How have feminist scholar challenged traditional research paradigms?

Illustrate with reference to

qualitative and quantitative approaches and methodology
Introduction
The paper aims at focusing on traditional research paradigms, enumerating ways in which feminist
research scholars built in a body of criticism to tackle these paradigms and finally, taking the a few
research articles to highlight the ways in which feminist researchers have used methods creatively and
appropriated theories that builds in methodologies that serve the goals of feminist research.
One needs to understand the few key concepts of traditional research such as ontology, epistemology,
methods and methodology needs to be understood clearly before understanding the traditional research
paradigms.
Ontology: It is the study of being trying to relate to and understand human life from questions like what
it means to be a human being?, the nature of world? to decipher from these questions a derivation of
reality.
Epistemology: When ontology is the understanding the social reality, epistemology is concerned with the
very nature of knowledge, it shapes the very definition of research process by questioning how do we
know what we know? it questions very point of unleash of a certain knowledge and understanding the
emergence of such a knowledge.
Methods- Are concerned with particular methods employed to collect valid and reliable data
Methodology Is an entire process, that begins with understanding the research question, framing the
research objectives, employing a particular method and the reason behind using that particular method
and finally, arriving at a conclusion after analysis and validating.
Feminism is a consciousness and a movement that believes that women are oppressed by varied different
structures of power and patriarchy and they problematize gender in order to try and bring in social quality.
Feminist research scholars perform feminist research using methodologies and develop new theories that
can reflect womens issues and everyday lives as well as expose the structures of power and dominance in
the society in order to achieve feminist objectives.
Evolution of feminist research
The first wave womens movement occupied the academic institutions and universities after fighting for
universal equal right to education and suffrage. As they tried acquiring knowledge under various
disciplines in universities the feminists understood that every discipline has an innate gender bias and
stereotyping within. The cultural stereotypes of gender were inherently articulated in each and every
discipline and argued in the name of proven theories in natural sciences, humanities and in social
sciences.
Thus the feminists of second wave understood that the traditional research is reflecting the gender bias
and is majorly androcentric. The lived experiences of women are different from what they were reading
about their lives and realities in the traditional social science research and were quick enough to find the
source of such assumptions. The theories and concepts of research are developed by men and serve the

interests of male and help in imposing the existing models of power and dominance on women. The
definitions of knowledge, truth and methodologies were male oriented and were validated by male
researchers. As more and more feminist researchers tried understanding such crude forms of sexism
existing in traditional research knowledge, they tried building a movement to focus the attention of
research about womens lives.
The vibrant womens movement of the 1960s and 70s served as backbone for the movement of feminists
countering the traditional research paradigms. The ideology based on strongly rooted womens movement
politicized feminist research and changed the focus of research on women to for women injecting the
findings back in to movement in order to build in strong arguments against structures of power and
dominance, thus strengthening the struggle and studies for women simultaneously.
Traditional positivist research paradigm
Paradigms reflect changing values and ideas countering the existence of a fixed reality that can be
objectively found. The traditional research paradigms that are mostly countered by feminists for they
form the basis for the gender bias that is stemmed in research theories and methods.
The traditional research paradigms were rooted in positivist paradigm which resulted in the following
approaches
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2.
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4.
5.

Insistence on empirical evidences or validity

Quantitative methods
Deductive nature of research
Objective/ value free research
Reliability and replication

Positivist paradigm insists on external, objective reality in order to arrive at fact and truth, further
insisting that the universal knowledge lies in the derivations and interpretations of the found fact and
truth. There is a definite distinction between facts and truth from values as values are considered as
individuals consciousness and emerges from ones self interpretations and are not considered objective
whereas facts are seen as outside ones self and as the opposite of values, free from interpretations and
these facts are acknowledged to be the reality.
Feminist research scholars have rejected out rightly the very notion of positivist paradigm as there can
be no research that is completely outside ones values, interpretations as they are the basis as to why
individuals have different research questions and build in varying conclusions based on these differing
questions.
They countered saying that the very empirical evidence or facts which were predominantly quantitatively
measured using the survey data and statistical data analysis to test the hypotheses and causal relationships
that are deductive in nature as they are tested against the social laws and theories for validity are
considered objective that justified its claims as well as unbiased or value free/value neutral to produce
findings which are considered as reliable and are generalized and are considered as replicable.

Feminist critique of positivist paradigm

Feminist critiqued the positivist paradigm as it is the underlying reason for the missing experiences of
women as their experiences are underrepresented or not represented within the same. And, this is the
major reason for contradictions of womens experiences in social sciences. The feminists strongly felt that
the dominance of positivist notion is not its rooting in the objective or universal knowledge base rather
from its privileged location within the hegemonic power structures. The feminists went further called the
value-free, objective and social reality propaganda of positivist paradigm as myths as no socioscientific research can be outside the social reality, free from the researchers interpretation of these social
realities and objective is never static and keeps changing. They further critiqued the quantitative methods
were not sufficient enough to finding the lives of women, their concerns and in turn to provide an
accurate account of society from their view. They felt that the positivist science reduces human beings
their experiences, realities, feelings and accounts to mere social facts. Thus the objectification of human
beings by using dominant methodologies which are mostly quantitative in nature was strongly criticized
calling it distanced, distorted and dispassionately objective.
On the basis of the critique built against the very philosophy of research, the feminists created a road
map for feminist research based on the ideological frameworks that were derived either from a marxistfeminist framework or experiential-inductionist framework the nature of the feminist research were:
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Ethnomethodological
Mostly based on qualitative methods
Interpretative in nature
Objective (derived from the lived and social reality knowledge claims) and also subjective
Reliable and are unique most of the times (womens experiences cannot be replicable as they are
different stemming from differing situations)