Towards a Feminist Ethnography

Abstract

This chapter provides the reader with the story of the research project to contextualise the study but also to provide reflections, and even tentative advice, on the research process. It is not always usual to include a methods chapter in a monograph but I have found that the methodology appendix in Alternative Femininities was, and is, being used by so many students that it has convinced me of its validity. I say ‘tentative advice’ because none of us know what will happen during the research process — Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (1983) advise that it is a mistake to believe that research can be logical and organised and where no problems occur. Having said that, this chapter is not a sequential account of ‘how I did the data collection’. But, as Beverley Skeggs (2002, p. 17) argues, ‘this chapter provides an underpinning for the rest of the book as methodology underpins all theory. To ignore questions of methodology is to assume that knowledge comes from nowhere allowing knowledge makers to abdicate responsibility for their productions and representations. … Methodology is itself theory’. This is an assertion echoed by other researchers; for example, Stanley and Wise (1993, p. 164) argue that all research is filtered through the researcher’s consciousness and Peter Woods (1999, p. 55) states that ‘the account is not purely an objective one that any competent researcher employing the same methods with the same degree of rigor would produce, but a construction by this particular one’. Andrew Sparkes (1995, p. 280) argues that there is tension between ‘I’ (i.e., the researcher) and how people, and events, are represented.

Narrative inquiry … can be described as a methodology based upon collecting, analysing, and re-presenting people’s stories as told by them. … Narratives are particularly suitable for portraying how people experience their position in relation to a culture: whether on the margins, in the centre, or on becoming part of a new culture.

(Etherington, 2004, p. 75)