Fonow and Cook

The article Frminist Methodology: New Applications in the Academy and Public Policy by Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook, released in 2005, is a reconceptualization of the study these authors produced in 1991. This is similar to the first article I posted about in terms of subject matter, so I will use this post to discuss the points I found most interesting/important.

On page 2213, 5 "guiding principles of feminist methodology" are given. The third of these is "...challenging the norm of objectivity that assumes  that the subject and object of research can be separated from each other and that personal and/or grounded experiences are unscientific". This line arrested my attention.

The first half, explaining that subject and researcher are NOT, in fact, sanitary and separate is especially interesting. When I think about who does research, I envision an academic. This person may be male or female but they are undeniably professional and rigid, and they wear elbow patches and glasses. Of course, this seems ridiculous, and rest assured that I do not labor under the assumption that all researchers are like this, but it is where my imagination takes me when I think of the word: research. The researcher here is exhaulted as an intellectual whereas the subject that they are studying is an object. The subject has certain attributes that makes studying them desirable, and their identities are not contingent or fluid. This manner of thinking denies that if a subject is studied, that study itself will impact it. Certainly, individuals respond to others, and certainly a subject will be altered by interaction with a researcher. The norm of objectivity then, is inherently flawed.

The second half of the statement, that personal experiences are NOT unscientific, was also hard-hitting. This implies that qualitative research can be just as important as quantitative, and even though I believe that is true, this though allows a concise lens through which to view research. A table on page 2214 lists the selected methods employed by Feminist Scholars. This table shows many types of qualitative methods, and this allows one to have a more scholarly understand about just WHAT qualitative methods are, as well as why they are important.

The authors concern themselves with the body in a way they had not i n1991. They state that the body can be seen as a "social category of analysis." I find this to be deeply interesting, when one considers the implications for qualitative analysis. To keep the body in mind when thinking about how to research seems like a  new and profound approach.

Again, we think about Quality versus Quantity. In response to my own first post:
This article suggests that Quantitative methods have the "...power to alter public opinion in ways that a smaller number of in-depth interview do not." This is a much more concise phrasing than I used in my work, and a functional understanding of the debate. The authors offer a "multimethodism," which is directly in line with the agreed-upon commitment to understanding intersections of oppression that color the lives of individuals that feminists attempt to study.