Points to remember
The following are the major points introduced in this chapter. Ensure that you are very confident with their meaning, content, context and significance.
1 Feminist
research studies, among other things, the status of women in a social context.
2
Feminist research enlightens people about taken-for-granted sexist practices and
the gender-blindness of government and community practices.
3
The focus of feminist research is on changing the status of women in modern
societies, on studying women, and on employing female feminist researchers.
4
Feminist research is research on women, by women and for women.
5
Feminist research is based on the assumption that the world is socially
constructed, displays a relative aversion to empirical positivistic methodology,
and accepts the value-laden nature of research.
6
Feminist researchers employ a qualitative and/or quantitative methodology
although most researchers opt for the former.
7
Feminist research employs mostly conventional methods. The methods that can be
characterised as exclusively 'feminist' are in the minority.
8
Characteristic for feminist research is not the methods it employs but the
epistemology it follows.
9
Briefly, feminist research is quantitative and qualitative research employed
within a feminist paradigm.
10
Feminist researchers who follow the interpretivist paradigm employ qualitative
research.
11
Feminist research is well constructed, well defended and very popular.
12
Feminist research is not uniform but pluralistic. Most common is research based
on feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint and feminist postmodernism.
13
Feminist empiricism accepts and employs empiricist principles and practices
within its research model, although it is tailored to meet feminist standards.
14
Feminist standpoint research works on the assumption that women, due to their
personal and social experience as females, are in a better position than men to
face and understand the world of women.
15
Feminist postmodernism rejects epistemological assumptions of modernism, the
foundational grounding of knowledge, the universalising claims for the scope of
knowledge, and the employment of dualist categories of thought.
16
Feminist research has not yet developed the parameters that are required for the
development of a 'methodology'.