Practical Guidelines for Feminist Research

The current “Editor’s Pick” article is by Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAAN, who has published a number of articles that focus on feminism and nursing.  As a feminist scholar in nursing, she is well qualified to offer to the discipline her article titled “Practical Guidelines for Feminist Research in Nursing.”  Dr. Im provided this message, and an invitation for readers to engage in discussion of this article with her on this blog!

First of all, thanks a million to you, Dr. Chinn, editor of  ANS!!!  Thanks for choosing my article as the “Editor’s Picks” so that I could have scholarly discussion with all my respectable colleagues throughout the world.

To explain the background of the article…  The article was motivated by questions from my own doctoral students.  In my doctoral classes, I have frequently been asked about “how to conduct” a feminist study.  As all of us would agree, there is no one way to conduct a feminist study, but the students were eager to hear about my previous experience in feminist studies and some advice for their future feminist studies. That was the start point when I re-collected all my previous research notes from three feminist studies that I had conducted and re-analyzed to identify what would be essential components in feminist research.

Through the process, I have extracted a total of 10 idea categories, and I have proposed guidelines for these idea categories. Yet, these guidelines would not be new to feminist scholars/researchers who have been conducting feminist research. Rather, these are the ones that feminist scholars/researchers have taken for granted. However, for our novice feminist scholars/researchers, these kinds of explicit guidelines would be helpful (my hope!!!).

As noted in the article, there are several major limitations of the article.  I simply took a pragmatic approach to provide tangible guidance for feminist research. Also, the guidelines are from only three Internet-based studies with limitations in generalizability.

Anyway, I think we could further develop the guidelines for our future generation through our future collective efforts.  So, please feel free to add absent components that you found in your studies.  Thanks for all your attention to this article and thanks again to Dr. Chinn for this opportunity to dialogue with other scholars!

I invite you to download your copy of this article now at no cost, and engage in this dialogue!