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Report Information from ProQuest05 March 2015
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Document 1 of 1 In/out/side: positioning the researcher in
feminist qualitative research Author: Acker, Sandra ProQuest
document link Abstract (Abstract): Questions around
insider/outsider standpoints are readily found in sociological
writings,especially those concerned with the methodology and
epistemology of qualitative research. For example, amajor concept
for Max Weber (1947), a founder of sociology, was Verstehen, which
is sometimes translated as"understanding." It concerns the extent
to which we can imaginatively project ourselves into the position
ofanother person, in order to try to comprehend the reasons that
person has for her/his actions. Comprehending asituation and
explaining it to others is at the heart of qualitative research,
though it has been much troubled inrecent years by an increased
sensitivity to the problems inherent in such an exercise (Britzman,
1995). Severalother classical sociologists (Simmel, 1908/1971;
Schutz, 1944) have considered the role and specialperceptions of
"the stranger," and in the early 1970s, Robert Merton (1972)
directly tackled the question ofinsider and outsider perspectives
in research. More recently, Patricia Hill Collins (1991) has
developed theconcept of "the outsider within" with regard to Black
women sociologists, and James Banks (1998) has identifieda number
of possible insider/outsider categories. Feminist researchers
regularly raise questions about thepositioning of the researcher
and the researched (Stanley &Wise, 1983, 1990; Smith, 1987;
Cook &Fonow,1990; Reinharz, 1992; Harding, 1993; Edwards
&Ribbens, 1998). To the extent that external researchers
undertake ethnographic research, conduct many interviews, or
makesite visits, their understandings are increased and their
perspectives move closer to insider than outsider ones.But more
often, the contact is relatively short, as in our 60-90 minute
interviews. When working in fields not ourown, rather than seeing
the researcher as necessarily in opposition to her original
community and trying to beaccepted by a new community (External-
Insiders), or simply remaining detached (External-Outsiders),
wetended to adopt a category more like Collins's "outsider within."
In that case the researcher retains her originalcommitments and
values but makes use of them to understand a new community into
which she is also beingsocialized. Special insights for outsiders
who become partial insiders are at least possible, if less likely
than forthose who are insiders but on the margins of their own
fields (Indigenous-Outsiders). This excursion into the question of
insiderness and outsiderness that arose in a feminist qualitative
researchproject has, in the cliched words of so many discussions in
the literature, raised more questions than it hasanswered. I would
have to say that I feel more at ease interviewing in my own field
(education) than in the otherthree fields. I am less apprehensive
that I will fail to understand the research or the departmental
organizationthat the participant is describing to me, and that
makes me more relaxed, which in itself may contribute to abetter
interview. That level of confidence has remained for me even when I
have been acutely aware of some ofthe differences between the
interviewee and myself. These differences can arise around
attributes such as raceor ethnicity, seniority, sub-discipline,
gender or political views. I am thinking of the ethnic minority
woman Iinterviewed who denied that discrimination against her
ethnic group still occurred, or the man who attackedfeminist
research for being preoccupied by topics such as the situation of
women academics rather than issueslike poverty or homelessness.
Despite these differences, there was still a shared insider status
vis-a-vis"education" that facilitated those interviews. What was
familiar was not so much the detail of people's researchbut the
general lines of the workplace culture (see Acker, 1999b). For
example, dilemmas such as the balancebetween graduate teaching and
preservice teaching turned up regularly, and were easily
recognizable, whilethe comparable tensions within other fields were
harder for me to recognize and to probe in an interviewsituation.
Nevertheless, I cannot know how much I might have missed because
education academics may haveassumed I would know about something
and therefore there was no need to tell me.
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Full text: This article considers issues of "outsiderness" and
"insiderness" that arose in the context of a feministqualitative
research project on the experiences of academics, especially women,
in faculties of social work,education, pharmacy and dentistry.
Members of the research team had connections to the four fields,
andoriginally believed that their insider status in that regard
would facilitate access to the participants, rapport in
theinterviews, analysis of the data and communication of the
results. The article identifies some of the problemsand puzzles
that emerged around the determination of who is an insider or
outsider and who has the greaterinsights in which situation. One
possibility is that the insider- outsider question cannot be fully
resolved, but thatwe can try to work creatively within its
tensions. Cet article examine des questions d'appartenance et de
non- appartenance survenues dans le contexte d'unprojet de
recherche feministe qualitative sur les experiences
d'universitaires, femmes surtout, dans lesdepartements de travail
social, d'education, de pharmacologie et de dentisterie. Les
membres de l'equipe derecherche avaient des liens aux quatre champs
d'etudes, et croyaient que leurs associations faciliteraientl'acces
et le rapport aux participants lors des entretiens, l'analyse des
donnees et la communication desresultats. L'article identifie
certains des problemes et questions lies a l'identification des
personnes del' ou de l' et lesquelles de ces sit uations etaient
plus propices. Une possibilite estque la question de l'appartenance
ou la non-appartenance ne peut jamais etre totalement resolue, mais
que lestensions qui en sont issues peuvent ouvrir la voie a des
approches creatrices. As a sociologist, I am used to that
uncomfortable feeling of distancing myself from what is happening
aroundme, whether it be a party, a meeting, or a dinner with
relatives -- all potential grist to the mill of
sociologicalanalysis. As a woman, I have been in many situations
where I have been acutely conscious of being the "other"in a world
dominated by men. What does it mean to be an outsider or insider?
