Researching Female Faith

Qualitative Research Methods

Nicola Slee, Fran Porter, Anne Phillips, Nicola Slee, Fran Porter, Anne Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351734127
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Religious and spiritual engagement has undergone multiple significant changes in recent decades. Researching Female Faith is a collection of essays based on recent and original field research conducted by the contributors, and informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives, into the faith lives of women and girls – broadly from within a Christian context.

Essays describe and recount original qualitative research that identifies, illuminates and enhances our understanding of key aspects of women's and girls' faith lives. Offered as a contribution to feminist practical and pastoral theology, the essays arise out of and feed back into a range of mainly UK pastoral and practical contexts. While the essays in this volume will contribute to an enhanced appreciation and analysis of female faith, the core focus is on feminist qualitative research methods and methodology. Thus, they demystify and illuminate the process of research, including features of research which are frequently under-examined.

The book is a first in bringing together a specific focus on feminist qualitative research methodology with the study of female faith lives. It will therefore be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners with interests in faith and gender in theology, religious studies and sociology.

Part I

Developing feminist methodologies

1 ‘Come as a girl’

Exploring issues of participative methodology for research into the spiritual lives and faith of girls-becoming-women

Anne Phillips

Introduction

Across the Western world in recent years, multiple reports from statutory and voluntary bodies based on interviews with girls and young women reveal the effects of the gender-based pressures in their everyday experience, physical, social and psychological.¹ In one response, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project² in 2012, reminds girls that: ‘You’re not defined by your gender, your body, or what anybody else says about you. Only you get to decide who you are’.³ When I conducted my research with girls aged 11–13 in churches during 2004–2005,⁴ issues of body image, discrimination and sexualization were concerns that they raised spontaneously. Georgia observed how girls ‘were “hardly ever happy” about their body image’, upset there was something wrong, and thinking they were ‘either a bit too short or a bit too big’.⁵ Hannah reflected on gendered peer stereotyping: ‘sometimes boys say if you want to play football, “you’re not a boy, you don’t know how to play”’, and on the injustice of staff discrimination: ‘in class, when the teachers ask you to go and get boxes, they never ask girls, but girls are as strong as boys’.

Lucy, approaching teen years, was conscious of the increased and constraining sexualization suggested by adults over mixed friendships: ‘there’s quite a few boys in my class who I get on really well with, but if you’re seen with boys it’s considered straight away that it’s girlfriend/boyfriend and it’s not!’⁶

I open my chapter with these accounts to illustrate the reality of the world girls inhabit to the increasing detriment of their flourishing. Where girls are involved in the life of faith communities, there is both the need and the opportunity to work with them to connect life and faith, and to draw on the resources of spirituality to help build their resilience and gendered self-confident awareness. Obsession with body image, and low self-esteem, are not only psychological and health issues, they are profoundly spiritual.⁷ In working with girls, it is inadequate for adults to determine programmes and support structures claiming to understand their lives based on their own memories and perceptions of adolescence, for ‘their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams’.⁸ Only those living in that liminal place in each discrete generation can tell it as it is for them in its particularity. The role of their adult accompanists is to enable them to voice and reflect on their experiences, to listen and learn from their thoughts and feelings, and to offer informed support and advocacy through all aspects of their growth towards full flourishing. This must rest on good qualitative research engaging girls as participants, requiring researchers to adopt creative and reflexive methodologies. In this chapter, I will examine the participative nature of the methodology and methods I used, within the constraints of a faith community, and in conversation with other examples of research methodologies demonstrating varying levels and models of participation.⁹

Girls within childhood research: the contemporary scene

I begin with a summary of the current state of research with girls/boys,¹⁰ which from early years to adulthood is flourishing: normatively now employing feminist and liberation methodologies, methods are increasingly participatory. Most research is, however, conducted in the fields of education, health, psychology or the social sciences, fields where significant funding is forthcoming, and takes place almost exclusively in institutional settings. Inclusion of young people as active participants reflects their acceptance not only as research subjects but also in some instances as researchers. These issues, along with their corresponding philosophical and epistemological bases, are well represented in the contemporary literature on research with children and young people.¹¹

Underpinning the trend towards greater participation is the political impetus enshrined in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, followed in the UK by the Children Act (1989) and Every Child Matters (2003), which underlies the Children Act (2004) and all of which promote both the empowerment of children and young people to make a positive contribution to society, and also their rights among which is that to impact the issues and services that affect them.¹²

