IMPLICATIONS OF FEMINIST CONCERNS FOR THE TEACHING OF RESEARCH METHODS

The variable that divides people into males and females is surely one of the most fascinating and important, if enigmatic, that we will ever probe in psychology. As chronicled here and elsewhere, there are so many difficulties in attempting to study gender—and similar factors like race, age, and ethnicity—that most mainstream psychologists have cho-sen to ignore the study of gender differences and many even disparage efforts to do so (Unger, 1979, 1981). But it is difficult to imagine that an understanding of human behavior will progress when the most central psychological variables are systematically avoided. The kinds of ques-tions raised in probing variables like gender, issues such as the role of values in science, and weighing the advantages of differing research methods will not disappear because they are difficult to address.

Just as many academic psychologists today avoid epistemological issues in their own research and writing, they tend to give short shrift to these topics when they train future scientists. The preponderance of time in courses on research methods and statistical analyses is spent teaching the nuts and bolts of conducting, analyzing, and reporting on simple true experiments in the laboratory. Almost no attention is devoted to the relationship between conceptual frameworks and research methods. When alternatives to true experiments, like passive observational methods, are discussed at all, they are generally com-pared unfavorably with the more tightly controlled approaches and portrayed as methods of last resort.

Many feminist psychologists have become increasingly concerned about the narrowly focused and distorted training available to students and young psychologists at both the graduate and undergraduate lev-els (Quina, 1986). Not only have they changed their own modes of con-sidering problems and conducting research, but they have also changed how they instruct their students on the topics of epistemology, research methods, and statistical design. Central to their efforts is the notion that sexism, racism, and other conceptual biases have hobbled psychologists’ understanding of the human experience. To that end, they attempt to foster students’ awareness of their own everyday assumptions about the nature of reality and help them generate alter-native and testable conceptualizations.

Paludi is a feminist psychologist who has successfully restructured graduate and undergraduate statistics and research methods courses along these lines (Bronstein & Paludi, 1988). She has altered both the form and the content of her courses to convey better the range of per-spectives and methodologies available to scientists. We will draw extensively from her work to illustrate what alternative courses might look like.

Even on the most superficial levels, alternative methods courses look quite different in their structure from conventional counterparts. Stu-dents may, for example, be seated in discussion rather than lecture for-mats, and instructors may function more as discussion leaders or facilitators than as lecturers. Because few textbooks in these areas have been written from feminist perspectives, feminist instructors often opt to assemble their own lists of readings to supplement or supplant standard texts in these areas. Reading lists for courses like these often consist of numerous primary sources, representing a much broader range of topics and perspectives than is ordinarily offered to students in more traditional courses. For example, in a research methods course, journal articles on the nature and limits of psychological knowledge, ethics and values in science, and the differences between qualitative and quantitative ways of knowing may appear on reading lists along-side more conventional offerings on how to write the method section of a research report. Such articles can be analyzed in a discussion group where students take on the roles of advocates or critics of the various points of view.

To enhance students’ understanding of some knotty methodological issues, a series of classroom or homework exercises or small research projects can be designed. In-class exercises can give students a first-hand sense of how variables like gender of experimenter, gender of stimuli, or others discussed here can operate to affect results. Students can be asked to respond to vignettes like those developed by Bronstein and Paludi (1988), in which the gender (race, age, level of disability, and so on) of the target person is varied, providing students with a clear demonstration of their own stereotypes and encouraging them to acknowledge their own biases. Gender-of-stimuli manipulations can be contrasted with parallel gender-of-respondent manipulations to illus-trate the effects of gender role expectations. Similarly, the effects of other demand characteristics as they operate in laboratory (and some field) settings can be demonstrated in classroom exercises.

In statistics courses, an illuminating assignment requires students to vary the ways in which they report a set of data, to see how mode of presentation influences how results are interpreted. Encouraging stu-dents to present results in multiple modes—in graphs, tables, and words—and to apply more than one statistical test to the same num-bers can help put a data set in perspective. These exercises can fuel the debate on whether statistics do in fact ‘‘lie.’’ P. B. Campbell (1988) shows how easy it is to generate data sets where observers are apt to

‘‘see’’ gender differences in a table, but not in a graph, even when the numbers involved are exactly the same. Similarly, one can readily dem-onstrate how the type of statistical analysis used creates or obscures a difference. For example, applying an analysis of variance to a set of data supplied by males and females, students may find that a

statistically significant gender difference emerges. If a regression analy-sis is applied to the same set of numbers, it will be revealed that respondents’ gender accounts for less than 1 percent of the variance.

Another way of helping students explore the meaning of similarities and differences is to induce them to consider the degree or percentage of overlap in the scores of two groups. Assigning students the task of graphing actual gender differences in skill competencies, for example, can demonstrate that the area of overlap—which is at least 90 percent even in cases of the largest gender differences—is far greater than the area representing group differences (Campbell, 1988). Most students who complete this assignment readily grasp the point that effect sizes are needed along with exact probability levels for readers to evaluate the real-world significance of any difference found.

