Monday, March 20, 2006
Review of Women, Development, and Communities for Empowerment in Appalachia by Virginia Rinaldo Seitz
Ethnography as Speaking Out for Women: A Review of Women, Development, and Communities for Empowerment in Appalachia by Virginia Rinaldo Seitz
Women, Development, and Communities for Empowerment in Appalachia is a feminist ethnography about the marginalization of working-class Appalachian women and how, despite and because of their marginalization, they have acted for the betterment of their families and communities through strategic collective interaction, and in the process, have transformed themselves. Virginia Rinaldo Seitz’s methodology is complex, her empirical statements powerful, and at times, both include contradictory elements; nonetheless, her ethnography as a whole is compelling for two reasons. First, it effectively challenges stereotypes and other negative images of women and Appalachians, especially those found in the popular media and implicitly supported by development experts who use the culture of poverty theory to claim Appalachians are poor because of their pathological and backward culture.[1] Second, its critical-feminist use of life story interviews results in gendered, working-class, local descriptions of marginalization and indigenous gendered-development activism, and in this way, the book speaks out for, not about, working-class Appalachian women. In so doing, it confronts traditional development practices, which define development as economic growth and women’s contribution as increased employment, which assume outside experts are necessary, and, yet, which are inconsistent with local individual, family, and community needs.
For anyone with little-to-no knowledge of Appalachians beyond the stereotypes one hears or sees in the popular media, Seitz ethnography is insightful because its life stories rebut the stereotypes of Appalachian women as naïve, wild, dim-witted, superstitious, fatalistic, and continually pregnant and barefooted (Byrd; Heller). The women of her study are none of the above. Instead, they are resourceful, idealistic, and hard working despite and because of their marginalization. Furthermore, it is out of their resourcefulness, idealism, and hard work, along with their feelings of responsibility for the wellbeing of their families and communities, that they have become development activists working for social, economic, and political change. Seitz underscores that they are not exceptional women; they are not male-identified, nor have they rejected their families and communities; they are ordinary. However, later in the text, she admits that some of her participants may be exemplary.
Seitz uses the first two chapters to describe her research methodology, which is an innovative, feminist, and, at times, conflicting montage of elements of interpretivism, critical theory, feminist standpoint theory, and grounded theory. In the first page she warns the reader that the “presentation is not linear” because the text is and presents an “interative and reflexive exploration of change.” Perhaps, that warning is, in part, to prepare the reader for contradictions within the text that mirror the contradictions that emerged during her research process.
Early in the second chapter Seitz clearly rejects positivism because she is concerned with things that would be rejected as unknowable and irrelevant by positivists: meanings, motivations, and social structures of gender and class relations, and accepts an anti-positivist or, what shell calls, her “post-positivist” approach grounded in elements of interpretivism and critical theory (p. 16). Seitz accepts, like interpretivists and critical theorists, multiple, socially-constructed realities that may conflict and a more personal, interactive mode of data collection because meaning (interpretation) can only be communicated through such interaction. However, unlike interpretivists, but in agreement with critical theorists and some feminists, she claims that interpretivists do not go far enough to reject the researcher-researched distinction. Specifically, Seitz argues that the relationship of the researcher and researched should not just be interactive, but should be interactive and empowering to both, and although there are multiple interpretations of reality, researchers should place central importance on the lives and experiences of those who have been marginalized in society.
An important and potentially contradictory element in Seitz’s methodology is her use of feminist standpoint theory to imply that the knowledge produced by the working-class Appalachian women of her study or any oppressed group is “a more complete and therefore privileged knowledge of society” (p. 18). Just as positivists privilege method, in the sense that they claim to use objective methods that produce the Truth, similarly feminist standpoint theorists privilege the knowledge of women, and perhaps, in that sense, some-to-all feminist standpoint theorists assume that the knowledge produced by women is objective, grounded in the Truth. If Seitz accepts the assumption of an objective epistemology, then she contradicts a fundamental assumption of both interpretivism and critical theory, and agrees with a positivist assumption. Furthermore, she may also share the positivists’ ontology of a “real” social reality. If so, this reality, although it may be contested, is ultimately revealed by those who have been marginalized and, in some sense, are “outsiders.” This reviewer, however, believes Seitz uses feminist standpoint theory, not because she believes it produces an objective truth, but because she is an advocate for women, not just a laissez faire moral relativist.