Might it simply be a fleetingaspect of subjectivity, like the
discomfort at the start of a social occasion? Alternatively, when
does it mark allone's perceptions and actions? When is it a key to
insightful analysis? When does it stand in the way of
clearthinking? How do we even know when we are inside or outside or
somewhere in between? This paper is about issues of insiderness and
outsiderness that arose in the context of a feminist
qualitativeresearch project on academic life. Although some
quotations from the project data are used to illustrate
thearguments, the results of the study itself are not featured here
as the purpose is to focus on a particular issuerather than to
report study findings, some of which can be accessed elsewhere
(see, for example, Acker&Feuerverger, 1996; Acker, 1997, 1999a;
Wyn, Acker and Richards, 2000). Questions around insider/outsider
standpoints are readily found in sociological writings, especially
thoseconcerned with the methodology and epistemology of qualitative
research. For example, a major concept forMax Weber (1947), a
founder of sociology, was Verstehen, which is sometimes translated
as "understanding." Itconcerns the extent to which we can
imaginatively project ourselves into the position of another
person, in orderto try to comprehend the reasons that person has
for her/his actions. Comprehending a situation and explainingit to
others is at the heart of qualitative research, though it has been
much troubled in recent years by anincreased sensitivity to the
problems inherent in such an exercise (Britzman, 1995). Several
other classicalsociologists (Simmel, 1908/1971; Schutz, 1944) have
considered the role and special perceptions of "thestranger," and
in the early 1970s, Robert Merton (1972) directly tackled the
question of insider and outsiderperspectives in research. More
recently, Patricia Hill Collins (1991) has developed the concept of
"the outsiderwithin" with regard to Black women sociologists, and
James Banks (1998) has identified a number of
possibleinsider/outsider categories. Feminist researchers regularly
raise questions about the positioning of theresearcher and the
researched (Stanley &Wise, 1983, 1990; Smith, 1987; Cook
&Fonow, 1990; Reinharz, 1992;Harding, 1993; Edwards
&Ribbens, 1998). Despite the work that has gone before, in some
ways my colleagues and I felt that we were in new territory.
Onereason for this belief is that we were conducting team research.
Team research has its shares of disasters butmany consider its
strengths to outweigh its problems (Woods, Boyle, Jeffrey
&Troman, 2000). Nevertheless, it is
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one thing to reflect critically upon one's own self in relation
to one's work, and quite another to reflect uponrelationships among
colleagues in a research team and upon colleagues' relationships to
the other academicswe are studying. We had to think about the
subject positions of five researchers and the various permutations
oftheir connections with a range of participants. In/out/side
questions surrounded us. A Feminist Research Project Since 1995,
five women academics have been involved in a study of Canadian
academics in the fourprofessional fields of social work, education,
pharmacy and dentistry. Our project, which was titled "Making
aDifference," is unusual in its comparative focus and its basis in
a combination of face-to-face semi-structuredinterviews and site
visits. The existing research on women academics has tended to use
either large- scalesurveys or personalized autobiographical
experience. We believed that a middle way would produce
findingsthat could be generalized but that would still have
authenticity and a vivid "slice of life" quality. Although all of
ushad done ethnographic research in the past, we were aware that we
would not have the time available forlengthy immersion in the
culture of a university department. Further, we likely would have
encountered practicaldifficulties in gaining access and doing
participant observation in these settings. Instead, we hoped that
our"insider" experiences in our own academic fields would provide a
richness against which to frame the interviewsas well as expediting
access to individuals in the various departments and faculties.
When we embarked on this research, we believed that we were doing
feminist qualitative research. It did notseem necessary to explore
in detail our possibly varying ideas of what phrase meant. Looking
back, our bondwas not so much based on a shared and specified
feminist epistemology, but on other commonalities. Forexample, we
were committed to the concept of qualitative research. We wanted to
study women, although aftersome debate we agreed that we needed to
study men as well, in order to make informed comparisons.
Weexpected to enjoy the interviews and achieve significant rapport,
because we would be women interviewingmostly women. The research
was also supposed to be "for" women in a number of ways. We were
workingcollaboratively as a team of women. We often met in each
other's homes, with food and friendship. Finally, all ofus had
feminist commitments. As a team, we had both strengths and
weaknesses in terms of reflecting the range of perspectives
andexperiences held by academic women. One of the weaknesses was
the lack of a visible minority perspective,although two of us are
Jewish, and we vary in other ways such as ethnic heritage, social
class origin andregional roots. Another weakness was a relatively
restricted age range, as we are all in our forties and fifties.
Allof us are heterosexual and married; three have children; none
has a disability. One of our strengths, webelieved, was the spread
of our disciplinary and professional affiliations and the match to
the fields to bestudied. Indeed, our team was intentionally
composed as a multidisciplinary group, in part because that was
oneof the requirements for SSHRC strategic grants. (See Acker,
1994, and McKenna &Blessing, 1998, fordiscussions of how
funding bodies' requirements shape research aims.) Our group
included a sociologist ofeducation, a social work professor who has
studied the history of women in social work, a dental professor
whohas taken a special interest in dental education and women in
dentistry, a medical sociologist who has workedin a pharmacy
faculty, and a specialist in multicultural and multilingual
education. Conducting almost 200 in-depth interviews was intended
to help us determine whether the representation ofwomen in the
student body (highest in social work, lowest in dentistry) has any
consequences for womenacademics and for feminist scholarship. We
called our project "Making a Difference" because we wanted
toexplore the concept in several ways. First, we intended to assess
whether women faculty continued to haveinequitable experiences in
academia and whether the climate would be less "chilly" in fields
where women arepresent in relatively large numbers. Second, we
wanted to know whether an increased presence of womenmade a
difference to departmental or faculty culture, creating an
atmosphere that was more woman-friendly orchanged in some other
respect. Third, we questioned whether the presence of women made a
difference to thecurriculum, faculty research topics, or other
aspects of scholarship.
