Privileging personal experience over scientific method

Although some feminist scholars deploy complex statistics to reveal the reality of women’s lives (for example Cantillon and Newman 2005), most have tended to favour methods that emphasise personal experience over scientific method (Hall 2006). Some, such as Oakley (1990) and Harding (1987) go so far as to argue that positivist, scientific and statistical forms of knowledge are essentially

masculine forms of knowledge. In contrast, they seek female forms of knowledge built on the recounting of personal experiences. This means a heavy reliance on qualitative techniques, even in-depth biographical or ethnographic methods. Moreover, all of the previous work most closely aligned to the aims of this piece of research (Pahl 1989, Goode et al 1998, WBG 2005 and 2008, Morris 1984, Wiggan 2005) has been strongly qualitative in nature.

A heavy reliance on in-depth interviews with a relatively small sample of women has been chosen for this study. This decision has been made for a number of reasons. Firstly, even if a quantitative approach was desired, the large scale data on intra-household income distribution is simply not available. Most of the key data is gathered at the household level. Secondly, living on a lower income is a very complex phenomenon, both in its causes and its effects. Statistics enable disaggregation of many of its components but in so doing it is possible to lose the inter-connectedness of all the elements. Each element of the lives of people managing on a lower income is tied up with each other element. If the inter-relatedness of these factors is to be included, it is necessary to take each individual mother as the starting point, rather than each individual factor. Thirdly, it has already been argued that qualitative methods are more likely to generate answers to ‘why?’ questions than quantitative ones. Finally, the argument of many feminist scholars that women’s voices must be heard if women’s lives are to be understood is accepted.

The way that women’s personal narratives should be interpreted has created an important division between feminist scholars like Bhavnani (1997) and Benhabib

(2001) who, while rejecting positivist research assumptions, still argued that qualitative research with women reveals something of their objective reality, and those like Dixon and Wetherell (2004) and Sonnenberg (2008), who have drawn on discourse theory to suggest that the way interviewees describe their lives is created by the interview process itself. Sonnenberg pointed out (2008) that a degree of contradiction between interviewees’ stated desire for gender equality and their actual unequal practice is almost universal, and argued that contradictions of this kind mean that researchers should abandon traditional interview techniques in favour of pure discourse analysis.

Two other solutions have, however, been proposed to the problem of contradiction. In her seminal book The Second Shift (1989), Hochschild

suggested the concept of ‘family myths’; ‘versions of reality that obscure a core truth in order to manage a family tension’ (19). West and Zimmerman (1987) phrased the same issue slightly differently, seeking to distinguish between ‘talking gender’ and ‘doing gender’, a concept which presupposes contradiction between the degree of equality people say they have and the actual lived

reality. Neither Hochschild nor West and Zimmerman responded to contradiction in interviewees’ accounts of gender practice by a withdrawal into discourse analysis. Instead, they recognised that marriage in modern society is beset by contradictory principles: a partnership in a society built on individualism, an institution where income is shared in a society that values individual financial reward, a place where adults and children struggle to reconcile their individual interests to a common good while still seeking personal fulfilment; what Sen has termed ‘co-operative conflicts’ (Sen 1990). To these inherent tensions must be added the unequal power of men and women in all aspects of our society, and the difficulties women face in reconciling ideals of the mother as carer and the mother as paid worker (Duncan and Edwards 1999, Wiggan 2005). Indeed the British as a whole struggle to reconcile these issues, with a relatively high rate of gender egalitarianism expressed but a substantial gender pay-gap (Thebaud 2010). Contradictions when discussing such issues simply highlight genuine contradictions in thinking and in the normative expectations of society, and suggest researchers need to consider actual practice as well as narrative accounts of that practice (West and Zimmerman 1987).

There should in fact be no opposition between ‘experience’ and ‘objectivity’: ‘individual experience is created in an active relationship to objectivity’

(Bhavnani 1997, 44). In other words, poverty is real and is also experienced. It is both objective and subjective. The necessary feminist focus on the personal experience of women should not lead to the exclusion of the concept of objectivity or a flight into discourse analysis. All of this is in keeping with the constructivist philosophical roots of feminist epistemology, which acknowledge that the experience and meaning of social activities is personally constructed, but not freely constructed. Social, economic and normative frameworks shape and constrain that construction at every stage, what Folbre has termed

‘gendered structures of constraint’ (1994). Hammersly (1992) has proposed a middle ground which recognises that ‘reality exists’ and that researchers can make claims of ‘reasonable certainty’ about it, but that: ‘we must still view people’s beliefs and actions as constructions’ (1992, 53).

In the first part of the interviews for this study, therefore, the objective nature of the poverty of different household members was established using income data and deprivation analysis questions. In the remainder of the interview, a semi-structured approach was taken to gather information on the subjective experience of each woman; how does each interviewee experience and

understand her financial struggles and the financial struggles of her household? In this part of the interview, there was a particular emphasis on analysing the gendered nature of life on a low income within each household. Rather than seeing contradictions between the two parts of the interview as problematic, they will be seen as both instructive and expected.