Grounded theory, which is a research process used to develop theory, also informs Seitz’s ethnography, particularly her data collection and analysis. There are many variations of grounded theory; however, according to Charmaz and Mitchell (p. 160), they all include the following strategies:
1. simultaneous data-collection and
analysis;
2. pursuit of emergent themes through
early data analysis;
3. discovery of basic social processes
within the data;
4. inductive construction of abstract
categories that explain and
synthesize these processes;
5. integration of categories into a
theoretical framework that specifies
causes, conditions, and consequences
of the processes.
Seitz’s grounded theory is similar to Charmaz’s constructivist approach: it assumes multiple, socially constructed realities, recognizes and encourages the mutual creation of knowledge by the researcher and researched, and its goal includes interpretive understanding of subjects’ meanings (Charmaz).
Both grounded theory and Seitz’s ethnographic research begin with central concepts (Denzin). For Seitz, there are two: “marginalization” and “empowerment.” These central concepts are important to her as a feminist and critical researcher, and she makes that known to the reader in the first chapter. She starts with “working definitions” of these concepts and uses them to form questions that frame her research, in the hope that the resulting life stories become the text for “drawing out the ‘extralocal relationships’ and structural constraints on women’s lives” (p. 19). These definitions change through a recursive and reflexive process, with both the women in her study and Seitz empowered to change the definitions.
The author’s concern for and use of reflexivity is implicitly woven throughout the text, but is explicit in the second chapter. There she explains her personal motivations for the study and describes relationships that she strategically developed, encouraged, and discouraged with her participants inside and outside the research process, and which affected her data and conclusions. Seitz explains to the reader that it is out of her feminism, dissatisfaction with the Women in Development (WID) literature, anti-positivism, and fifteen years of experiences living and working in Southwest Virginia that she chose to focus on the lives and experiences of working-class Appalachian women in Southwest Virginia. These people are marginalized because they are women, because they are working-class, and because they are Appalachian, and for each and all of these reasons, they have been excluded from knowledge construction, and in particular, the knowledge that justifies social and economic policies that affect them. , Seitz is a feminist, activist and scholar, and she wants to “speak out” for these women (p. 7). Thus, it is out of all of the above that her study seeks to generate a gendered, working-class, local knowledge of the marginalization of working-class Appalachian women and how that marginalization influences their collective struggle for social, economic, and political change. Specifically, her ethnography seeks to answer the following questions (p. 2):
1. “How are women marginalized and oppressed on the basis of their class, gender, and other positions of difference?
2. How do women theorize an understanding of class and gender?
3. Under what conditions do women come together collectively for social change?
4. What associations provide contexts for women’s empowerment? (and)
5. How are women empowered through their grassroots collective practices?”
A sixth question that Seitz derives from the above is:
6. “Does the feminism (as theory and practice) of women in this research setting share standpoints with third world feminisms?”