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Having someone on the team who was knowledgeable about each
subject area seemed an obvious advantage.It would assist us in
getting access to lists of potential participants, with the
relevant individual making thenecessary contacts in each
university. It would aid dissemination of our results, ensuring
that persons in eachfield would hear our results through
appropriate conference presentations and articles and might
consequentlywork towards change that would benefit women in those
fields. The interview and analysis stages wouldpresumably gain as
well, although at this point we did not think through these
consequences in great detail. At the start of the project,
determining who would interview which participants seemed a
technical and practicaldecision. We thought that it made sense for
people to interview mainly in their own subject field, but also to
gainsome experience interviewing in the other field(s) in order to
make the project more coherent and because wecould learn about each
other's subject areas. That strategy would also help us when it
came to cross-fieldanalysis, we believed. Writers such as Douglas
(1976) have argued that insider and outsider perspectivesbalance
and complement each other. Interviewing academics in fields not
one's own did not seem to presentinsurmountable difficulties and
there were many precedents for it in the literature (e.g., Becher,
1989).Pragmatic considerations loomed large; for example, if
someone was visiting a university for a conference, weoften tried
to add some interviews to her stay, to avoid travel costs to the
project that might take us beyond ourbudget. Academic Small Worlds
Academic fields have been regarded as communities, disciplinary
cultures, or small worlds (Clark, 1987). TonyBecher (1989) calls
his book about faculty in four contrasting subject areas Academic
Tribes and Territories.The small world nature of academic
disciplines in Canada was relevant to our project. Had this been a
study ofacademics in the United States, identities might have been
easier to disguise, as individuals might have beendrawn from any
one of hundreds of institutions. Even in our largest field,
education, there were less than fiftypotential sites in Canada.
Promises to informants about anonymity and confidentiality needed
to be takenseriously when narratives about their lives might be
recognized by their colleagues. A particular concern washow to
ensure the recruitment of visible minority faculty participants to
the study, when their very raritythreatened to make them
identifiable if any but the haziest generalizations were mentioned
in papers orpublications. Another feature of the small worlds was
that we, as academics and researchers, had a location within them
thathad to be taken into account. The case of pharmacy can be taken
as one example. Pharmacy is a relativelysmall field, with only
about 155 tenured or tenure-stream Canadian faculty in 9 schools.
Although pharmacy hasthe greatest ethnic minority representation of
the four fields under study, it has very few tenured and
tenure-stream academic women. As a result of the small size of this
particular disciplinary community, we needed toinclude in our study
a large proportion of the tenured/tenure-stream women in the field.
To do this kind ofcoverage meant visiting all or most of the
pharmacy schools, located in 8 provinces across the country. Most
of the pharmacy interviews were conducted by the team member who
had been a professor in a pharmacyfaculty for eight years. Given
the small size of the field, it was inevitable that she knew or
knew of many of thosebeing interviewed. This colleague's interviews
produced some qualitatively different results than those of
otherson the research team interviewing in pharmacy faculties. A
small number of her interviews were very emotional,perhaps because
the interview situation provided a unique opportunity for these
women in science to expresstheir grief at being misunderstood in a
field to which they had made such a strong commitment. A few were
inthe process of leaving the field and shared their emotions about
this prospect with the interviewer, who was alsoabout to leave the
field. It appeared that the interviewer's extensive knowledge of
the field and the people in it,plus her own experiences, put her in
a better position to generate trust, sharing, and emotional
expression thanwas the case for interviews conducted by
"outsiders," i.e., the rest of us. The situation resembled what
AnnOakley (1981) identified some time ago as feminist interviewing,
where the interviewer refuses to stay detachedand carries an
obligation to reveal some of her own feelings in order to introduce
greater reciprocity into the
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interaction. What eventually arose through team discussion of
this case and others were several related, and sometimestroubling,
issues. Were some of our interviews more trustworthy than others
and was the quality of the interviewrelated to who did the
interview, an insider or outsider to the field? Was the insider's
ability to see between thelines a useful interpretive tool or a
potential bias? Did an insider interview have additional ethical
consequences,as participants might reveal more of their personal
pain than they might have intended? Should insider status beused in
the analysis of the data, and if so, how? Conversely, was the
outsider in a better position to take anoverview or might she be
more readily palmed off with polite untruths? What were the more
subtleconsequences of studying "people like us"? In fact, to what
extent were the participants really "people like us" incases where,
apart from subject field, they differed from ourselves in other
respects such as gender, classorigins, sexual orientation or race?
Insiders and Outsiders We began to recognize that at least some of
our questions were related to discussions in the broader
literature,especially the sociological and anthropological
literature, about insiders and outsiders and their respectiveclaims
to degrees of insight. Traditional ethnography depends on a process
of lengthy immersion in a cultureuntil its parameters and the
perspectives of the members become clear to the researcher, who
then translatesor interprets the result for an audience of readers.
