on qualitative principles.

13. FEMINIST RESEARCH models • Feminist empiricism • Feminist standpoint • Feminist postmodernism

14. Feminist empiricism: • Employs a realist ontology; a modified objectivist epistemology; a concern for hypothesis testing, explanation, prediction, and cause–effect linkages. • Accepts objectivist principles of knowledge creation. • Employs traditional social research, modified to avoid bias, sexism etc. and to meet feminist standards.

15. Feminist empiricism: • Employs quantitative and qualitative methods. • Challenges the notion that the person/identity of the researcher has no effect on the quality of the findings. • Challenges the notion of the adequacy and validity of empirical rules and norms.

16. Feminist empiricism: • Employs traditional research methods. • Employs reliability, credibility and multimethod research strategies • Follows primarily the existing rules and principles of the sciences • Criticizes not so much the foundations of science, but its practice.

17. Feminist standpoint research: • rejects traditional research methods • focuses on feminist methodologies • builds on and from women’s experience • sets women’s everyday experiences at the centre of research concerns

18. Feminist standpoint research: • employs feminist qualitative methods • goes beyond the traditional methods • assumes researcher reflexivity • provides women with a unique opportunity for undertaking research.

19. Feminist postmodernism Postmodern feminism is a newer development within feminist theory and research and has received diverse and contradictory responses from within and outside the feminist domain.

20. Feminist postmodernism • views the world as endless stories or texts, many of which sustain the integration of power and oppression • views truth as a ‘destructive illusion’ • rejects epistemological assumptions of modernism • rejects the foundational grounding of knowledge, the universalizing claims for the scope of knowledge.

21. Feminist postmodernism • rejects the employment of dualist categories of thought • is critical of conventional qualitative research, and the ‘power’ of research in general • is critical also of certain feminist practices which they consider essentialist • objects to the feminist notion that concepts such as women and patriarchy are universal.

22. Feminist research focuses on: • consciousness-raising methods • using intuition or writing associatively • group diaries • identification instead of keeping distance • dramatic role-play • studying unplanned personal experience

23. Feminist research focuses on: • structured conceptualisation • conversation, dialogue • photography or talking-picture technique • speaking freely into a tape recorder or answering long, essay-type questionnaires.

24. Feminist Methods: • Seek to reveal and overcome andocentric biases in research. • Seek to create social change. • Seek to represent human diversity. • Acknowledge the positionality of the researcher.

25. Revealing Androcentric Biases • Methods must involve: • Women (not men alone) as participants. • Women’s experiences within society. • Example: • In depth interviews with women that reveal women’s understanding of power structures in workplace, family, etc.

26. Creating Social Change • Methods must involve and respect participants as agents of change.

27. Representing Human Diversity • Methods must acknowledge that: • Not all women (and not all men) experience social world in the same way. • Examples: • Interviews (data collection) and life history analyses that examine unique life experiences of Jewish, Catholic and Muslim men (and women). • Statistical methods that examine how sex category interacts with religious practice in their effects on individual outcomes.

28. Acknowledging Positionality of Researcher • Methods must acknowledge that the researcher’s positionality shapes the research process: • Researchers’ experiences shape: • What she or he views as important topics for study. • How participants respond (e.g., in face to face interviews). • How she or he interprets data.

29. MAIN POINTS • Feminist research is an established type of research, which has the specific purpose of studying women and their status in the community. • Feminist research is an emancipatory inquiry focusing on enlightenment and on social change. • Feminist research employs a variety of methods, adjusted to meet the requirements of the feminist paradigm.

30. MAIN POINTS • There are at least three positions within feminist research; these are feminist standpoint, feminist postmodernism and feminist empiricism. • Feminist standpoint stands closer to the mainstream feminist cause than the other two. • The three research positions fully cover the range of methodological issues within the feminist paradigm.

31. MAIN POINTS • Feminist research borrows methods and designs from other methodologies, especially of a qualitative nature. There are only a few methods that can be characterised as exclusively ‘feminist’. • The characteristic of feminist research is not the methods it employs but their application and purpose.

32. THANKS