Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research

Jane Ribbens is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. She is co-author of Mothers and Education: Inside Out? Exploring Family Education Policy and Experience (with D Miriam, R Edwards and M Hughes, 1993), and Mothers Intuition? Choosing Secondary Schools (with D Miriam and A West, 1994). Rosalind Edwards is a professor of sociology and a codirector of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton. She is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a founding and coeditor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology. She has published widely on qualitative and mixed methods, including books on Paradata, Marginalia and Fieldnotes (2017, coedited with J. Goodwin, H. O’Connor, and A. Phoenix), What Is Qualitative Interviewing (2013, with J. Holland), and a Qualitative Research special issue on “Democratising Research Methods” (2017, coedited with T. Brannelly). Currently, she is part of a team exploring the feasibility of conducting secondary analysis across existing data from several qualitative longitudinal studies: http://bigqlr.ncrm.ac.uk/

`This is an excellent book for both undergraduate and graduate students. It contains some useful tips on technique and some striking quotations. There is also a comprehensive bibliography of feminist writing on a wide range of theoretical and practical topics. The care and thoughtfulness of this collection bring together in a stimulating way the philosopher′s questions about representation and the empirical researcher′s questions about evidence. Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research is a useful and timely book′ - Women′s Philosophy Review`It is indeed refreshing to find serious, dedicated feminist psychologists who write so expressively about their desires, commitments, limitations and difficulties as researchers, and how they choose to address them.... [This book] offers us a rare oppotunity to thrash through these dilemmas and perhaps gain sufficient practice such that when we are again alone in the thorny thickets of research we shall be better prepared.′ - Feminism and Psychology

• PART ONE: INTRODUCING OUR VOICESPublic Knowledge, Private Lives, Personal Experience - Rosalind Edwards and Jane RibbensHearing My Own Voice? An Autobiographical Discussion of Motherhood - Jane RibbensPART ONE: SPEAKING AND LISTENING: REFLECTING MULTILAYERED VOICESBringing Silent Voices into a Public Discourse - Melanie MauthnerShifting Layers of Professional, Lay and Personal Narratives - Tina MillerPublic and Private Meanings in Diaries - Linda BellTheoretical Voices and Women′s Own Voices - Janet ParrPART TWO: HEARING AND REPRESENTATNG: REFLECTING THE PRIVATE IN PUBLICHearing Competing Voices - Miri SongSibling ResearchReflections on a Voice-Centred Relational Method - Natasha Mauthner and Andrea DoucetRepresenting Voices in Ethnography and Discourse Analysis - Pam AlldredRe/constructing Research Narratives - Maxine BirchWriting the Voices of the Less Powerful - Kay StandingResearch on Lone MothersEpilogue - Jane Ribbens and Rosalind Edward