In studying cultures matching or similar to one's own,researchers
are exhorted to make the familiar strange (Hammersley
&Atkinson, 1995, p.9). "Defamiliarization"(Wolf, 1992, p. 131)
means cultivating an attitude of distance that enables one to see
cultural arrangements asworthy of analysis rather than as taken for
granted features of social life. Presumably an insider researcher
hasto make greater efforts to create that distance, or else reject
the notion that distance is required. An outsider has a different
set of dilemmas. Originally so much is strange that it is hard to
know where to look orwhat to hear. Gradually, as the outsider
becomes a relative insider, that sense of strangeness wears off and
it iseasy to forget that certain ways of doing things--now
familiar--might still be important for the analysis. Thekeeping of
careful and detailed field notes over time is meant to serve as a
protection against this inevitable lossof sharpness of perception
as the researcher becomes a more central member of the community
under study. The meaning of a researcher being "inside" or
"outside" a community, and even more the ethics andproblematics of
attempting to represent a culture to a different audience, have
been hotly debated in recentyears (Clifford &Marcus, 1986;
Wolf, 1992). Poststructuralist critics have attacked the notion
that there is a"reality" that a suitably assiduous researcher can
convey (Britzman, 1995). Groups on the margins ofmainstream society
have protested the realist accounts (Van Maanen, 1988) that
outsider-ethnographers tell"about" them. There is a tension
between, on the one hand, the desire of and need for marginalized
groups tocome to voice, and, on the other, the inevitable role of
the researcher in co- constructing such accounts (Bloom1998; Lather
1998). Feminist writing has been keenly concerned about related
issues. In general, feminists have argued that asinsiders, women
are the best informants about their own lives. Grounding an
analysis in the everyday lives ofordinary people, especially women,
could be the start of an improved understanding of social forces as
theyoperate to confirm and continue inequities and privileges of
dominant groups (Smith, 1987). Perhapsparadoxically, women as
outsiders are also said to be insightful informants about the
activities of mainstreamsociety or of dominant others. So, for
example, the secretary knows more about the boss than the boss
knowsabout the secretary. But even if the "people at the bottom" do
not have full knowledge of those who are arranging social life to
theirdisadvantage, "the experience and lives of marginalized
people, as they understand them, provide particularlysignificant
problems to be explained or research agendas" (Harding, 1993, p.
54, italics in the original). Certainlythere is now a growing body
of autobiographical accounts of being a marginalized and
minoritized woman inacademe (e.g. Bannerji, 1991; Carty, 1992; Ng,
1993; Monture-Angus, 1995; Chouinard, 1995/96; Lock, 1997).
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Patricia Hill Collins (1991) added another dimension to these
discussions by locating them in a specific case ofsociological
knowing and its operation by Black women sociologists, whom she
called the "outsider within." Shedescribed the culture from which
this group gained some of its uniqueness, and the way in which
thecombination of marginality derived from participation in
interlocking systems of oppression together with theexperience of
socialization into the field as a pathway to a heightened
sensitivity to anomalies, distortions andinvisibilities. Other
writers also locate this sensitivity in the experience of
disjuncture or bifurcatedconsciousness (Smith, 1987). Harding
(1993) notes that it is the experience of a contradictory
subjectivity -- forexample, being a feminist scientist -- that
generates feminist knowledge (p. 66). Recently, James Banks (1998)
has delved further into the insider/outsider question with regard
to research onAfrican-American communities in the United States. He
identified two dimensions, the first of which reflects theorigins
of the researcher in relation to the community studied (indigenous
or external), and the second theperspective taken during the
research itself (insider or outsider). Putting the dimensions
together results in atypology with four categories: indigenous-
insider; external-insider; indigenous-out-sider; external-outsider.
(Inthe discussion that follows, I have added italics and initial
capitals to the four "types.") The Indigenous-Insider and
External-Outsider contrast strongly with each other. An
Indigenous-Insider would besomeone from the community, perceived as
a legitimate member by others, and promoting the well-being ofthat
community through the research; while an External-Outsider would
have been socialized within a differentcommunity and would lack
deep sympathy or understanding for the community which has become a
target forthe research. The other two categories are more
complicated. The Indigenous-Outsider was socialized withinthe
indigenous community but has been assimilated into a different
culture so becomes seen as an outsider ifs/he studies the community
of origin. The External-Insider has been socialized within a
different culture from theone where the research is conducted, but
through particular experiences (perhaps of marginality in the
originalcommunity) comes to identify strongly with an adopted
community that becomes the research site. Banks illustrates these
categories with the lives and work of scholars who have made
contributions todiscussions of prejudice and racism, some
African-American and some not. The need in our own projectseemed to
be for something similar to Banks' typology, but one that would
pertain more precisely to disciplinaryor subject field
identification. Collins (1991) uses the phrase "community of
practitioners" in writing about adisciplinary community such as
sociology, which suggests that Banks's notion of community could be
adaptedfor our purposes. The concept of "indigenous" in our context
was possible as an analogy but not literally so. Noone is born a
sociologist or historian, or a dentist or pharmacist. The
difference is important: one becomes aspecialist through a long
process of socialization and indoctrination. Disciplinary
identification can be regardedas an ideology, and perhaps because
it is learned, some cling to the ideology with the passion of
conversion.Staying a member in good standing of the disciplinary
community generally requires the (minimal) exercise ofcertain
behaviours, such as teaching, publishing and serving the field
(Collins, 1991). Yet there are alwayssome people who are more
central than others to the prevailing thinking in a field, who come
to stand for whatthat field signifies at a given time. There are
factions and subgroups that espouse different versions of the
field;there are persons on the margins who seem closer to a
different discipline than their ostensible home. Who arethe
insiders and outsiders in these cases? In our case there were
further complications given that our discipline,work location, and
subject studied were not always congruent. Professional faculties
often have members withdisciplinary identifications in the social
sciences. Our team reflected this situation, including members
withsociological or historical affiliations but with positions in
professional faculties. Many questions arose for my colleagues and
myself. What does it mean to belong to a discipline or field -
whois the insider? How can a discipline study itself? What are the
complications of the positioning of the individualsaccording to
race, class, and so forth? Can one be marginalized in one's
discipline but not socially--or vice-versa? Is insider-outsider
status more a continuum than a clearly delineated affiliation? Or
is there some othermodel or metaphor that is more appropriate,
something that will reflect the shades and degrees of difference
we
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were beginning to appreciate? A Typology For Our Purposes In the
rest of the article I shall work through some of these questions by
adapting Banks's typology to oursituation, using other perspectives
such as Collins' analysis and our own experiences to trouble it
somewhat,note contradictions, and raise further questions.