To generate a gendered, working-class knowledge that can answer the above questions, Seitz is emphatic that she does not repeat data collection methods that for centuries have been used to produce male scholars’ knowledge of women and authorities who have spoken for women. Thus, she rejects any data collection technique, such as a survey, that controls informants; reduces their ideas, thoughts, and memories to words of the researcher; and does not require face-to-face interactions. Instead, she uses a data collection method that avoids control over the subjects of her research and develops a researcher-researched connectedness so both researcher and researched are co-equals (Brewer; Oakley, 1981, 2000; Reinharz, 1992). Seitz agrees with Oakley and Reinharz that the open-ended interview process is the best method for feminist research because it permits access to participants’ ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than the words of the researcher; permits non-verbal communication and emotions; produces non-standardized information that allows researchers to make full use of differences of people; and creates participants, not respondents, who are essential for the construction of a gendered knowledge. Therefore, the open-ended interview process is the primary data collection technique she uses, and in particular, Seitz uses life-history interviews because they can be focused around biographically meaningful events for her research participants that occurred because of their participation in community organizations. These biographically meaningful events or “epiphanies” connect personal troubles to public issues (Denzin, 1989). For Seitz, epiphanies are particularly useful in explaining “the ‘how’ questions of social change”; therefore, she restricted her participants to working-class Appalachian women who have experienced epiphanies through their participation in local community organizations (p. 21).
For twenty-three months, Seitz ‘met, individually and in groups, numerous women from Southwest Virginia [and] attended their meetings and celebrations, observed them working, went out for coffee, and visited their homes” (19). She states she used her own knowledge of the area, based on fifteen years of living and working there to identify and contact “more than twenty key informants,” all of which are women, “’development catalysts’” and could help her identify associations that met her four criteria (20). ,
In the second chapter, Seitz states that five associations were found that met the four criteria, and which could “provide collective contexts for women’s empowerment”, and where she had no long-term personal involvement (20). However, in an endnote for the chapter, she admits that her analysis shows that two of the associations do not meet two criteria. , Later during the research process, because it is reflexive, Seitz adds a sixth association. The six associations are:
1. Gender Equity Support Group: A community college support group for women as individuals who are getting job training and/or enrolled in degree programs.
2. Income-Generating Cooperative: A group, organized by a local woman, of about twenty women who do piecework sewing in their homes as wage laborers, not entrepreneurs.
3. Coal Employment Project: A national advocacy and support group for women miners that was formed by a small group of women miners “’to help miners claim their rightful place in the coal industry’” (147).
4. Family Auxiliary of District 28 of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA): An association of wives, widows, mothers, daughters, sisters, and other family members of coal miners.
5. Dungannon Development Commission: A community development organization that was formed in 1979 “in response to the practical gender needs of one-hundred women working at a local sewing factory” (186).
6. Ivanhoe Civic League: A community development organization that was formed in reaction to the county’s plan to sell an industrial park rather than bring industry to the town of Ivanhoe.
Seitz states she contacted each association, fully disclosed the purposes of her research to them, and asked for permission to conduct her research during formal and informal meetings with members. During association meetings, she asked members for volunteers or names of women who could represent other women in their groups. She used a strategy of snowball and purposive sampling techniques and eventually selected twelve women for her life story interviews.
The effort to obtain data for ethnographic research is very different from that sought by the positivist researcher. While the ethnographer works to “get in,” which means becoming connected and personally involved, the positivist’s effort is to be estranged by “procedural objectivity” (Burawoy, 10). Seitz “gets in” by fully disclosing the purposes of her study and revealing shared experience and sympathy for the women’s collective efforts. She reveals personal information about herself: she is a mother, divorcee, head of a household with two children, and about the same age as many of her participants. By personalizing her relationship with her participants, Seitz and the women of her study develop relationships of trust and mutuality, and in so doing, Seitz describes herself as an “outsider within” (Seitz, 19). She is a participant-as-observer who becomes an “observer-as-participant” when she conducts the intensive interviews.
According to Seitz, most of the intensive interviews were conducted during a period of ten months. In two to four sessions, with each session varying from three- to eight-hours long, these women told Seitz their life stories. She states that she guided, did not control, their conversation by use of an open-ended interview guide, which was reflexive; it varied with the women being interviewed and as their life stories were told.
