New tendencies in relationship between the researchers and participants in woman and gender studies

In the 1990s, postmodern-feminist and socialist-feminist writers have started problematising not only the inadequacy of positivist and qualitative approaches to research on gender and sexuality, but also the dynamics of the relationship between research, researcher and the ‘researched’ in these studies. The aim of this article is to discuss the relations between participants and researchers on theoretical and implementative dimensions in the methodology of research about gender, sexuality and sexual orientation. Towards this purpose, some methodological elements that are related with two research projects completed by the authors of the paper will be explored. The first project that is investigated in this article is on women who sell their own agricultural products in a weekly town market. The research evaluates their reasons for coming to market, the factors that make the market place attractive to them, the socio-economic value of the marketing activity and what kind of public sphere the market place is. In the relationship between researcher and participants, obstacles were overcome because both parties are women, however, the difference in the social status of the researcher and the participants inevitably created a gap between them. The study concluded that in research with women participants and especially in closed/conservative communities where gender segregation of public and private space is evident, it would be almost impossible for a male researcher to gain this level of acceptance. The second research project investigates opportunities regarding gender in the finance sectors in Britain and Turkey. This project contains comparisons between female and male workers, power and authority differences between researchers and participants. During this research, the second researcher who was male, questioned his position and pros and cons of his study and concluded that his gender was not an obstacle to do this research. Firstly, there were both male and female participants where gender difference between researcher and some participants was inevitable. The fact that the second researcher was young and from outside the country, had different significance for participants from two countries and cultures. When we looked at the relationship between the researchers, it can be concluded that his gender, social status, class and profession had a dynamic but not static effect on the processes, objectives, participants and outcomes of this project. This paper argues that, during the field study, the gender of participants and researchers play an important role. This is not a static role but a dynamic role shaped by the social and cultural interpretation of gender. In both research projects, their outsider and student status, the researchers’ urban origins, their political views, ages and other socio-economic attributes may have had as much influence on the relationship between them and the participants as their gender. The responsibility of a social scientist is not to deny or ignore the role of his/her gender in the field, but to assess the direct and indirect impact of his/her gender as well as the participants' gender on the study's steps, methods and conclusions and to try to balance the impact of his/her gender, by upholding the principles of social equality, and of individual rights and liberties.

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