Following Banks's lead, I will explore the situations of
theIndigenous-Insider, the External- Outsider, the
Indigenous-Outsider and the External-Insider in the context ofour
project. The first term in each case refers to the field or subject
affiliation of the researcher, analogous (butof course not
identical) to the community of origin, while the second refers to
the perspective taken during theresearch. Table 1 sets out the
typology. The Indigenous Insider The Indigenous-Insider would be
someone who is trained in, and studies, their own field or
discipline. It mightbe argued that there would be relatively few
individuals in this category, as most people who are insiders
wouldnot be particularly curious about their own territory, taking
it for granted and comfortably inhabiting itsmainstream circles.
Patricia Hill Collins (1991) provides a nice description: Group
insiders have similar worldviews, acquired through similar
educational and professional training, thatseparate them from
everyone else. Insider worldviews may be especially alike if group
members have similarsocial class, gender, and racial backgrounds.
Schutz describes the insider worldview as the "cultural pattern
ofgroup life" -- namely, all the values and behaviours which
characterize the social group at a given moment in itshistory. In
brief, insiders have undergone similar experiences, possess a
common history, and share taken-for-granted knowledge that
characterizes "thinking as usual." (p. 48) Mainstream insiders
might be least likely to wish to share information with
interviewers. Like the indigenousinsiders of Banks's typology,
their first allegiance is to the community, which means that they
might well besuspicious of anyone from outside that community,
including some with insider credentials but whosepositioning as
researcher might hint at outsiderness. For example, when we
interviewed Deans or other senioradministrators in the various
fields and institutions, we asked questions intended to get an
overview of theissues in the field, the strengths and weaknesses of
the faculty, the gender balance of faculty members,changes such as
restructuring, and so forth. For the most part, the Deans were
pleasant, even charming, andwilling to assist us. Nevertheless,
these consummate insiders were rarely going to alert us to the
divisions andconflicts within their faculties; their loyalties were
to their institutions, not to our research. At times, these
encounters set up tensions for us when one of us knew or suspected,
either from personalcontacts and experience or from other
interviews, that there was information that a Dean glossed over
oromitted from his or her account. For example, there were times
when a team member might question thevalidity of a colleague who
was in the same field as the administrator interpreting the data in
terms of herprevious experience, especially if the others could not
arrive at the same conclusion simply from the evidence inthe
transcript. On other occasions, when the interviewer was not in the
same field as the administrator, the teammember who was in that
field might suspect that the interview had not been probing enough
to unearth "thetruth." On the whole, interviews by persons in the
same subject field as the participant usually displayed strong
rapportand generated much sharing of feelings and experiences. Yet
transcripts from these interviews were often themost difficult for
other team members to interpret, as they relied on shared
understandings that were not alwaysspelled out. These interviews
were also more likely to detour into discussions of persons known
in common tothe interviewer and the participant. For example, here
are two extracts from an interview done by an interviewerin the
same field as the participant. (In all of the quotations below, 'I'
refers to Interviewer and 'P' to Participant.) P: Here's our
committee list. I: Is [name 1] a student? P: She was in charge of
the admissions committee. She was brought, [name 2] decided
that...and paid her...
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I: And that continues on? P: Ah, she's done that for two
years....It's [now] [name 3], she works in [subject area]. * * * P:
That was part of the, that's what led to the grievance was that was
a direct violation of my academic freedom. I: Now are these things
out of character? I mean, you had both [name 4] and [name 5] as
your colleagues. Arethese things that you would not have expected?
P: Ah-mm, I wouldn't have expected-well, I'd expect it from [name
4]; I wouldn't have expected it from [name 5].But they're close
enough as friends that it's unclear who's doing what. [Name 4] is a
political player and one ofmy colleagues one time said the best way
to describe [name 4] is that his favourite game is let's you and
himfight, and he'll do everything he can to set up fights...[Name
5] I would say, from my view, is someone who, Ithink, is in over
her head.... The External Outsider Interviews conducted by persons
unfamiliar with the subject field -- the External-Outsiders -- had
their ownproblems, even if they did not feature discussions like
those just quoted. In contrast, they were often marked byexchanges
where the interviewer had to ask for clarification of information
given (or sometimes by the greaterdifficulty in getting a
conversation going on a particular topic, and moving more quickly
to the next question).Interviewers had to struggle to understand
technical terminology, for example when those of us not
closelyfamiliar with academic dentistry were interviewing in that
field. I: Hmm. So if you look back you don't regret this choice [of
field]? P: Not at all. Either this, or psychology even. I:
Psychology! Why would you pick psychology? P: Well, I, a lot of my
patients actually have psychological problems and physical
problems. I: Okay. But I'm not sure I know what you mean. P: Ah,
you know that about 80 per cent of patients who see family
physicians do so because of emotionalproblems. Well, many of the
patients I see, it's the same thing. I: So it's not physical abuse
or anything. P: No, no, I mean just, some of them it may be that
but I don't get into that depth of-- I: So you're working on their
teeth-- P: No, no, I'm an oral pathologist. I don't work on teeth.
