Participant observation
Fundamental to my attempt to ‘capture … social meanings and ordinary activities’ as a way of deciphering how the women in this study make sense of their leadership circumstances (Brewer, 2000) was the practice of conducting participant observation at meetings in which they interacted with other women leaders from rural areas. Rural research has commonly made use of this method (Hughes et al., 2000), and it has been described by LeCompte (2002) as an instrument for understanding broader cultural frameworks without masking differences among participants. Although it did not involve complete immersion into a field setting, early in the research I began attending meetings as a way of gaining acceptance among the women I studied (Brewer, 2000). This led to the recognition that their lives are quite complex and multi-dimensional – shaped by much more than simply their status and duties as leaders (Hughes et al., 2000). It also informed my understandings of the role these organizations play in rural life and provided deeper insights into the participants’ lives when they spoke about the organizations.
Particular attention must be paid to how much participation was appropriate to the setting (Buch and Staller, 2007). Wolf (1996) observes that research would not be undertaken if there were not existing differences between the researcher and the researched. Even in instances where the researcher shares some ‘insider characteristics’ with those being studied, it ‘is not enough to ensure that the researcher can fully capture the lived experiences of those he or she researches’ (Hesse-Biber, 2007, p. 141). Bourdieu (2003) attributes this to the foreignness of the researched group’s formative practices and experiences as opposed to those of the researcher. While claims have been made for the advantages of both insider and outsider statuses (Wolf, 1996), much feminist research considers insider/outsider status as fluid (Lal, 1996) or, alternatively, views the researcher as both insider and outsider concurrently (Wolf, 1996). McAreavey’s (2008) work gives further insight into the complexities of the researcher’s overlapping insider/outsider status through recognizing the continuous internal dialogue required to maintain both. This blurring of insider/outsider status was relevant to a point here, where my status as both an insider (daughter of a rural farm family) and an outsider (academic and native of the USA) informed my choices regarding participation.
Reflexivity
The common factor in both the interviews and participant observation was reflexivity. Reflexivity may be defined as a critical examination of the researcher’s perspectives and experiences as they have the potential to influence her/his research (Fonow and Cook, 2005). Feminist research values the practice for its usefulness in revealing biases that help deconstruct researcher objectivity and shore up experience as ‘a legitimate form of knowledge’ (Pini, 2004b). It is also a key way of recognizing both similarities and differences between researcher and researched and among the researched as a group (Katz, 1996), and is particularly useful to researchers interested in women in leadership (Pini, 2004a). Reflexivity must be recognized and practised, however, as a critical process rather than ‘a simplistic rendering of biography for its own sake’ (Pini, 2004b) or an exercise that falls into the trap of being either too brief (and thus inadequate and ineffective) or too long (and thus narcissistic) (Bourdieu, 2003). Bourdieu (2003) sets forth the requirement that the researcher subject not only her or his experiences, but also his or her relation to those experiences, to meticulous scrutiny – recognizing that the researcher’s location in the realm of academia will also influence research practices and outcomes. Unfortunately, in spite of the reflexive practices of feminist rural sociologists, reflexivity has had limited acceptance in the field of rural sociology (Pini, 2004b), placing it among the ‘sociological subfields’ Rosenberg and Howard portray as ‘stubbornly immune to key feminist insights’ (2008, p. 677).
Reflexivity is often relegated to the latter portions of academic studies. However, Hughes et al. (2000) advocate beginning the (continuous) reflexive process during the research design. Bourdieu (2003, p. 288) echoes Hughes by purporting that, without early reflexivity, researchers run the risk of ‘injecting scholarly thought … into the behaviours of ordinary agents …’. Ramazanoglu and Holland (2002, p. 14) bring this insight to bear on feminist methodology through their recognition of the unfeasibility of compartmentalizing segments of our lives as researchers – the impossibility of separating academia from our ‘everyday life’ – and so admonish feminist researchers to be mindful of the social context within which we operate. Beyond introspection, Naples and Sachs (2000) expand reflexivity to include how the research is presented, choice of contacts, formality or informality in dress and speech, and the researcher’s location during fieldwork – all for the purpose of exposing the process by which research conclusions have been formulated.
In the broader scope of sociology, Bochner (2001) embraces this element of research as humanizing the researcher, making space for the recognition of ways in which the research being undertaken is reflective of the ‘therapeutic’ and ‘scholarly’ intersections in our own lives (p. 138). However, this argument must also be tempered by Pillow’s (2003) admonishment to avoid forms of reflexivity that build false connections between the researcher’s life experience and similar (but not the same) life experiences of the participant. Pini’s (2004b) observation that reflexivity has a constructive role to play in revealing the context of knowledge production in rural research (particularly when examining issues of power) necessitated the acknowledgment of my own positions as both ‘privileged’ researcher (Milbourne, in Hughes et al., 2000, p. 179) and daughter of a farm family, among many others (see Section 3.1.1). To quote Pini (2004b, p. 172): ‘The questions I was interested in as an academic were similar to those which plagued me growing up and in my roles as granddaughter … and daughter to farmers. I could not separate myself as the “daughter of … farmers” from myself as “academic”, as traditional research paradigms would assert is necessary.’ In so identifying her multiple subjectivities, Pini was able to reveal the ways in which they influenced her production of knowledge, and also to acknowledge the limitations of reflexivity in capturing the complexity of shifting and multiple researcher identities (Pini, 2004a). Similarly, I began by practising reflexivity in the design of this research, and incorporated reflection as an on-going part of the research. This continuous practice assisted in analysis, as it revealed relationships between topic, people, social circumstances and methodology (Brewer, 2000).
2.3 Analysis
2.3.1 Method of analysis: the ‘Listening Guide’
Initially, analysis of data was to be carried out utilizing software. However, having carefully transcribed the interviews in the ‘mode of naturalism’ (Oliver et al., 2005, p. 1273) – including verbal stops, starts and notations of emotional expressions such as sighs and laughter – the partitioning of transcripts required by the software proved unsatisfactory. A search for alternatives led to a method of analysis that much more closely aligned with the aims and objectives of this study, with feminist thought and with Brewer’s criteria. This method – the ‘Listening Guide’ – was developed by Carol Gilligan and colleagues as a means of allowing multiple voices to emerge from a single interview, thereby revealing both the internal and societal (external) complexity of the individuals being interviewed and creating space for the reflexive voice of the researcher to be easily identified and to inform the analysis (Gilligan et al., 2003). Mauthner and Doucet’s (2003) recognition of the importance of reflexivity during analysis (as it stands alongside continuous reflexivity in the data-gathering phase) is reaffirmed by Gilligan et al.’s (2003) emphasis on the accessibility and identification of the reader/listener’s voice.
The Listening Guide ‘… is centred on a set of basic questions about voice: Who is speaking and to whom, telling what stories about relationship, in what societal and cultural frameworks?’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 159). These questions are pursued via multiple readings (‘listenings’) of the interview texts, with each reading focused on a particular aspect of the story being told. Gilligan et al. (2003) describe