1st Edition

Feminism Counts Quantitative Methods and Researching Gender

Edited By Christina Hughes, Rachel Cohen Copyright 2012
    104 Pages
    by Routledge

    104 Pages
    by Routledge

    This is an important and timely text that provides a unique overview of contemporary quantitative approaches to gender research. The contributors are internationally recognised researchers from the UK, USA and Sweden who occupy a range of disciplinary locations, including historical demography, sociology and policy studies. Their research includes explorations of heterosexual and same sex violence, media responses to feminist research, data sources for the study of equalities, approaches for analysing global and local demographic change and intersectional concerns in respect of work and employment.

    Through detailed, sophisticated and thoughtful considerations of the place of quantification within gender studies, and the place of feminist approaches to quantification, each contributor overturns the stereotype that quantitative research is antithetical to feminism by demonstrating its importance for challenging continuing global inequalities associated with gendered outcomes. An introductory chapter illustrates the significance of geography and discipline in the take-up of methodological preferences.

    Feminism Counts: Quantitative Methods and Researching Gender makes an important contribution to the ways in which feminists respond to contemporary methodological and interdisciplinary challenges, and is essential reading for all research students in gender studies.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

    1. Feminists Really Do Count: The Complexity of Feminist Methodologies  Christina Hughes, University of Warwick and Rachel Cohen, University of Warwick

    2. Doing Feminist Demography  Jill Williams, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

    3. Identifying dissonant and complementary data on women through the triangulation of historical sources  Lotta Vikstrom, University of Umea, Sweden

    4. Quantitative Methods and Gender Inequalities   Jacqueline Scott, University of Cambridge

    5. Measuring Equalities: data and indicators in Britain  Sylvia Walby, University of Lancaster and Jo Armstrong, University of Lancaster

    6. Feminist epistemology and the politics of method – surveying same sex domestic violence  Marianne Hester, University of Bristol, Catherine Donovan, University of Sunderland and Eldin Fahmy, University of Bristol

    7. Counting Woman Abuse: A Cautionary Tale of Two Surveys  Diane Croker, St Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada

    Biography

    Christina Hughes is Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Warwick, UK. She has longstanding interests in feminist research methodologies and feminist theory, and is founding co-chair of the Gender and Education Association.

    Rachel Lara Cohen is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK. She uses a mixed methods approach to study work and employment and is interested in the use and teaching of research methods.

    'The seven papers that make up the book cover a wide range of the challenges faced in quantitative feminist academia. Together they successfully argue that quantitative and qualitative methods do not need to be at the opposing ends, but can complement each other in search for new approaches to feminist research.'
    -Linda Wijlaars, London, in Significance Feb 2012

    '...several of these essays will be of great interest to GAD [gender and development] researchers and practitioners.'
    -Gwendolyn Beetham in Gender & Development, vol 20, no 2