Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences

303 Pages·2016·3.173 MB·English

by  Joey Sprague

Feminist
Methodologies for
Critical Researchers
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The Gender Lens Series
Series Editors
Judith A. Howard
University of Washington
Barbara Risman, editor emerita
University of Illinois, Chicago
Joey Sprague
University of Kansas
Virginia Rutter
Framingham State University
The Gender Lens series has been conceptualized as a way of encouraging the develop-
ment of a sociological understanding of gender. A “gender lens” means working to make
gender visible in social phenomena; asking if, how, and why social processes, standards,
and opportunities differ systematically for women and men. It also means recognizing
that gender inequality is inextricably braided with other systems of inequality. The Gender
Lens series is committed to social change directed toward eradicating these inequalities.
Originally published by Sage Publications and Pine Forge Press, all Gender Lens books are
now available from The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Michael A. Messner, Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements
Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess, editors, Revisioning Gender
Francesca M. Cancian and Stacey J. Oliker, Caring and Gender
M. Bahati Kuumba, Gender and Social Movements
Toni M. Calasanti and Kathleen F. Slevin, Gender, Social Inequities, and Aging
Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore, Gender and the Social Construction of Illness,
Second Edition
Shirley A. Hill, Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships
Lisa D. Brush, Gender and Governance
Dorothy E. Smith, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People
Joan Acker, Class Questions: Feminist Answers
Oriel Sullivan, Changing Gender Relations, Changing Families: Tracing the Pace of
Change over Time
Sara L. Crawley, Lara J. Foley, and Constance L. Shehan, Gendering Bodies
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love, Second Edition
Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, Gender and Families, Second Edition
Manisha Desai, Gender and the Politics of Possibilities
Jocelyn A. Hollander, Daniel G. Renfrow, and Judith Howard, Gendered Situations,
Gendered Selves: A Gender Lens on Social Psychology, Second Edition
Dana M. Britton, The Gender of Crime
Virginia Rutter and Pepper Schwartz, The Gender of Sexuality: Exploring Sexual
Possibilities, Second Edition
Joey Sprague, Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences,
Second Edition
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Feminist
Methodologies for
Critical Researchers
Bridging Differences
Second Edition
JOEY SPRAGUE
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Sprague, Joey, 1947–, author.
Title: Feminist methodologies for critical researchers : bridging differences / Joey
Sprague.
Description: Second edition. | Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2016] | Series: The
gender lens series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046941| ISBN 9781442218710 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781442218727 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women’s studies—Methodology. | Sociology—Research—Methodology.
| Sociology—Statistical methods.
Classification: LCC HQ1180 .S65 2016 | DDC 305.4—dc23 LC record available at http://
lccn.loc.gov/2015046941
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Foreword vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 The Field of Vision 1
Why Feminists? 2
Who Am I? 3
What Is Methodology? 4
What’s Keeping Sociology from Its Promise? 6
Knowing Choices 29
2 Seeing through Science: Epistemologies 33
Positivism: Do the Facts Speak for Themselves? 34
Radical Social Constructionism: Is Knowledge Illusion? 39
Critical Realism 43
Standpoint Theory 47
Critical Realism or Standpoint Theory? 53
Critically Seeking Reality 60
3 Authority and Power 63
Power and Authority, Ideology and Knowledge 64
The Subjectivist (Mis)interpretation of Standpoint Epistemology 68
Social Standpoint Epistemology 79
v
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vi CONTENTS
4 How Feminists Count: Critical Strategies for Quantitative Methods 95
Problems with Standard Quantitative Methodology 96
How Feminists Use Quantitative Methods 114
Conclusion 140
5 Qualitative Shifts: Feminist Strategies in Field Research
and Interviewing 145
Feminist Critiques of Qualitative Methodology 147
Increasing the Researcher/Researched Connection 160
Compensating for the Researcher’s Standpoint 167
Constructing Collaborations 185
Conclusion 191
6 Whose Questions? Whose Answers? 195
Asking Critical Questions 196
To Whom Are We Providing Answers? 210
7 Changing Sociology, Changing the World 229
Changing Research 234
Changing Our Discipline 236
Changing Ourselves 238
Notes 241
Bibliography 243
Index 277
About the Author 283
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Series Editors’ Foreword
It is now more than thirty years since feminist sociologists identified gender
as an important analytic dimension in sociology. In the intervening decades,
theory and research on gender have grown exponentially. With this series, we
intend to further this scholarship, as well as ensure that theory and research
on gender become fully integrated into the discipline as a whole.
In their classic edited collection Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social
Science Research (1987), Beth Hess and Myra Marx Ferree identify three
stages in the study of women and men since 1970. Initially, the emphasis was
on sex differences and the extent to which such differences might be based
on the biological properties of individuals. In the second stage, the focus
shifted to the individual sex roles and socialization, exposing gender as the
product of specific social arrangements, although still conceptualizing it as