As stated above and implicitly, Seitz’s primary data collection technique is intensive interviews, specifically life-story interviews. She states that she recorded all of these interviews and produced verbatim transcriptions of each interview within one week of their occurrence. These transcriptions include her observer comments, which are Seitz’s comments that “convey settings, describe processes, and reflect on meanings for both the subjects and the researcher” (23). These transcriptions are her primary data.
Other data, which “provided illustrative materials for analysis of the [primary] data,” include field notes, which were produced from interactions with women in the associations, videotapes, photographs, memorabilia, and other documents and print materials (24).
Seitz’s claims her analysis was an interactive process of going back over transcripts of each interview numerous times as each life story was reconstructed and used Denzin’s approach of bracketing central and recurring themes. Consequently, her analysis should have taken the following five steps (Denzin):
1. Locate within the life stories key phrases and statements that speak directly to marginalization and empowerment.
2. Interpret the meanings of these phrases and statements.
3. Obtain the participant’s interpretations of these phrases and statements, when possible.
4. Inspect these meanings for what they reveal about recurring themes of marginalization and empowerment.
5. Offer a tentative statement of marginalization and empowerment in terms of the recurring themes in the previous step.
Conceptualization is an important process for Denzin’s analysis, and it is for Seitz’s as well. She uses the process to locate marginalization and empowerment in the life stories and social environments of her participants. In this way, she presents the results, which are the recurring experiences and feelings of marginalization and empowerment, as they occur within the participants’ families, at work, and in their communities, in their own words and emotions and Seitz’s summaries of such.
What marginalization and empowerment mean to the working-class Appalachian women of her study is presented in chapters three to eight. Marginalization and empowerment began with the following working definitions:
Marginalization: To cause to live
on the edges of society by excluding
from participation in any group effort.
Empowerment: A process aimed at
consolidating, maintaining, or
changing the nature and distribution
of power in a particular cultural
context…
The twelve women of the study speak of being isolated and powerless because they are female, working-class, and Appalachian. Recurring experiences and feelings of isolation and powerless of these women are communicated in the third through fifth chapters on family, work, and community. For example, in the chapter on the family, Seitz presents the following summaries,
· 10 participants “acknowledged that the most difficult aspect of growing up was recognition that their sex made them powerless”(4).
· Staying home and missing school was routine and accepted by schools because girls were expected to mother their younger sisters and brothers.
· “Threats of abandonment and shunning by family members, and fears about life outside the extended family network were recurring themes in the interviews” (66).
· Not to marry was not a choice, for all participants.
· 9 women spoke of verbal abuse, “being ‘put down’ or told that they ‘weren’t worth anything’” (58).
· 7 spoke of being slapped, 4 of being beaten, and 1 of being raped by her husband.
· “For wives of workers in an uncertain and vulnerable industry, dependency was enforced economically as well as physically” (56).
Along with experiences and feelings of isolation and powerless in their families, at work, and in their communities, the women also speak paradoxically of experiences and feelings of empowerment in their families, at work, and in the community. For example, in chapter three on the family, Seitz reports:
· Some women married as a way to “escape the
deprivations or degradations of both poverty
and being female” (53).
· “the women still perceive a primary
relationship of equity and mutuality as their
ideal, if not their experience, of marriage”
(61).
· “Women found the strength to endure and some-
times resist abusive relationships with
husbands because of their children” (63).
· 4 of the 6 women who divorced, “initiated
separations to protect their children if not
themselves” (64).
· 1 woman’s form of resistance was staying in
her marriage to give her child financial, if
not emotional, security, as a form of
resistance.
