Although feminist researchers have increasingly called for participatory and action-oriented research, there have been few analyses of the diverse actions that can occur. We theorized the actions considered and implemented in a feminist participatory action research project (FPAR). For three years we collaborated intensively with a group of diverse women on low income who were involved in a FPAR project designed to reduce social isolation and other self-identified health problems. Our data set included tape recordings of 32 one-on-one interviews, 15 research meetings, and extensive fieldnotes. Our findings indicated that actions occurred on both individual and collective levels; some had been enacted prior to the project and were shared to promote ongoing or new actions, while others arose as a consequence of the women’s involvement in the project. Additionally, some actions were implemented and actualized while others, though discussed at length, remained hopes for the future. While the research participants reported the benefits of being involved in such projects, they also spoke of the potential risks. Our findings revealed the complexities of taking action in FPAR and highlight important considerations for others wishing to engage in this type of research.
In this study, we sought a better understanding of how poor women made meaning of their poverty and health. Twenty research participants used varied, multiple, and at times contradictory discourses that shaped their identities as both legitimate and powerful and illegitimate and powerless. We identified four discourses in the women's talk—illegitimate dependencies, legitimate dependencies, overwhelming odds, and critique and collectivism. These four discourses revealed complexes of meanings and networks of interpretation that subverted, accommodated, and reinterpreted dominant discourses of poverty and health. This examination is relevant for feminist researchers attempting to understand the impact of dominant discourses in the lives of socially marginalized women who continually struggle to establish and strengthen claims to legitimacy and moral worth.
Doing good qualitative research requires engaging with the ethical and epistemological challenges of deliberately entering into relationships with people to learn about them. The authors draw on an event in their personal lives for insight into research relationships, hoping to deepen their understanding of how these relationships feel and work from research participants' perspectives. The authors present their experience in two linked vignettes to explore ways research participants might experience research about their experiences of loss, pain, shame, and social stigma and to address ways researchers can begin to understand how it feels to be the "written about" in research projects about such topics. They frame their discussion around three areas that arise from the vignettes: the increased risk to research participants when they like and trust researchers who misunderstand their experiences, the personal costs of disclosure, and the need for flexible research plans that can adapt to the interpersonal demands of intimate research relationships.Qualitative research demands painstaking attention to learning about how other people live, experience, and interpret their lives. It also, as has become increasingly obvious in feminist and postmodern writing about research, demands painstaking attention to the nature and quality of the relationships between researchers and research participants. Indeed, these relationships often-and increasingly-are central to researchers' claims to knowledge. Doing good qualitative research these days requires an engagement with both the ethical and the epistemological challenges of deliberately entering into relationships with other people to learn about them (
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