The Times I Was Caught by Surprise! Lessons on Qualitative Research on Gender Transformation

"This article seeks to draw lessons on qualitative research methodologies and methods from experiences where I as a researcher was caught by surprise."

This review of lessons on research methodology is collected from the author's research in evaluation settings focusing on issues of gender and social transformation. She defines key terms and then describes surprising instances of results from her career, as well as the methodologies that produced them, and then draws lessons from the experiences she shares and offers concluding remarks.

Murthy states that "[q]ualitative research can be gender (socially) blind, gender (socially) instrumental, gender (socially) ameliorative and gender (socially) transformative in methodology and methods adopted as well as interpretation of findings...." For example, "qualitative methods may include case studies without a gender or social relations lens, leading to a gender and socially blind perspective. Case studies may explore how far sex roles are adhered to by participants and health workers, and whether this leads to improved child health. This leads to a gender instrumental perspective. The day to day needs of women and men (for example, drinking water services) can also be a focus of case study leading to lightening of work load. Case studies can also include a strategic gender and caste lens. Examples, include gender and caste based ownership of assets, freedom from domestic violence etc."

Some examples of her instances of surprise in her qualitative evaluation research  used to evaluate impact of development programmes include the following [More detail is available in her article linked here and below]:

• In a researcher training workshop on gender and livelihood projects empowering to women in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India, she and trainees interviewed a woman who had improved her income, increased her livestock herd, expanded cultivation and enriched soil fertility. However, given a choice of one of three faces drawn on papa - happy, sad, moderate - she felt sad because her son-in-law had demanded the land as dowry and, when he was refused, he sent her daughter back to the family.
• In Madhya Pradesh, India, she explored reasons for high infant mortality and low institutional attendance for delivery. through discussion group responses she found that first generation users of the system felt that "they did not get appropriate medical and social treatment (in particular, injection and access to water and food which the health centres are supposed to provide)." The institution unknowingly violated a cultural norm of offering water to guests as a basic courtesy.
• In Jharkhand, India, Murthy found through separate and joint discussions with mother-in-law, daughter-in-law and husbands that the traditional assumption that delivery took place only in mothers-in-law houses was not valid for all communities as some women went to their mothers' houses. Also, husband knowledge had increased with the intervention, but mothers-in-law believed they knew more than the intervention was teaching them and their sons and daughters-in-law.
• Amongst Pahadias, Lalitpur Block, Jharkhand, the evaluation asked who helped make the decision on when to have children and whether to use contraception: the woman, man, mother-in-law, father-in-law; and/or other family members. The response was that the government made the choice. "The Paharias were considered endangered by the government, and contraceptive services were not available to them...."
• In the case of evaluating a men's group, Murthy had a surprising interview with a father of a daughter who had been raped by three men. In a high pressure situation involving an unsupportive policeman, as well as village chief, "[t]his Adivasi father fought against the (majority of ) group opinion to stand for the rights of his daughter. It of course helped that he had his wives support (from a women’s group) and that of the NGO which had formed the father’s group and its lawyer....That is, the father had changed his opinion through the process of questioning and reflection with other players."

Examples continue from: Afghanistan (arranged marriage of teenager women); Moldova ("economic ranking" and local poverty); Nepal (gender-equal funding of a women's NGO); Sudan (female genital mutilation - FGM - and who in the family has a say in the practice); Bangladesh (risks to researchers, both men and women, for working together in conservative settings); Tamil Nadu, India, (members of women’s sangams for women's empowerment and enterprise groups for women’s economic empowerment gained some power from the governing panchayat after participating in protests); and Sri Lanka where, in war torn areas during a gender audit, people were sometimes hostile researchers, highlighting the vulnerability of women and women researchers in areas of heightened hostilities.

Lessons learned begin with:

• the fact that gender and social transformative evaluative research,  in particular qualitative methodology, is a political process. Ensuring research team safety is essential. This may may require an eye to the composition of the team.
• Epistemological reflexivity (reflection on one's own knowledge and its sources as they contribute to theoretical assumptions) must be ongoing in order to judge how researcher assumptions are influencing the evaluation process.
• Looking more deeply at context and culture in evaluating a programme's influence on strategic gender issues so as to avoid ethnocentric interpretation and in order to describe whether an intervention was empowering or not from the perspective of the participant.
• Researcher assumptions are sometimes challenged. For example in the case of researcher notions of femininity and masculinity being more deeply entrenched amongst Dalit men than Dalit women, a conversation analysis of a mother-son exchange showed that generation and exposure of youth to social movements and gender transformative views mattered.
• Change of thinking over time can reveal research as a heuristic process "where the participant strengthened his strategic gender perspective through the different research processes..." as happened in the case of the father who reported and took to court the perpetrators of rape.
• Posing an open-ended question after becoming comfortable in the interview group can bring unexpected replies not coloured by researcher background and assumption but providing an understanding of phenomena as consciously experienced by people living those experiences.
• Methods that can yield evaluation data might include a “road map of life (during the intervention period)” to understand changes due to the intervention. Also keeping a space for answering "other" in addition to researcher listed choices may lead to an entirely different conclusion. Posing open ended questions and also discussing with positive and negative deviants (those who do not follow community norms). Road map of change and happiness mapping can bring surprising results. Economic ranking can aid exploration of economic progress of households and individuals.

"However 'gender transformative methods' like control over body mapping and decision making matrix are less dependent on researcher. Gender transformative research methods should be used along with feminist ethics like building rapport, ensuring confidentiality, ensuring privacy ..., ensuring utility..., and ensuring no harm .... I had to rely on translations in several countries, attention to body language is a must and validations of findings from different sources is crucial."

Murthy concludes from her analysis of personal surprises in her gender transformative evaluation history that specific challenges are"to firstly acknowledge that the entire research — who does the research, why, with what perspective, what design, what methods, how analysis is done, report written and taken back- is a political process wherein gender and other hierarchies intersect and play out. One has to be aware of one’s personal identity and biases arising from preconceived notions, while at the same not abandoning a gender and socially transformative lens. This holds good with the research commissioning agency, within the research team and research process. Being political attention composition and safety of research team and participants is a must, and gendered/ social ethical aspects have to be kept in mind.... A fine balance needs to be maintained by the lead researcher between support for challenging social norms and the boundaries of the extent to which cultures and contexts can be pushed....Lastly, results out of gender transformative qualitative methodology and methods can be quantified. [Q]uantitative studies on gender and social transformation should follow qualitative research."