Seitz analysis demonstrates that she satisfied her goal to limit her intensive interviewing to women who have been changed by their participation in one of the six associations, and in the process is able to compare the opportunities for change that these associations allow. Women in the Gender Equity Support Group and Income Generating Cooperative reported that participation in their groups increased their and their peers’ individual self-esteem and self-confidence, and helped them recognize their “inadequacies as productive workers were based on structural inequalities” (143). Participants in the Coal Employment Project (CEP) expressed that their participation in CEP allowed them to both identify their needs and determine how they could participate in association; it helped them develop a gender consciousness. Those in the Family Auxiliary told stories of improved self-esteem and strategic collective actions that were taken during the union’s dispute with the Pittston Coal Company and which changed them by raising their class consciousness and gender consciousness. The women in the Dungannon Development Commission (DDC) reported that their participation in DDC changed their foci from individual self-interest to the interest of workers in the factory, and then to the community as a whole, with the conviction that community development should be indigenous and inclusive. Finally, the women in the Ivanhoe Civic League communicated that through their participation in the League they have become conscious of and have acted on strategic gender needs, and in the process have recognized that they, as women, “have some power within their communities,” and within their homes (216). ,
Any ethnography, from positivist to postmodernist, should include a discussion of reliability and validity because they have traditionally been the methods used to evaluate academic research, especially positivist research. To this, Seitz does not disappoint because a section in the second chapter is entitled, “Issues of Reliability and Validity.”
For Seitz, reliability refers to replicability, and specifically to the question, “Would similar recurring themes be described by different respondents?” That the answer to that question is a concern to her is evidenced by her research strategy to select women who were identified by others in their groups as being able to speak for their experiences. Furthermore, she reports that she asked similar questions to other women in one association to assess the commonality of experiences of change (25):
In one association, … I have had
several opportunities to ask similar
questions of other members and to
discuss my analysis of their
collective experiences with
respondents and with others. Other
members have described similar
processes of change through
participation in the group.
Seitz defines validity as an assessment of the veracity of the respondents’ accounts because it is the women who describe and explain their marginalization and empowerment. Because she is a critical feminist, and because she believes there are multiple, socially constructed realities and each life story is a “’fiction of self-representation,’” she rejects concerns for validity and instead shifts the concern to “’subjective mapping of experience” (26). By making that shift, she rejects concerns that participants may lie or be misinformed and, instead, tells us that these women should be heard because we can learn from them.
Linked to reliability and validity is an approach called “triangulation,” which refers to the crosschecks made to assess if data are valid and an effective representation of the phenomenon being studies (Schensul et al.). Crosschecks are made by obtaining information in different settings, from different persons, and at different times (Class Notes). Seitz interviews twelve women who are members of six different associations, and as stated above, she poses similar question to different women in one of the associations. Furthermore, she interviews the twelve women not just in one session, but, instead, in two to four sessions that range from three to eight hours. The life-story interviews are conducted as conversations in the women’s homes, in a park, laundromat, restaurants, coffee shops, and their places at work, with concerns for the idiosyncratic effects of place on the life stories. For example, at least one of these women is always interviewed in the same place (24):
one respondent who was not overtly critical
of a project organizer was always interviewed
in the group’s meeting place [because] her
husband would not have appreciated [Seitz]
coming to her home.
Social sciences researchers are also traditionally concerned with generalizability, which refers to the ability to make inferences about a larger population based on research results from a sample (Schensul et al.). The women of Seitz’s study are working-class Appalachians from Southwest Virginia who have participated in six specific associations and experienced epiphanies because of their participation. Seitz does not claim that the twelve women that she interviewed speak for all women, all of the working-class, or all Appalachians; instead, she reports that these twelve women speak for the experiences of other women in their associations.
Ethical concerns are imbued throughout Seitz’s research process. First, she does not hide her motivations from the reader; she identifies herself as a critical feminist who has lived in Southwest Virginia for fifteen years and how that motivates her study. Second, she does not conduct her research in secret. She declares that she “was careful to fully disclose the purposes of her research and to ask permission to carry on the study” in both formal and informal meetings with members of the associations (22). Third, she protects the confidentiality of the women and assures their anonymity. She does not report data in ways that could be used to construct “individual profiles” and then identify the women, nor does she create fictionalized composites of working-class, Appalachian women, because Seitz wants each woman to be heard in her own words (26). Fourth, she respects requests to speak off the record. For example, Seitz reports there are few quotes from one participant in the Coal Employment Project because “she asked that the tape recorder be turned off while we were discussing this association” (244). Fifth, and finally, she admits that although every participant is quoted or summarized at least once in each of the analysis chapters, “not all women are given equal voice on the page” (26).