For the laboratory sections of such courses, instead of focusing exclusively on the design and reporting of a number of true experi-ments in the laboratory, students might receive a wider range of assignments that introduce them to different research methods. One alternate assignment might be to conduct an unobtrusive observation of a gender, race, or age-relevant interaction. These observations might occur in a real-world setting like a restaurant, supermarket, sports arena, or bus. In another assignment, students might be asked to con-duct a content analysis of some aspect of popular culture like television commercials, comic books, and magazine ads for gender, race, or age-relevant material (Bronstein & Paludi, 1988).

Instructors who seek to integrate feminist and cross-cultural perspec-tives into methods courses have also given consideration to modes of evaluating and grading students other than traditional multiple-choice tests, which may offer a distorted view of what some students know.

In her quest to fit the type of assessment to the material and the stu-dent, Paludi, for example, administers what she calls ‘‘problem sets’’ to students in methods courses. After a unit on a particular topic is com-pleted, students are asked a number of long and short essay questions that may, depending upon the topic covered, require them to analyze journal articles as to the biases, ethical violations, and threats to inter-nal, exterinter-nal, construct, and statistical conclusion validity or to com-ment critically upon justifications of the research hypotheses, research conclusions, and so on contained therein. These problem sets may be quite lengthy and assigned as take-home exercises, or shorter versions can be administered in class. Students may be assigned the reports to be analyzed or may choose research articles on their own, including their own work. In one problem set, Paludi asks students to outline and prepare lectures for their class on topics like the issues involved in follow-up and replication studies or the place of statistics in psychol-ogy. These thought-provoking and sophisticated assignments appear to have great educational value and engage the students in ways that

more typical assignments clearly do not and may lead to the creative use of statistics as well as the kind of reflective psychology that so many of us seek.

This chapter, along with some others in this volume, may provide some sense of the content that alternative methods courses might offer.

One of the major departures from conventional methods courses is the expanded perspective on the research process. Instead of concentrating so heavily on true experimental designs and a few quantitative modes of data gathering, alternative courses attend to all stages of the research process: the role of theory, the review of relevant literature, the formu-lation of the research question and hypotheses, the selection of a research design that is well suited to the question, the selection of research participants, data analysis, interpretation of the results, publi-cation of the results, and their incorporation into the scientific litera-ture. The sources of bias and error that can enter into the research process at all stages are discussed, guided by Unger’s critical point that methodological biases can be traced to conceptual biases such as ideol-ogy, political loyalty, values, convention, and personal background.

It is important to stress here that instructors who take a feminist perspective do not disparage or overlook traditional experimental methods or seek to replace them with less methodologically rigorous designs. The unique virtues of the true experiment for probing causal questions guarantee it a central place in any methods course in psy-chology, regardless of who teaches the course or how it is taught. Nor do such instructors aim to convert methods courses to ‘‘psychology of women’’ courses by focusing only on gender-relevant issues. One of the great contributions of feminist methodologists has been to demon-strate how concerns about gender studies have illuminated many criti-cal and unresolved issues for all social scientists, regardless of their subject areas.

It is also necessary to acknowledge that these approaches to teaching research methods are not always easy to implement. Many feminist instructors who attempt to make alterations in central departmental offerings like statistics or experimental psychology can expect to meet with departmental resistance. Even if they are granted the academic freedom to teach their courses as they wish, they will not readily find the materials, resources, or guidelines that can help them organize their courses. Instructors of alternative courses may spend more time in con-sultation with students than those in conventional classes because of the ‘‘accessible atmosphere’’ that so many exercises, demonstrations, discussions, and debates can create.

Many questions arise when we consider these and related changes in methods courses. Will students exposed to so many perspectives, techniques, and methods be overwhelmed and confused? If time is spent on such topics as formulating research questions and conducting

literature reviews, will students be able to develop the skills to conduct true experiments? If methods other than experiments are taught, will students fail to develop the proper respect for the unique virtues of experiments? Of course, these and similar questions are empirical and should be addressed by research. It may well be the case, for instance, that students need more, as well as different, kinds of methods courses to grasp the kinds of issues raised here.

As difficult as it may be for many of us to contemplate major changes in core courses, there is evidence of increasing concern among educators that the conventional curriculum in psychology is failing our students (Hall & Sandler, 1982). Many of us who have taught tradi-tional research methods courses are well aware of how poorly they prepare most students to conduct or analyze even the simplest experi-ments and what little enthusiasm most students have for performing experiments or pursuing research careers. We do not mean to suggest that traditional experimental courses are invariably sexist, ineffective, or unappealing to students or that methods courses taught from a fem-inist perspective have ready solutions to the many problems inherent in training psychologists. Rather, we maintain that if psychologists are determined to eliminate sexism in their research and teaching, acknowledge feminist perspectives, or integrate the new scholarship on women into the appropriate literatures, they must begin by changing the way they conceptualize, use, and teach research methods. Feminist instructors have made some intriguing and worthwhile suggestions along these lines.

