Modelo de gestión como herramienta en el transporte

Feminist research is more likely to address women’s oppression if it respects and values women’s experiences and their accounts of them creating a collective culture for the respectful sharing and examination of all relevant participant experiences contributes to women being able to identify new or better ways of understanding the situation. The interviewing women is a contradiction in terms (Oakley, 1981). Reflecting on the power

dimension of research and the way in which a more powerful woman who asks the question and the less powerful women who gives the answer constitutes an uneasy relationship (Pfeiper, 2000; Farber, 2001). In Mumbai, the dilemma of unequal power relationships was solved in three ways. Firstly, the interviews were conducted informally in the effective way a conversation would proceed with both the parties exchanging our experiences with violence. Secondly, permission was asked and a third party the social worker explained the possible ways in which their stories would be used in the project. Finally during the writing up stage, care was taken to ensure that the women’s stories were represented exactly as they wanted their voices to be heard.

Two broad currents of criticism and disquiet have served to dislodge modernist visions of quality in qualitative research opening up the field to a more flexible and pragmatic relationship between research practice and methodology. Political perspectives have involved objections to the hidden values which modernist commitments to guiding ideals like objectivity and rationality have involved. In the wake of this, post modernism appears to have shaken the foundationalism on which much qualitative research has depended. Denzing’s research practice contains elements that address both sources of criticism (Denzin, 1991). Marxist, feminist and other perspectives from critical theory argue that the quality of research should be judged in terms of its political effects rather than its capacity to formulate universal laws or apparently objective truth (Acker, Barry and Esseveld, 1996).

Various studies on domestic violence in India and in other countries have used different qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify various aspects of the problem of VAW. The Women’s Studies Unit of the TATA institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai has pioneered research on DV in India (Mitra, 1999, 2000; Burton, 2000; Ghosh, 2004). Mitra’s (2000) report on the study of social responses to DV against women in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra used a methodology that involved the non-random survey of institutions that worked with victims of domestic violence. 15 different institutions were identified and surveyed. Ganesh (2006) based a study on DV in Maharshtra by analysing the data in the records maintained by the Special Cell.

As far as methodology is concerned the use of a highly structured intake form/ method would run counter to the ethos of the shelter movement and other feminist support group/ agencies but also to feminist research practice. In the case of feminist agencies and activists working to stop violence against women the articulation and legitimation of women’s experience have been an absolutely central objective in these contexts the rejection of the coercive objectification, of any structure-imposing methodology (either of enquiry or intervention) has often been explicit (Greaves and Wylie, 1990; Alvesson, 2009)

Qualitative research cuts across disciplines and subject matters. Qualitative researchers aim to acquire an in-depth understanding of human behaviour and the reasons that govern them. Qualitative research relies on reasons behind various aspects of behaviour. It investigates the why and how of decision making and not just when, what and where. Hence the need is for smaller but focused samples rather than large random samples which qualitative research categorizes data into patterns as the primary basis for organising and reporting results.

Feminists throughout the world have sought to develop ways of bringing the integrity of their own and other women’s experiences directly into practical and research contexts not necessarily treating those experiences as inviolate and sacrosanct but allowing them to inform their thinking and acting (Helium, 2000). Feminists are aware that their experiences and others’ rarely speak for themselves hence they require analysis and interpretation. When the inquiry involves speaking for other people or about other person’s experiences there is a tacit consensus amongst feminists about the responsibility a researcher or writer has to take for the position she occupies and about her accountability to the persons or groups about or for whom she claims to speak (Helium, 2000). Questions of authority and expertise are the issue here and the accountability is a central feminist concern which entails a principle commitment to trying to discover how things are with people one is studying or working with in on-going critical and self- critical yet respectful negotiations. Accountability often manifests itself too in a readiness to make sure that people who have participated in the research process as interviewees

remain active participants to the extent that the researcher makes her results available and ensures that they are accessible to them (Oakley, 1981). Ever since the 1981 publication by Ann Oakley’s work on interviewing women many researchers have insisted that all such processes should be interactive rather than constructed according to the old subject/object (interviewer/interviewee) model. Amongst feminist researchers Oakley’s work has produced a growing commitment to contesting and even rejecting the artificial stance of the objective observer. Yet her work has also generated what Reinharz describes as excessive demands especially in situations in which interests of the researcher and the person being interviewed are in conflict or otherwise incongruent with each other. While Oakley argues that interview encounters necessarily produced a relationship between the researcher and the people she interviews some theorists have extrapolated from this observation to conclude that researchers and the subjects must become friends.

Social research is difficult because one has to find the right balance between the theoretical frames and assumptions and sensitivity to the participants’ voices whilst doing qualitative research. Women researchers who have done their research in domestic and intimate private lives have contributed their experiences carrying out qualitative research and expressed their shared concerns (Jackson 2002). The main concern of these researches is the process of making ‘public’ these private and personal voices for a professional or academic audience. Researchers have to be aware that voices of particular

groups might be ‘drowned out’, systematically silenced or misunderstood as researchers engage with dominant academic discourses.

One of the challenges of the research was in making public the private experience and writing one’s own ‘hearing’ voice (Ribbens, 2002). Another obstacle was the study of social invisible relationships in social institutions (Mathner, 2002). Song (2002) gives a useful account of hearing competing voices and locating oneself within the research and dealing with multiple perceptions in research and about gate keeping and overcoming the barriers of researcher allegiance. This was useful for me to negotiate between the institutions that acted as gate keepers and the interviewees and to strike a balance in my relationships in the field.