an individual trait. The hallmark of the third stage is the recognition of the
centrality of gender as an organizing principle in all social systems, including
work, politics, everyday interaction, families, economic development, law,
education, and a host of other social domains. As our understanding of gen-
der has become more social, so has our awareness that gender is experience
and organized in race- and class-specific ways.
In the summer of 1992, the American Sociological Association (ASA)
funded a small conference organized by Barbara Risman and Joey Sprague to
discuss the evolution of gender in these distinctly sociological frameworks.
vii
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viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
The conference brought together a sampling of gender scholars working in
a range of substantive areas with a diversity of methods to focus on gender
as a principle of social organization. The discussions of the state of feminist
scholarship made it clear that gender is pervasive in society and operates at
multiple levels. Gender shapes identities and perception, interactional prac-
tices, and the very forms of social institutions, and it does so in race- and
class-specific ways. If we did not see gender in social phenomena, we were
not seeing them clearly.
The participants in the ASA-sponsored seminar recognized that although
these developing ideas about gender were widely accepted by feminist soci-
ologists and many others who study social inequalities, they were relatively
unfamiliar to many who work within other sociological paradigms. This book
series was conceived at that conference as a means of introducing these ideas
to sociological colleagues and students and of helping to develop gender
scholarship further.
As series editors, we believe it is time for gender scholars to speak to our
other colleagues and to the general education of students. There are many
sociologists and scholars in other social sciences who want to incorporate
scholarship on gender and its intersections with race, class, and sexuality in
their teaching and research but lack the tools to do so. For those who have
not worked in this area, the prospect of the bibliographic research necessary
to develop supplementary units or transform their own teaching and schol-
arship is daunting. Moreover, the publications necessary to penetrate a cur-
riculum resistant to change and encumbered by inertia have simply not been
available. We conceptualize this book series as a way of meeting the needs of
these scholars and thereby also encouraging the development of the sociologi-
cal understanding of gender by offering a “gender lens.”
What do we mean by a gender lens? We mean working to make gender
visible in social phenomena, asking if, how, and why social processes, stan-
dards, and opportunities differ systematically in women and men. We also
mean recognizing that gender inequality is inextricably intertwined with
other systems of inequality. Looking at the world through a gendered lens
thus implies two seemingly contradictory tasks. First, it means unpacking
the assumptions about gender that pervade sociological research and social
life in general. At the same time, looking through a gender lens means
revealing how central assumptions about gender continue to be the orga-
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SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD ix
nization of the social world, regardless of their empirical reality. We show
how our often unquestioned ideas about gender affect the words we use, the
questions we ask, and the answers we envision. The Gender Lens Series is
committed to social change directed toward eradicating these inequalities.
Our goals are consistent with initiatives at colleges and universities across
the United States that are encouraging the development of more diverse
scholarship and teaching.
The books in the Gender Lens Series are aimed at different audiences and
have been written for a variety of uses, from assigned readings in introductory
undergraduate courses to graduate seminars and as professional resources
for our colleagues. The series includes several different styles of books that
address these goals in distinct ways. We are excited about the series and
anticipate that it will have an enduring impact on the direction of both the
pedagogy and the scholarship in sociology and other related social sciences.
We invite you, the reader, to join us in thinking through these difficult but
exciting issues by offering feedback or by developing your own project and
proposing it for us in the series.
ABOUT THIS VOLUME
Joey Sprague offers a nuanced and engaging analysis of why and how meth-
odologies matter: they shape the kinds of influence social science research has
on society. After evaluating the epistemologies available to social researchers
at this historical moment—positivism, postmodernism, critical realism, and
standpoint theory—Sprague argues that a sociological perspective leads to
a preference for standpoint epistemology. She explores discussions about
relationships among researchers’ social power, their power in the research
process, and their authority as knowledge producers, and argues that a socio-
logical reading of standpoint theory leads not to simple transfers of authority
to some select group but rather to approaches that bridge standpoints.
In chapters 4 and 5, she takes up quantitative and qualitative methods,
respectively, arguing in chapter 4 that although quantitative methods are
vulnerable to certain kinds of biases, feminists have found ways to use them
to forward critical feminist scholarship. In chapter 5, she challenges the com-
mon assumption that qualitative methods are freer from distortions of power
and privilege, and evaluates a range of strategies feminists have developed in
using these methods to respond to standpoint epistemology. The message of
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