Participation in research ranges from being simply an active subject in a pre-determined process to full adherence to the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR), an umbrella term for a variety of action-oriented research whereby researcher and participants ‘work together to examine a problematic situation or action to change it for the better’.¹³ Using context-specific methods researchers seek to engage participants in ‘genuinely democratic and non-coercive research with and for, rather than on, participants’.¹⁴ Seminal texts defining the concept and examining the construction of theoretical participatory frameworks with girls/boys, models by which social research is both informed and evaluated, are Hart’s ‘Ladder of Children’s Participation’, which traces it through hierarchical stages from tokenism to full participation, and Shier’s alternative model focusing more on adult roles. Both are designed to assist practitioners to explore different aspects of the participation process.¹⁵ Girls/boys are now seen as broadly competent agents, their competence being different from but not lesser than adults’, and their knowledge as rooted in lived experience, so a research methodology in which they are engaged in some way as partners is the most appropriate.

Since most childhood research is conducted in social and political contexts, discussion of the methodological framework of participatory research takes place almost exclusively in relation to institutions and services that govern the lives of young people, and most commonly focuses on cognitive skills and functional outcomes in the social or built environment. Empowerment of young people in these areas has, potentially, far-reaching consequences in capacity building as they engage with social and political structures and contribute to community enhancement. Through being enshrined in a very broad sense in legislation and good practice guidelines, spirituality has gained some acceptance as contributing to a girl’s/boy’s well-being, and has been the subject of some research mainly in educational and medical arenas. However, confessional faith as an application of spirituality, and gender specificity or differentiation within the spiritual life, have received scant attention. So, despite the prevalence of childhood research and some research into spirituality, girls’ inner relational worlds and their faith lives in the context of their places of worship, have largely been neglected as subjects for empirical study.¹⁶ In studying the faith of girls, I am therefore breaking the silence in two areas of research.¹⁷

Participation within my research methodology

All research is participative in that it requires the acquisition of data from consenting subjects. However, as a qualitative methodology participative research indicates active engagement with the process by the subject, including in the research design, determination of topic and methods, conduct of the enquiry, data analysis and in some cases active pursuit of named goals. It is also imprecise and contested in its meaning and practice: strongly advocated at different levels by practitioners in child research, its claims as well as its epistemology and ontology are also challenged, as in the work of geographers Lesley-Anne Gallacher and Michael Gallagher.¹⁸ On the grounds that participatory methodologies retain power imbalances, they propose an alternative model, or rather attitude, of ‘methodological immaturity’ on the part of the researcher and the child, to which I shall return later.

I have briefly outlined participative methodology’s parameters as the framework within which to evaluate my own practice: while following much good practice in childhood research, my work also illustrates some of the questions raised by Gallacher and Gallagher particularly as it relates to the conduct of research with girls/boys in the voluntary sector, and specifically in a faith community, a context imposing restraints as well as opportunities not found in formal or state institutions. The researcher in a faith community usually has limited choice in levels of participation, and my chosen methodology necessitated some compromises, but for me the key ontological and epistemological tenets mirroring those fundamental to current theories of childhood theory were non-negotiable. The aim of my research was both to contribute to girls’ empowerment within the adult-constructed community, and to exercise wider advocacy on their behalf. The girls I worked with had their own unique appropriation and practise of faith, and this I aimed to explore in its particularity,¹⁹ while also in my analysis seeking commonalities within the age range across different churches both to inform, and to instigate debate among, church leaders working with girls in their personal and developmental transitions. These research goals, then, guided the development of my methodology, the desire to identify and advocate new and potentially transferable knowledge, and create an opportunity for empowerment by encouraging new thinking and gendered spiritual awareness. Since I also had an ethical responsibility to be respectful of the norms and beliefs of their current ecclesial heritage, it felt at times like walking a methodological tightrope.

The methodology in practice

In my empirical research, then, conducted in churches with varied demographic profiles, ecclesial style and theological stance, I planned for girls to be active participants as far as was practicable working within the social constraints consequent on church attendance being a voluntary pursuit, and the institutional constraints arising from my ‘intrusion’ into the privately organized and cont...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Developing Feminist Methodologies
• Part II Gathering Data
• Part III Analysing Data
• Part IV Practising Reflexivity
• Bibliography
• Index