Just as Seitz’s ethnographic research is an iterative and reflexive exploration of the experiences of working-class, Appalachian women in community associations, a reading and review of her ethnography is an iterative and reflexive process. What can appear as a complicated and, at times, inconsistent mix of elements from alternative research paradigms can also appear as a strategic and thoughtful feminist interplay. Furthermore, what can be judged as a compelling, but, at times, flawed mix of empirical statements, can also be understood as inevitable products of the dialectical tension between subject and object, between researcher and researched, between powerless and empowered, and between insider and outsider. The women of the study are marginalized as women, as working-class, and as Appalachians, yet, despite and because of their marginalization, they have acted for the betterment of their families and communities through strategic collective interaction, and in the process, transformed themselves.
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Trochim, William M.K. 2001. The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 2nd Ed. Atomicdogpublishing.com, Cincinnati, OH.
Women, Development, and Communities for Empowerment in Appalachia is a feminist ethnography about the marginalization of working-class Appalachian women and how, despite and because of their marginalization, they have acted for the betterment of their families and communities through strategic collective interaction, and in the process, have transformed themselves. Virginia Rinaldo Seitz’s methodology is complex, her empirical statements powerful, and at times, both include contradictory elements; nonetheless, her ethnography as a whole is compelling for two reasons. First, it effectively challenges stereotypes and other negative images of women and Appalachians, especially those found in the popular media and implicitly supported by development experts who use the culture of poverty theory to claim Appalachians are poor because of their pathological and backward culture.[1] Second, its critical-feminist use of life story interviews results in gendered, working-class, local descriptions of marginalization and indigenous gendered-development activism, and in this way, the book speaks out for, not about, working-class Appalachian women. In so doing, it confronts traditional development practices, which define development as economic growth and women’s contribution as increased employment, which assume outside experts are necessary, and, yet, which are inconsistent with local individual, family, and community needs.
For anyone with little-to-no knowledge of Appalachians beyond the stereotypes one hears or sees in the popular media, Seitz ethnography is insightful because its life stories rebut the stereotypes of Appalachian women as naïve, wild, dim-witted, superstitious, fatalistic, and continually pregnant and barefooted (Byrd; Heller). The women of her study are none of the above. Instead, they are resourceful, idealistic, and hard working despite and because of their marginalization. Furthermore, it is out of their resourcefulness, idealism, and hard work, along with their feelings of responsibility for the wellbeing of their families and communities, that they have become development activists working for social, economic, and political change. Seitz underscores that they are not exceptional women; they are not male-identified, nor have they rejected their families and communities; they are ordinary. However, later in the text, she admits that some of her participants may be exemplary.
Seitz uses the first two chapters to describe her research methodology, which is an innovative, feminist, and, at times, conflicting montage of elements of interpretivism, critical theory, feminist standpoint theory, and grounded theory. In the first page she warns the reader that the “presentation is not linear” because the text is and presents an “interative and reflexive exploration of change.” Perhaps, that warning is, in part, to prepare the reader for contradictions within the text that mirror the contradictions that emerged during her research process.
Early in the second chapter Seitz clearly rejects positivism because she is concerned with things that would be rejected as unknowable and irrelevant by positivists: meanings, motivations, and social structures of gender and class relations, and accepts an anti-positivist or, what shell calls, her “post-positivist” approach grounded in elements of interpretivism and critical theory (p. 16). Seitz accepts, like interpretivists and critical theorists, multiple, socially-constructed realities that may conflict and a more personal, interactive mode of data collection because meaning (interpretation) can only be communicated through such interaction. However, unlike interpretivists, but in agreement with critical theorists and some feminists, she claims that interpretivists do not go far enough to reject the researcher-researched distinction. Specifically, Seitz argues that the relationship of the researcher and researched should not just be interactive, but should be interactive and empowering to both, and although there are multiple interpretations of reality, researchers should place central importance on the lives and experiences of those who have been marginalized in society.
