Gender Issues

Methods

If one defines methods as tools for use in conducting research, it is hard to draw any tight associations between methods and gender. Historically, most academic disciplines were dominated by men, and men were the original pioneers of most methods used in educational and social scientific research, from ethnography to survey research. Although some analyses of contemporary published scholarship suggest that women might use qualitative methods more frequently than men, this was not the case historically. In disciplines such as sociology and political science, it was women rather than men who were quantitative analysts at the point when these disciplines became institutionalized in Western universities. One example is the careful quantitative work carried out by women associated with the so-called Chicago School of American sociology, who conducted careful, detailed censuses of dwelling units on Chicago's South side and drew upon quantitative data from police and social work files to publish quantitative papers at a point when many of their male colleagues were writing non-empirical theoretical treatises. Mary Jo Deegan has shown that in the precomputer era, routine ciphering was seen as an appropriate task for women. It was only with the introduction of computers and sophisticated analytical methods in the 1950s and beyond that evidence collection and evidence analysis by computer-assisted statistical packages became separated, and [Page 366]men began to dominate the latter. In writing about more recent eras, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne suggested that disciplines that have been more accepting of qualitative methods such as ethnographic observation and intensive interviewing—for example, anthropology—have experienced more of a feminist revolution in the content and perspective than those such as economics or psychology that have not. However, it is hard to discern the direction of such a relationship. Were women attracted to fields where qualitative methods were used, or did women's participation popularize qualitative approaches?

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