I: Okay, you have to explain, this is the stupid question part. P:
OK, I'm a specialist and my speciality is basically diseases of the
mouth and surrounding areas thatessentially have either little or
nothing to do with the teeth. I: I see. Okay. In the above
quotation, the interviewer is clearly struggling to get onto solid
ground but is somewhat hamperedby the understandable assumption
that dental faculty members would study teeth. She attempts to
solve theproblem by adopting the stance of the naive observer and
labelling her own query as a "stupid question." Thisapproach does
have the effect of stimulating the participant to give a
layperson's explanation so that theinterview can proceed. This
interview and similar ones often contain a good deal of such
explaining, perhapsdetracting from other exchanges that might have
been of greater relevance to the project. Another stance taken by
the interviewers is to find areas which the two individuals do have
in common, even ifsubject fields differ. In the following example,
subject field differs and so do gender and ethnicity. Yet
theinterviewer manages to achieve a high level of rapport because
there appears to be an agreement on andunderstanding of the
arguments the participant is making. I: But how does it work inside
this faculty? Is that the way it works, that women look after
women's issues andyou know, for example, you would look after
other, say, racial issues, and so on? Or do people take it more as
a
-
common [goal]...[saying] we really do want that diversity. P:
There are a number of people who say they want that diversity, and
they'll argue for it, but they're a minority. I: I see. P: The
silent majority exercises its power very effectively... I: Yes,
that's right. The interview continues: P: And we [ethnic minority
faculty] feel very isolated. We never meet, you know. I: What about
across the campus, is there -- P: Across the campus pretty much the
same. I: Yeah? That's terrible. P: It's really sad. Individually,
we have acceptance. Individually, I have acceptance. I: Yeah. And
so it's based on really superlative qualifications and experience.
P: Yeah, you have to -- I: Like you have to be four times as good
as the next one. P: That's right. Unfortunately, that's correct.
And it's as true for visible minorities as it is for gender. In
Bank's typology, the External-Outsider category contains persons
who are doing research for reasonsunrelated to the community's
benefit, and who have little empathy or concern for that community.
As describedby Banks, this is an unattractive category, one which
inevitably raises ethical issues. There is a sense in whichsome of
our interviews might be placed under the label of External-Outsider
interviews. If one of us in, say,education interviews someone in
dentistry, there is not necessarily a deep understanding of the
other field noran intent to learn all about it. Nevertheless, our
feminist commitments tended to keep us from seeing ourselvesas
doing research solely for outsider purposes, at least in our own
eyes. We hoped that our work would(ultimately) make a difference,
particularly in the lives of women academics in all fields. In the
short run, webelieved we made a difference when interviewees were
enabled to speak about painful and difficult experiencesand found
the interview to be cathartic, as we were sometimes told. Certainly
we identified with participants in all fields sufficiently that
painful interviews were also very disturbing toourselves:
interviewing for this project could provoke many emotions in the
researchers, too (see Acker&Feuerverger, 2000). It is possible
that the participant is not all that unhappy when the interviewer
is going to goaway again after the interview, rather than popping
up again (with all that guilty knowledge) at someinconvenient
moment. Yet it is still important to question the extent to which
we can achieve real empathy whenwe do not share the crucial
characteristics of those we interview. Not all our interviews with
persons differentfrom ourselves seemed to transcend that difference
to the extent apparent in the extract above; and we have noway of
knowing whether even that interviewee had reason to suppress
aspects of his experience that hebelieved the interviewer could not
comprehend or should not be privy to. The Indigenous Outsider The
remaining two categories in the typology are interesting for their
ability to complicate the notion of insiderand outsider research. I
suggested earlier that an Indigenous-Insider researcher might
hesitate to question andcriticize or even to investigate her own
territory. To do so might require an experience or perception of
being de-centred, for example inhabiting a marginal status within
the field by virtue of ideology, sub- specialization,temporarily
becoming a member of a different group, or belonging to a
minoritized or under-represented group.None of these experiences
would guarantee special insights, but they could increase the
probability ofgenerating them. The researcher then moves toward the
Indigenous-Outsider designation, someone whobelongs to the category
yet takes a different view than those fully encapsulated within the
category and for thatreason is seen by the community to be at least
a partial outsider. The border might be a good vantage point fora
critical perspective. We tended to believe that all of the members
of our research team were able to attain thismeasure of insight
when interviewing in their own fields by virtue of being women in
male-dominated university
-
disciplines. In Banks's Indigenous-Outsider category, there is
an inherent instability in the situation, as the person
risksrejection from the original community because of their
affiliation with a different community or their curiosityabout and
analytical approach to the original community. A degree of irony
lies in the increased sensitivity of theinsider turned outsider,
coupled with her/his probable exclusion from inner circles where
secrets are shared,and ultimately a lesser degree of insiderness
and access (Banks, 1998). Any effort to interpret the innerworkings
of the field to outsiders (which would happen in publications about
our research, for example) couldresult in accusations of betrayal,
as confidences given to someone because of shared understandings
andempathy are reframed, and even if no quotation can be traced,
are nevertheless used for the researcher'spurposes, which might not
be the same as the purposes of the community of practitioners. What
might make a difference is the positioning of the informants vis-a
vis this researcher. The Indigenous-Outsider, seen as
border-dweller, might do well to interview persons who are
themselves marginalized in somefashion from the community under
study, who could be expected to experience a certain degree of
rapport withthis researcher. For example, the quotation below shows
a high degree of rapport between two white women inthe same field
who had never met before the interview. P: I always bring work with
me to conferences because I see it as a way to catch up or time to
catch up. Menwere completely baffled by this -- that I would bring
other work to do -- and the two women in the audience saidof course
you bring work to do and they had all brought reviews or other
little things. I: I always bring work to do even if I don't do it.