An important and potentially contradictory element in Seitz’s methodology is her use of feminist standpoint theory to imply that the knowledge produced by the working-class Appalachian women of her study or any oppressed group is “a more complete and therefore privileged knowledge of society” (p. 18). Just as positivists privilege method, in the sense that they claim to use objective methods that produce the Truth, similarly feminist standpoint theorists privilege the knowledge of women, and perhaps, in that sense, some-to-all feminist standpoint theorists assume that the knowledge produced by women is objective, grounded in the Truth. If Seitz accepts the assumption of an objective epistemology, then she contradicts a fundamental assumption of both interpretivism and critical theory, and agrees with a positivist assumption. Furthermore, she may also share the positivists’ ontology of a “real” social reality. If so, this reality, although it may be contested, is ultimately revealed by those who have been marginalized and, in some sense, are “outsiders.” This reviewer, however, believes Seitz uses feminist standpoint theory, not because she believes it produces an objective truth, but because she is an advocate for women, not just a laissez faire moral relativist.
Grounded theory, which is a research process used to develop theory, also informs Seitz’s ethnography, particularly her data collection and analysis. There are many variations of grounded theory; however, according to Charmaz and Mitchell (p. 160), they all include the following strategies:
1. simultaneous data-collection and
analysis;
2. pursuit of emergent themes through
early data analysis;
3. discovery of basic social processes
within the data;
4. inductive construction of abstract
categories that explain and
synthesize these processes;
5. integration of categories into a
theoretical framework that specifies
causes, conditions, and consequences
of the processes.
Seitz’s grounded theory is similar to Charmaz’s constructivist approach: it assumes multiple, socially constructed realities, recognizes and encourages the mutual creation of knowledge by the researcher and researched, and its goal includes interpretive understanding of subjects’ meanings (Charmaz).
Both grounded theory and Seitz’s ethnographic research begin with central concepts (Denzin). For Seitz, there are two: “marginalization” and “empowerment.” These central concepts are important to her as a feminist and critical researcher, and she makes that known to the reader in the first chapter. She starts with “working definitions” of these concepts and uses them to form questions that frame her research, in the hope that the resulting life stories become the text for “drawing out the ‘extralocal relationships’ and structural constraints on women’s lives” (p. 19). These definitions change through a recursive and reflexive process, with both the women in her study and Seitz empowered to change the definitions.
The author’s concern for and use of reflexivity is implicitly woven throughout the text, but is explicit in the second chapter. There she explains her personal motivations for the study and describes relationships that she strategically developed, encouraged, and discouraged with her participants inside and outside the research process, and which affected her data and conclusions. Seitz explains to the reader that it is out of her feminism, dissatisfaction with the Women in Development (WID) literature, anti-positivism, and fifteen years of experiences living and working in Southwest Virginia that she chose to focus on the lives and experiences of working-class Appalachian women in Southwest Virginia. These people are marginalized because they are women, because they are working-class, and because they are Appalachian, and for each and all of these reasons, they have been excluded from knowledge construction, and in particular, the knowledge that justifies social and economic policies that affect them. , Seitz is a feminist, activist and scholar, and she wants to “speak out” for these women (p. 7). Thus, it is out of all of the above that her study seeks to generate a gendered, working-class, local knowledge of the marginalization of working-class Appalachian women and how that marginalization influences their collective struggle for social, economic, and political change. Specifically, her ethnography seeks to answer the following questions (p. 2):
1. “How are women marginalized and oppressed on the basis of their class, gender, and other positions of difference?
