What can conversation analysis contribute to feminist methodology? Putting reflexivity into practice

Abstract

This article uses conversation analysis to explore an issue central to the design and delivery of feminist research: the relationship between researcher and researched, and specifically, the impact of the former on the latter. A guiding principle of much feminist research is that it should be respondent-centred, allowing participants to set the agenda and define what is important in their own terms. Though not advocated as an explicitly feminist method, one technique deemed to be ideally suited to this end is the use of prompts as stimulus materials. In this article, I revisit data from my own research in which picture prompts were used to derive gender talk. Rather than treat prompts as facilitators of talk in which the respondents set the priorities, I demonstrate how the activity of showing a prompt itself requires work on the part of the moderator. I argue that even where the researcher tries to minimize her impact on the data collection process — as in this case through the use of prompts — that she is still influential and the data is thereby always an interactional product. Although many feminists acknowledge this, and advocate the importance of a reflexive orientation to our data collection practices, I suggest that most feminists do not, as yet, possess the analytic skills to do this reflexivity well. I consider the implications of this analysis for the way feminists and other researchers derive and analyse gender talk, and conceive of the relationship between the researcher and those researched.