NCJ Number
210311
Editor(s)
Tina Skinner,
Marianne Hester,
Ellen Malos
Date Published
2005
Length
252 pages
Annotation
This book offers a collection of papers examining feminist methodological questions in the study of gender violence.
Abstract
The papers are authored by members of the British Sociological Association’s Violence Against Women Study Group who focus their analyses on key methodological questions that have arisen from the recent research interest in gender violence. The second chapter, in particular, notes that as British Government policy shifted to focus on empirically evaluated programming and “what works” in terms of violence interventions, feminist research strategies took on an increasingly quantitative character, making a distinct break from the qualitative methodologies that helped shape the field. Issues surrounding the use of both quantitative and qualitative methodology in feminist research are expanded upon in each chapter. Particular topics include an analysis of how sports-related violence in the public sphere is related to violence in the private sphere as well as an analysis of the challenges involved with feminist researchers studying male subjects. Cross-cultural comparisons of children’s experiences of domestic violence are considered, including an examination of the power differentials inherent in the research process, and the particular issues of cultural competence and shared ethnicities in qualitative research are discussed. Ethical considerations when children are research subjects are dealt with, as is researcher-subject confidentiality when the subject is a violent male. In the end, it is clear that feminism is no longer a clear-cut ideology with a set of approved methodologies. Instead, feminist ideology and feminist scholarship have taken on many diverse forms, evidenced by the contributions to feminist thought offered in this book. Index