Qualitative application and analysis

The qualitative approach comprised 16 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with wife and husband on eight dairy farms (Paper IV). The choice of dairy as the main production enterprise was based on the common occurrence of this type of production in major parts of Sweden. The farms were sampled within a restricted area, at similar distances to larger cities, in the county of Västra Götaland. This area was chosen based on its prominent position in the agricultural sector, both in terms of numbers of farm businesses and milk production. Understanding the content and epistemology of the experiences as specialised knowledge requires attention to the contexts from which those experiences emerge. While produced by individuals, farm women’s and men’s experiences as situated knowledge are embedded in their rural communities (Little, 1994; Haraway, 1988) and shaped by their spatial and natural situation (Bernstein, 2010a; Harvey, 2006).

For maximum variation, the farms were strategically selected based on criteria relating to the farms and their activities (see the methods section in

incorporating purposive and snowball approaches (Noy, 2008), was used. The partners were interviewed separately in order to facilitate the development of a personal narrative (Kohler Riessman, 2003), so that the participants could reflect on their experiences of everyday life and family farming. The interview questions were open-ended and the interview guide was constructed based on the guidance of the theoretical framework. The guide explored the experiences of the participants’ everyday world and their personal history. The feminist debate on the position of researchers in qualitative research (Sprague, 2005) coloured the whole research process and helped in interactions with the participants in their everyday world (Abu-Lughod, 1990). To understand interviewing as a form of social interaction, it is important to consider one’s own standpoint in the different steps of the research process (Harding, 1993).

These meetings were an important driving force in the work described in this thesis and the participants’ experiences were of great value to the final product. In general, the participants were found to talk easily and were able to reflect over their everyday world. However, a number of them had off-farm functions, e.g. as board members, and seemed to find it easier to put their experiences into words. Within this subgroup in particular, there was a distinct collective narrative involving use of more or less the same word to describe some aspects of their profession. The characterisation of farming as a job denoted by ‘freedom’ was one of the more common narratives articulated by the participants. Many of the farm couples in the study put aside time to participate, even though the interviews took place during a busy period. However, three couples declined to participate due to pressure of work during the period. This could be interpreted as a slight bias in the sample based on the economic structure of time – who could ‘afford’ to participate? There are of course other factors that influenced the ability to participate, not least the environmental and ecological aspects of farm production.

In the process, reflection on my own lived position and that of the participants contributed to a sense of relation and recognition. I sometimes experienced difficulties when participants’ values and points of view collided with my own (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996). While I did not grow up on a farm, the perception during the interviews was that my rural background provided a social link based on similarity. In many of the interviews, these circumstances situated me in both an outsider and insider position simultaneously (Narayan, 1993), something that became evident in meetings with a few of the participants. At the end, returning to questions that were first asked in the beginning of the interview exposed knowledge that was “mute” and taken for granted due to my assumed insider position (DeVault, 2004). The fact that I was considerably younger than the participants also played a part in

defusing the situation by making it less threatening. This said, the sensibility to power relations, without downplaying my own position as researcher in relation to the participants, is important to recognise (Skeggs, 2001). In a theoretical approach, reflexivity is an important practice to increase the transparency of the research process and to acknowledge that “all knowledge is affected by the social conditions under which it is produced and that it is grounded in both the social location and the social biography of the observer and the observed” (Mann & Kelley, 1997, p. 393).

The interview material from the study was then deductively coded based on the theoretical framework. During the course of the research, sub-coding was conducted inductively and transformed into categorical themes based on patterns and commonalities. The potential risk of “stealing women’s words” struck me during the process (Opie, 1992). To minimise this risk, I tried to be diligent in sharing the material (in the form of citations) and to be open about the heterogeneous parts of the narratives. These steps also increased the transparency of the process and enabled multiple reads of the data. The dual responsibility and accountability to the participants and to the wider academic and user community was challenging and provided important questions in the development of the research.

A feminist standpoint epistemology requires women to be placed at the centre of the research process and their concrete experiences provide the starting point from which knowledge is built (Hartsock, 2003; Smith, 1987). Despite farm women’s potential power to reveal important insights about the articulation and materialisation of gendered inequalities, their standpoint is only their perspective and is partial. No group has “a clear angel of vision” and thus can legitimately claim to possess a unique standpoint that enables a complete view of everyday world (Collins, 1990, p. 234). Despite its partiality, the standpoint of a marginalised group is still epistemologically preferable to that of dominated group from a standpoint position. In Collins account, the partiality of standpoint offers the possibility of male researchers, such as myself, to contribute and incorporate the feminist standpoint approach in the research process. The awareness of the partiality of one’s view encourages curiosity and a politic of solidarity.

In the Paper IV, the combination of insights from the different standpoints of the farm wife and husband contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of social life within family farming, as well as the interrelation between different inequalities and systems of oppression. In this understanding, with no pure victims and no pure oppressors, the tendency in early feminist standpoint theory to view women as passive victims rather the agents of

women are not just the experiences of discrimination and powerlessness, but also of struggling to preserve one’s standpoint and resist these oppressive processes.