P: Well, apparently the men don't... I: I have a lot of the same
problems. P: Oh, have you got solutions? I: Well with age you get
less able to do some of that stuff, like you get tired earlier and
you can't keep those sortof hours up forever. P: Yeah. I: I quit
some of that journal reviewing; for one thing it's fairly
invisible. P: Exactly. This particular interview was enjoyable for
the interviewer and there were many points of connection betweenthe
two women that could be regarded as shared marginalities. The
dialogue revolved around ways in whichboth individuals found
themselves treated in their departments by colleagues and students,
ways that reflect theliterature on the work of women academics
(Acker &Feuerverger, 1996; Park, 1996). After a discussion of
beingextra-prepared for meetings and taking on service
responsibilities beyond the norm, the participant commented:"I
think we're just great department citizens and the question I have
is whether we're ever going to be more thanthat. You know, I mean,
that's the cost I think we pay by doing this, and I can't not do
it." However, shared marginality might not be sufficient to
guarantee rapport, as there are so many otherdimensions on which
the individuals could differ (Merton, 1972). We also had a few
experiences in the study inwhich we, as white interviewers, even
within a shared subject field, received guarded responses from
personsof colour. While we took such responses to be related to
heightened concerns about anonymity, given thescarcity of academics
of colour in universities, they may also have been grounded in an
assumption that whiteresearchers could not fully understand the
experiences of minority faculty. The External Insider The
External-Insider position is one that is difficult to attain in
research like our own. Banks describes hiscomparable category as
including persons who have been marginalized from their own
communities and whoadopt the new community instead as their home.
None of us would be able to do that in subject field terms justfor
research purposes, although it might happen (and for one of us did
happen) for other reasons. A traditionalethnographer operates in a
similar way, immersing her/himself in a new community, but the
immersion is rarely
-
total and does not necessarily (or even typically) mean
opposition to one's original (disciplinary) community.This
individual, as a "stranger," may have the advantage of superior
insight, but would have to work at gettingaccess to inner circles
and creating trust. On the other hand, if we continue to think in
terms of borders between categories, the researcher need not be
atotal stranger to the culture. Several writers recount the
experiences of finding themselves in a position wherethey expected
to rely on commonalities that in practice proved somewhat elusive.
While expecting to beIndigenous-Insiders, they were treated at best
like External-Insiders. Josephine Beoku-Betts (1994), forexample,
thought that her own West African heritage would assist her in
achieving rapport with Gullah womenwho live on islands off the
coast of Georgia and South Carolina, but found that "Black is not
enough." In somerespects, trust was easier to gain, and in others
more difficult. Ongoing negotiation and reflexivity were
essentialto her research. Mehreen Mirza (1995) expected to be able
to connect with British South Asian young womenbecause of her
similar origins, but discovered that her independent and
non-married status, her residence in adifferent part of England and
her relatively short hair were all seen as marking her out as
different from thecommunity. The girls and women she initially
approached were wary of her and she felt as if her "very
presencewas an implicit criticism of their lives and their social
world" (p.175). These accounts suggest that a typologysuch as the
one explored here might be too limiting, given that "external" and
"indigenous" may not be mutuallyexclusive categories. In the
situation of our research, it is possible for an investigator to be
trained in more thanone field, or to pursue interdisciplinary
studies at the margins, or to choose a field for study that is
similar toone's own. To the extent that external researchers
undertake ethnographic research, conduct many interviews, or
makesite visits, their understandings are increased and their
perspectives move closer to insider than outsider ones.But more
often, the contact is relatively short, as in our 60-90 minute
interviews. When working in fields not ourown, rather than seeing
the researcher as necessarily in opposition to her original
community and trying to beaccepted by a new community (External-
Insiders), or simply remaining detached (External-Outsiders),
wetended to adopt a category more like Collins's "outsider within."
In that case the researcher retains her originalcommitments and
values but makes use of them to understand a new community into
which she is also beingsocialized. Special insights for outsiders
who become partial insiders are at least possible, if less likely
than forthose who are insiders but on the margins of their own
fields (Indigenous-Outsiders). Conclusion This excursion into the
question of insiderness and outsiderness that arose in a feminist
qualitative researchproject has, in the cliched words of so many
discussions in the literature, raised more questions than it
hasanswered. I would have to say that I feel more at ease
interviewing in my own field (education) than in the otherthree
fields. I am less apprehensive that I will fail to understand the
research or the departmental organizationthat the participant is
describing to me, and that makes me more relaxed, which in itself
may contribute to abetter interview. That level of confidence has
remained for me even when I have been acutely aware of some ofthe
differences between the interviewee and myself. These differences
can arise around attributes such as raceor ethnicity, seniority,
sub-discipline, gender or political views. I am thinking of the
ethnic minority woman Iinterviewed who denied that discrimination
against her ethnic group still occurred, or the man who
attackedfeminist research for being preoccupied by topics such as
the situation of women academics rather than issueslike poverty or
homelessness. Despite these differences, there was still a shared
insider status vis-a-vis"education" that facilitated those
interviews. What was familiar was not so much the detail of
people's researchbut the general lines of the workplace culture
(see Acker, 1999b). For example, dilemmas such as the
balancebetween graduate teaching and preservice teaching turned up
regularly, and were easily recognizable, whilethe comparable
tensions within other fields were harder for me to recognize and to
probe in an interviewsituation. Nevertheless, I cannot know how
much I might have missed because education academics may
haveassumed I would know about something and therefore there was no
need to tell me.
