Feminist Research

The goal of feminist research is to promote and practice social research informed by feminist theories and philosophies. This broad and diverse effort has evolved from the general concerns feminists have regarding contemporary Western methods of social research. Feminists are particularly critical of quantitative social research because the researchers most often rely on positivism and reductionist science. This research is not viewed outside of the logic of a natural science model and accompanying methods. In fact, it is forged within a perspective that assumes the researchers' abilities to obtain accurate knowledge of social realities through the same methods used by those in physics, biology, and other “hard” sciences. Additionally, these methodologies adhere almost exclusively on practices of deduction arrived from the study of cause and effect and/or causal effects among variables that are largely measurable in quantifiable terms. Likewise, these forms of social research are situated within a central belief in the existence of objectivity in the social world within a presumption of value-free methodologies and strategies.

While many contemporary social researchers refute the ability of reductionist or positivist methodologies to understand the true and evolving nature of our social world, feminist researchers argue that even qualitative methodologies may be inadequate if they fail to center on women's lives and do not consider the nature of gender and gender relations of power as they unfold in our social world. Feminists are concerned with women's realities and believe that social research has largely failed to capture the lived realities of women because such methodologies have been produced within a system of patriarchy that favors the male experience and subordinates or objectifies the female experience. In fact, they argue that women have been largely absent from or silenced in the production of knowledge in the social sciences because all forms of social research have been shaped from within the masculine scientific model that is deeply rooted in construction of Western knowledge. The identification of science with masculinity as is widely apparent has promoted a dichotomy of gender notions and socialization and continues to forge distinctions between the sciences as either hard or soft. Such distinctions are inherently gender-laden and imply certain binarisms between fields of study and gender. Thus, as a field and an emerging body of work, feminist research is more than a response to disapproval with traditional positivist or quantitative and qualitative social research. It is, in fact, a call for more insightful and pragmatic research that (re)dresses methods, purpose, and epistemologies in social research to include women as central to the research and to work toward the reconfiguration of social relations within notions of gender.

Feminist research is centrally concerned with the lived experiences of women and the knowledge that can be garnered about the social world from inquiries with and examination of the social realities of women's lives. Feminist researchers are concerned with social identities of gender, the power relations within these identities that have situated women's and men's identities into dichotomous ways of being. They are also keenly attuned to other notions of differences, including the layering of identities of race, social class, sexuality, religion, age, disability, and other social constructions within society that influence gendered identities in specific ways.

...