My decision to research the lives of parents receiving welfare benefits while trying to attain a postsecondary degree resulted not only from my personal experiences with students like Tammy, described above, but also from my new role as a mother. As I have struggled with the issues of child care — including the psychological burden
evidenced in the guilt I sometimes felt when I dropped my daughter off at her center crying and the practical frustrations of finding alternative caregivers when she was ill and not able to attend her usual class — I have become increasingly attuned to the general dilemmas of mothers in a culture that simultaneously heralds June Cleaver and Sally Ride (be a good mother, but you can be an astronaut too!). By citing such personal influences I acknowledge the feminist dimension of this study and hope to clarify, at least in part, the ways these experiences serve to shape my standpoint as a researcher.
First and foremost, I consider this study to be action-oriented and feminist in its conception and execution. What this might mean exactly is dependent on the action- oriented and feminist researchers asked, many of whom may disagree regarding the who, what, when, how, and why questions under girding any type of research project.
Certainly I see this project as embodying the general goals of action and empowerment research as defined by Stephen A. Small (1995) in his analysis of action-oriented research models and methods. Action research according to Julian Rappaport (1970) is a tradition
within action-oriented research in which the researcher’s primary goal is to “contribute both to the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to the goals of social science by joint collaboration within a mutually acceptable ethical
framework” (cited in Small, p.942). It is expected that researchers employing such an approach will share their findings with the participants and/or with individuals who enact change. Empowerment research is primarily “concerned with the study of relationships within and between various levels of the environment including individuals, groups, settings, the community, culture, and social policies” as a means of highlighting the political processes that come to define the positions of stakeholders with varying levels of power (p. 946). Although action and empowerment research are similar in their emphasis on change as an end goal, they are different, argues Small, in that action research need not result in the creation of knowledge that might rectify oppression. Eliminating oppression is the explicit goal of empowerment research.
I also see this work as feminist in that it reflects a particular concern with the subordination of women.8 In this case, I have consciously sought to design a project in line with Jayaratne and Stewart’s (1991) determination of what might comprise a feminist perspective. Their chosen feminist strategies are presented below:
1. When selecting a research topic or problem, we should ask how that research has potential to help women’s lives and what information is necessary to have such impact.
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Small (1995) identifies feminist research as representing yet another tradition of action-oriented research. I separate feminist research out here as a means of emphasizing its heightened influence on my research approach.
2. When designing the study, we should propose methods that are both appropriate for the kind of question asked and the information needed and which permit answers persuasive to a particular audience.
3. In every instance of use of either qualitative and quantitative methods or both, we should address the problems associated with each approach.
4. Whenever possible, we should use research designs which combine quantitative and qualitative methods.
5. Whether the research methods are quantitative or qualitative, it is critical that procedures be bias-free or sex-fair.
6. We should take the time and effort to do quality research.
7. When interpreting results, we should ask what different interpretations, always consistent with the findings, might imply for change in women’s lives.
8. We should always attempt some political analysis of the findings.
9. Finally, as much as possible (given a realistic assessment of the frantic pace of academic life), we should actively participate in the dissemination of research results. (Pp.101-103)
Like Jayaratne and Stewart, I believe in the emancipatory potential of research dealing with women’s issues, particularly as those issues affect the lives of women who have historically been and continue to be marginalized due to their class and/or racial/ethnic social positioning. I realize that fathering is likewise a challenging endeavor in a capitalist culture where the value of the dollar often wins out over paternity leave or equal participation in the raising of children. However, the subject of this study, welfare, is a state- and federally-funded program that is fundamentally gendered both in its application and its perception by the public. Interestingly, I found no welfare-related programs with the terms “mother” or “motherhood” explicitly listed in their titles, yet I found plenty of “fatherhood” programs. The assumption here, of course, is that welfare
is a program primarily geared towards women and mothers—men and fathers are
supplementary. This is made clear not only in the pronouns used in the public media and in the written language of welfare legislation but also by a simple visit to any welfare office in this country. Women and children fill the waiting rooms and halls. When men are sighted, they are usually case managers, staff, or fathers coming into the office with their child’s mother. Although single fathers with custody of their children do receive TANF—I interview two of them in this study—their numbers are small. In 2001, men represented a mere 10 percent of all adult TANF recipients (Children’s Defense Fund 2004).
In addition to the fact that women are more likely than men to participate in public welfare programs, Karen Seccombe (1999) argues that welfare is a women’s issue because so many middle and upper-middle class women “are simply one man away or one crisis away from welfare themselves” (p. 7). Women continue to earn significantly less than men, women are more likely to sacrifice career to take care of family members, and women are more likely to face sexual harassment or discrimination in the work place. All of these factors can potentially affect women’s economic stability and place them at high-risk of someday needing welfare. Women are also more likely than men to be targets of domestic abuse and are therefore more likely to find their and their children’s lives in economically precarious positions upon making the choice to leave their
“breadwinning” husbands to protect their lives. For all of these reasons, I argue that welfare is not just a family issue, but a women’s issue.