-
In contrast, one of my colleagues tells me that she was most at
home interviewing in her native province,regardless of the subject
field. Rapport was created out of knowing the local geography,
recognizing familiarphrases, sharing a sense of humour, referring
to prominent public figures, and so forth. Another colleague onthe
team believed that she achieved the greatest rapport with
individuals who had to struggle in some way toachieve their current
positions. These examples reinforce, once again, the argument that
we are none of usalways and forever either insiders or outsiders.
Our multiple subjectivities allow us to be both insiders
andoutsiders simultaneously, and to shift back and forth, not quite
at will, but with some degree of agency. The third segment of my
title "in/out/side" is "side," reminiscent of Howard Becker's
(1970) question tosociologists, "Whose side are we on?," or the
insistence of many feminist researchers on contributing to a
betterlife for women. Typically, an interview situation requires an
effort to find common ground and emphasizewhatever "side" of
oneself will make the best match to the other. As we are not
chameleons, this search is notalways easy. It may be especially
difficult when interviewing someone with a greater degree of power
thanoneself, such as the Deans in our study or the British
vice-chancellors Neal (1995) studied. In the analysisstage, we have
a few more choices, and at that point we can reflect about whose
standpoint -- whose "side" --we wish to privilege. I do not think
the insider-outsider question can be fully resolved. We need to
keep it bubbling away, like othertroubling research issues, as part
of our overall reflexivity about our work. As a research team, we
have not yetresolved our different views as to what extent our
personal experience should provide a context for dataanalysis.
Perhaps it is not necessary to come to a final conclusion on such
issues, but to find a way to workcreatively within the tensions
engendered by the debate. Collins (1991) reminds us of the
privileged status ofeither/or dualistic thinking in traditional
sociology, where categories are given meaning only in terms of
theirdifference. Black women who experience oppression in a
holistic fashion critique the way in which dualisticthinking asks
them to identify as Black or female (p. 43). Similarly, Reinharz
(1992, p. 262) gives someexamples of feminist researchers trying to
avoid the trap of being either "objective" or "subjective" towards
theirwork but attempting to find a way to be both. In other
contexts, writers have conceptualized the management ofteachers'
dilemmas in the school class- room in ways that avoid traditional
dichotomous thinking, for exampleassuming that advantaging the
girls necessarily equals disadvantaging the boys (Lampert, 1985;
Lyons, 1990). It follows that my typology will be most useful if
not taken too literally as four discrete boxes, but as a
heuristicguide, with plenty of allowances for work at the borders
of the boxes and the presence of tunnels that allowcrawling around
from one to another. As Beoku-Betts (1994) explains, keeping a
record and reporting ourdeliberations makes both a contribution to
the reader's understanding of the specific research and to the
largerdialogue about "conducting inquiry in marginalized cultural
group" (p. 431). If qualitative researchers typicallypraise the
value of reflexivity (Ball, 1990), feminist researchers have taken
the practice to heart, as is evident inalmost any compendium of
feminist writings on method or epistemology (Nielsen, 1990;
Stanley, 1990; Alcoff&Potter, 1993; Maynard &Purvis, 1994;
Ribbens &Edwards, 1998). Here I have been using my head
andfollowing my heart, in order to tease out the dilemmas that make
a difference to "Making a Difference" and infeminist research more
generally. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the
projectdescribed here: "Making a Difference: Feminization and the
Changing Climate of University-Based ProfessionalEducation." I
would also like to thank Linda Muzzin for the discussions and ideas
that led to the writing of thispaper, as well as rest of the
research team, including faculty members Carol Baines, Marcia Boyd,
and GraceFeuerverger; students Mika Damianos, Lisa Richards and Amy
Sullivan; transcriber Janet Ryding; and manyothers who have
contributed in various ways to the project. Note (f.1) This article
was printed in the previous issue of RFR/DRF, but a formatting
error created confusion in the
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Community/field of origin of researcher
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Perspective Indigenous External
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taken during
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the research
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Insider Resarcher belongs to Researcher leaves
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the field under study original field and
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and shares mainsteam joins or affiliates
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perspectives with the field
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under study
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Outsider Researcher belongs to Researcher does not
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the field under study but belong to or join the
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is marginalized and/or field under study
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Subject: Research methodology; University research;
Interviewing; Feminism; Research; Classification: 9172: Canada
Publication title: Resources for Feminist Research Volume: 28
Issue: 3/4 Pages: 153-172 Number of pages: 0 Publication year: 2001
Publication date: Winter/Spring 2001 Year: 2001 Publisher:
Resources for Feminist Research Place of publication: Toronto
Country of publication: Canada Publication subject: Social
Sciences: Comprehensive Works, Women's Studies ISSN: 07078412
Source type: Scholarly Journals Language of publication: English
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In/out/side: positioning the researcher in feminist qualitative
research