We are unaware of any formal evaluations of what or how much students learn about statistical and research methods when they are taught in a nontraditional fashion or how students taught in alternative ways differ in their knowledge, skills, or attitudes from students taught in more conventional ways. We urge that such evaluations take place soon so that they may contribute to the debate on these issues. Mean-while, our strong, if informal, impression, based on the unsystematic observation of students in nontraditional classes, is that such varied perspectives and pedagogical techniques may be uncommonly effective at engaging students in the research process: getting them to think cre-atively about research problems, building their confidence to criticize scholarly articles, and exciting them about the prospects of designing their own studies. Perhaps most importantly, these perspectives and techniques offer them far better prospects of conducting research that captures the authenticity and totality of their own experience.

CONCLUSIONS

In our extensive review we have attempted to provide a foundation for designing gender-fair research projects. We began our analysis with

a brief review of past feminist critiques of scientific psychology and focused especially on three interdependent areas that have become of concern to feminists: (1) the role of values in science, (2) issues embed-ded in the language and conduct of science, and (3) a comparison of qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Our general view of research methods has been expressed in various forms throughout this chapter. That is, unbiased consideration of the research questions posed should be the ultimate arbiter of which methods and research strategies should be used.

Throughout this chapter we have referred constantly to the work of Denmark et al. (1988)—Guidelines for Avoiding Sexism in Psychological Research. This document encompasses the issues and problems in gen-der-fair research presented here. It provides specific examples of com-mon avoidable situations and suggestions for minimizing and eliminating such bias. We hope that the guidelines will be seriously considered along with the information provided in this chapter in con-junction with planning research projects.

Finally, the major goal of this chapter was to offer a feminist per-spective on the research process, from problem selection to the analysis and interpretation of results. Feminist methodologists will surely con-tinue to challenge the nature of the truths we seek as well as our modes of pursuit. In so doing, they hold forth the promise of a more morally and scientifically sound discipline. We hope that the perspec-tives we have offered here will sustain this challenge and help to pro-vide a psychology for all people.

ADDENDUM BY FLORENCE L. DENMARK AND MICHELE A. PALUDI

In a brief postscript to the above chapter, we will explore the pro-gression toward gender-fair research in the 21st century. New refer-ences after the publication of the Rabinowitz and Sechzer chapter in 1993 continue to emphasize the need for theorists and experimenters to evaluate various aspects of the research process, including question for-mulation, literature reviews, measurement tools and techniques, sam-ple selection, and research designs, as well as data analysis and interpretation. The guidelines offered by McHugh, Koeske, and Frieze (1986); Denmark, Russo, Frieze, and Sechzer (1988); Landrine, Klonoff, and Brown-Collins (1995); and Halpern (1995) have paved the way for an alternative approach to the study of human behavior and other related fields such as biomedicine and health.

Indeed, psychologists have improved their research practices in response to such criticisms. Specifically, there has been an increase in the prevalence of female researchers and a decrease in the number of all-male samples, and research is more likely to be reported using

nonsexist language (Denmark, Rabinowitz, & Sechzer, 2005). Despite this progress, there is still much room for significant improvement with regard to the conduct of nonsexist research in various fields.

Some feminist researchers propose that the utilization of more inno-vative research methodologies will aid in establishing a less gender-biased arena in the field of psychology. One example proposed by Kimmel and Crawford (2001) involves moving away from tightly con-trolled laboratory experiments that manipulate independent variables to determine changes in dependent variables, emphasize objectifica-tion and dehumanizaobjectifica-tion, and often fail to study people in their natu-ral environments. Sevenatu-ral feminist researchers propose the following alternatives (Tolman & Szalacha, 1999):

1. Devote specific attention to women’s issues.

2. Conduct research that focuses on and empowers women thereby elimi-nating inequities.

3. Observe individuals in their natural environment in an attempt to under-stand how they experience their everyday lives as an alternative to manipulating people or conditions.

4. Avoid thinking simplistically in terms of the causal relationship between two variables and conceptualize the relationship in an interactive, mutu-ally influential way.

5. Consider innovative methods for studying human behavior.

With regard to innovative methods, Kimmel and Crawford (2001) suggest the use of focus groups whereby women gather to discuss a pre-determined topic. This would create an opportunity for researchers to evaluate the social context in which women make meaning of their experiences and gather data based on the information that is revealed.

Another example involves the use of qualitative methods that include semistructured interviews in which participants respond to open-ended questions that are tape-recorded and transcribed. It is important to note that feminist research and gender-fair research diverge on several issues, but the former can inform researchers on how to achieve the latter.

A primary focus in the progression toward gender-fair research is the exploration of topics that are of interest to or influence women. On the psychological forefront, topics such as emotional intelligence and female victimization (i.e., intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual exploitation) have received significantly more attention in the past dec-ade. In the medicinal field, the implementation of the Women’s Health Equity Act in 1990 mandated the use of women in clinical trials and called for the establishment of the Office of Research on Women’s

A primary focus in the progression toward gender-fair research is the exploration of topics that are of interest to or influence women. On the psychological forefront, topics such as emotional intelligence and female victimization (i.e., intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual exploitation) have received significantly more attention in the past dec-ade. In the medicinal field, the implementation of the Women’s Health Equity Act in 1990 mandated the use of women in clinical trials and called for the establishment of the Office of Research on Women’s