Sherin Sabu
In present-day feminist research, qualitative methods have been habitually preferred over quantitative methods, as the former is believed to significantly reflect the nature of human experience (discussed in Jayaratne, 1993) and facilitate the understanding of complex social phenomena from the perspectives of those who live it (Miles and Huberman, 1994). Also, techniques such as in-depth interviews, content analysis, participant observation, biography, and linguistic analysis (Morgan and Smircich, 1980: 498) have been thought to be particularly suitable for the study of women's experiences and issues as they do not require much abstraction from their context-bound, intimate lives (Grant, Ward, and Rong, 1987: 856). Chronologically speaking, while the use of quantitative methods dominated social science research in the 1960s and 1970s, qualitative forms of investigation became more preferred since the 1980s (Morgan and Smircich, 1980: 491), especially while studying ‘unexplored topics in social life in which women rather than men are central actors’ such as ‘childrearing, neighbourhood friendship groups, [and] ties with kin’ (Grant, Ward, and Rong, 1987: 856). However, the debate on the adequacy of qualitative and quantitative research methods in sociological research is an ongoing one (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), as many contemporary scholars still argue in favour of the usefulness of quantitative methods in making complex research designs such as those of longitudinal studies possible (Jayaratne, 1993: 116). Many others have also endorsed the employment of qualitative data in combination with quantitative data ‘to develop, support and explicate’ feminist theory (Jayaratne, 1993: 109), emphasizing methodological ‘triangulation’.