Researching Women's Lives From A Feminist Perspective

Chapter 7

Coming to Conclusions: Power and Interpretation in Researching Young Women's Sexuality¹

Janet Holland and Caroline Ramazanoglu

 

Introduction

Feminist researchers have made a major contribution to critical reflection on the research process, but deciding whether, or how, we can arrive at authoritative conclusions about the nature of other people's experiences remains a problem. Our aim in this chapter is to explore some of the issues involved in taking the accounts that people give in unstructured interviews, and presenting them as feminist sociology. Although we focus here on interviews, interpretation is part of any research that produces data from questionnaires, observation or recordings of other people's talk.

The many possible ...