Postmodern and feminist qualitative research: methodology, methods and practice

Abstract

Women's participation in sport is a feminist issue deserving of research and theory development. Feminist research is explicitly oriented towards identifying, understanding and changing social factors that sustain women's subordinate status. This chapter focuses on feminist qualitative research methods but it should be clear that feminists also conduct qualitative research, but without taking on all the methodological assumptions of logico-empiricism. This discussion incorporates an overview of linguistic and Marxist forms of structuralism as away of situating post-structuralism, particularly feminist responses to post-structuralism and (neo-Marxist) critical theory.