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I. Feminist Research Practice

Using Conversation Analysis to Explore the Researcher's Interaction with Participants

Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK, edvg500{at}york.ac.uk

This article focuses on the ethics of my own conduct during the course of recording interactions between women and the police to whom they were reporting abuse in a women's police station in Brazil. Using conversation analysis I explore how my own research practice changed over the course of the data collection phase. I began with a commitment to `objectivity' and abandoned that as I increasingly felt a debt to women who let me record their interactions, learnt progressively more about police work, and felt a moral responsibility as a feminist to intervene if I thought I could help women. I present one data extract from my first day in the police station and show how I try to disengage from a woman's attempts to elicit my involvement in her case. Then I show one data extract from my last day in the police station, in which I actively intervene in the situation, giving advice to a woman about what should be included in the police report. My research contributes to other work on the ethics of feminist research method in being based on fine-grained analysis of actually recorded (rather than remembered) interactions.

Key Words: abuse • Brazil • ethics • feminism • method • objectivity • police • reflexivity • women's police stations

Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 2, 149-161 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0959353507076547


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