New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies

Abstract

From the early days of the women’s movements of the 1970s, feminists have tried to intervene in the ways that the social sciences think about and do research. They have attempted to transform the methodologies and epistemologies of their disciplines. Central to these projects have been concerns about whether and how customary approaches to knowledge production promote or obstruct the development of more democratic social relations. Knowledge and power These theorists and researchers have argued that conventional standards for “good research” discriminate against or empower specific social groups no less than do the policies of legal, economic, military, educational, welfare, and health-care institutions; in fact, these standards actually enable the practices of these institutions. Social research turns the chaotic and confusing experiences of everyday life into categories of people in society, categories that reflect prevailing political arrangements. The social sciences then assign causal relations to people and social relations in these categories. These causal accounts enable institutions to govern our everyday lives in ways that fulfill the interests and desires of these institutions, and of the social groups that design and manage them, but not the interests and desires of our societies’ most economically, socially, and politically vulnerable groups. Thus the social sciences, while claiming to do impartial research, construct the “conceptual practices of power,” as Dorothy Smith (1990) said of standard methods in her own discipline of sociology. The social sciences are complicit in the exercise of power, including the power to control relations between men and women. Good method is supposed to guarantee reliable research results. In the conventional view, research methods do not contribute any social features, such as culturally local values or interests, to the phenomena they map