Given my research approaches, I chose to embrace methods that overtly address issues of power in the process of collecting data and that resist imposing meaning that does not emerge from the data itself. To that end, I have employed a consciously self- reflexive mode of analysis that is heavily influenced by grounded theory methods. First, I acknowledge my role as researcher in the processes of analysis. I see myself, to use Michelle Fine’s (1994) words, as “working the hyphen,” revealing the power dynamics influencing my relationships with participants and discussing the processes and
implications of those dynamics with participants. Given my goal of generating findings from accurate representations of participants’ experiences, I realize the importance of reflexively questioning the ways in which I, as a researcher, am shaping participants’ interpretations and meanings (Fonow and Cook 1991, Collins 1991, Reinharz 1992). Subscribing to such a perspective requires that an emphasis be placed on the dynamic nature of knowledge and the processes resulting in its expression as it is shaped by subjects in the context of discussion. As we put words to our experiences, we make meaning for ourselves which is often further refined in discussion with others. To presume that more accurate renderings of personal experiences can be gleaned from interviews where the interviewer refrains from any meaning-making or explanatory dialogue is simply false, not to mention, impossible if we subscribe to theories of social interaction which locate the dynamics of meaning-making in our interactions (Blumer 1969). This is not to say that we cannot limit our influence within interviews—of course we can. However, the degree to which we should involve ourselves in such meaning- making is dependent on a study’s objectives and the power differentials between those
involved. The challenge for researchers, particularly social researchers sensitive to the political nature of their subject matter is to determine when such involvement will produce greater understanding of the issues being examined with the ultimate intent of elucidating processes of oppression.
Secondly, because I am striving to derive meaning from the perspectives of participants, I chose to guide my analysis of data using grounded theory methods. Admittedly, my stated research objectives — which reveal a primary concern with recording participants’ experiences and analyzing how those experiences are represented, misrepresented or even absent within present and proposed welfare policy — do not emphasize a concern with theory construction, the explicit goal of grounded theory methods. Although my research approach is overtly political and theory construction is not an intended outcome, I have chosen to guide my analysis using grounded theory methods because, at least as described by Strauss (1987), such an approach to qualitative analysis is particularly rigorous and creative in its intended execution.
According to Strauss, analysis relying on grounded theory methods takes place in three distinct phases: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Although the phases are distinct in regards to what they produce, they are not necessarily employed in a linear fashion, as well be further explained below. During the first phase of open coding, indicators in the data are identified, coded, and compared to other indicators as a means of identifying concepts. Indicators can be words, phrases, or sentences identified in the data. These indicators are assigned a name representing a concept (e.g. “value of an education” or “childcare problems”) as a means of identifying how they might be
similar or different to other indicators under the same or different concept headings. Concepts become “theoretically saturated” when added indicators to a defined concept provide no new insights regarding that concept. In other words, when a concept is
theoretically saturated, the meaning of the concept has been made clear to the researcher. As concepts become theoretically saturated, relationships between concepts will emerge resulting in the creation of categories that more abstractly connect two or more concepts. When categories are introduced into the analysis, the phase of axial coding begins. Axial coding consists of dimensionalizing categories via the asking of a variety of questions regarding concepts and categories. Specifically Strauss recommends that questions regarding consequences, strategies, interactions, and conditions that might pertain to created categories. As the researcher dimensionalizes categories, previously coded indicators, concepts and categories are constantly compared with each other as a means of ensuring their respective validity. The final stage of selective coding is not really final in that open and axial coding can take place up until the end of analysis and selective coding can take place early on in the process. However, all of the open and axial coding lead up to selective coding when a final core category emerges. According to Strauss (1987), “To code selectively, then, means that the analyst delimits coding to only those codes that relate to the core codes in sufficiently significant ways as to be used in a parsimonious theory” (p. 33). Just as the name implies, selective coding is a more focused type of coding that results in the creation of not only a single core category but also theory.
Throughout this process of transcribing, coding and constant comparison, researchers are expected to track their findings, questions, and hypotheses in dated memos, another key tool defined by Strauss, that serves as a resource for integrating emerging concepts and categories. In those memos, researchers jot down questions and notes regarding emerging patterns, emanating from descriptions of processes and
relationships evidenced in the words of the text being examined. As stated previously, the goal of this recursive style of analysis — which involves processes of deduction and induction simultaneously — is to create dense concepts and abstractions that accurately depict and explain the processes evidenced in the data, thereby increasing the validity of findings.
In the sections below describing my interview and content analysis methods, I present a more detailed description of the grounded theory methods I chose to utilize for this particular project. I employed the practices of open coding, axial coding, memoing, and diagramming and forwent the final phases of selective coding and theory
construction. This is not to say that selective coding and the creation of a core category are not important. Instead, I would argue that given the action-oriented objectives of this particular project, I chose to focus on the results produced during the initial open and axial phases of coding. The findings from these phases of analysis provided the
necessary information to fulfill my research objectives. Further analysis of the data may indeed produce a core category that provides additional insight into our understanding of the experiences of student welfare participants. However, I would argue that the
intended to provide information and identify relationships that have heretofore been ignored in most coverage of welfare reform.