2. How do women theorize an understanding of class and gender?
3. Under what conditions do women come together collectively for social change?
4. What associations provide contexts for women’s empowerment? (and)
5. How are women empowered through their grassroots collective practices?”
A sixth question that Seitz derives from the above is:
6. “Does the feminism (as theory and practice) of women in this research setting share standpoints with third world feminisms?”
To generate a gendered, working-class knowledge that can answer the above questions, Seitz is emphatic that she does not repeat data collection methods that for centuries have been used to produce male scholars’ knowledge of women and authorities who have spoken for women. Thus, she rejects any data collection technique, such as a survey, that controls informants; reduces their ideas, thoughts, and memories to words of the researcher; and does not require face-to-face interactions. Instead, she uses a data collection method that avoids control over the subjects of her research and develops a researcher-researched connectedness so both researcher and researched are co-equals (Brewer; Oakley, 1981, 2000; Reinharz, 1992). Seitz agrees with Oakley and Reinharz that the open-ended interview process is the best method for feminist research because it permits access to participants’ ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than the words of the researcher; permits non-verbal communication and emotions; produces non-standardized information that allows researchers to make full use of differences of people; and creates participants, not respondents, who are essential for the construction of a gendered knowledge. Therefore, the open-ended interview process is the primary data collection technique she uses, and in particular, Seitz uses life-history interviews because they can be focused around biographically meaningful events for her research participants that occurred because of their participation in community organizations. These biographically meaningful events or “epiphanies” connect personal troubles to public issues (Denzin, 1989). For Seitz, epiphanies are particularly useful in explaining “the ‘how’ questions of social change”; therefore, she restricted her participants to working-class Appalachian women who have experienced epiphanies through their participation in local community organizations (p. 21).
For twenty-three months, Seitz ‘met, individually and in groups, numerous women from Southwest Virginia [and] attended their meetings and celebrations, observed them working, went out for coffee, and visited their homes” (19). She states she used her own knowledge of the area, based on fifteen years of living and working there to identify and contact “more than twenty key informants,” all of which are women, “’development catalysts’” and could help her identify associations that met her four criteria (20). ,
In the second chapter, Seitz states that five associations were found that met the four criteria, and which could “provide collective contexts for women’s empowerment”, and where she had no long-term personal involvement (20). However, in an endnote for the chapter, she admits that her analysis shows that two of the associations do not meet two criteria. , Later during the research process, because it is reflexive, Seitz adds a sixth association. The six associations are:
1. Gender Equity Support Group: A community college support group for women as individuals who are getting job training and/or enrolled in degree programs.
2. Income-Generating Cooperative: A group, organized by a local woman, of about twenty women who do piecework sewing in their homes as wage laborers, not entrepreneurs.
3. Coal Employment Project: A national advocacy and support group for women miners that was formed by a small group of women miners “’to help miners claim their rightful place in the coal industry’” (147).
4. Family Auxiliary of District 28 of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA): An association of wives, widows, mothers, daughters, sisters, and other family members of coal miners.
5. Dungannon Development Commission: A community development organization that was formed in 1979 “in response to the practical gender needs of one-hundred women working at a local sewing factory” (186).
6. Ivanhoe Civic League: A community development organization that was formed in reaction to the county’s plan to sell an industrial park rather than bring industry to the town of Ivanhoe.
Seitz states she contacted each association, fully disclosed the purposes of her research to them, and asked for permission to conduct her research during formal and informal meetings with members. During association meetings, she asked members for volunteers or names of women who could represent other women in their groups. She used a strategy of snowball and purposive sampling techniques and eventually selected twelve women for her life story interviews.
The effort to obtain data for ethnographic research is very different from that sought by the positivist researcher. While the ethnographer works to “get in,” which means becoming connected and personally involved, the positivist’s effort is to be estranged by “procedural objectivity” (Burawoy, 10). Seitz “gets in” by fully disclosing the purposes of her study and revealing shared experience and sympathy for the women’s collective efforts. She reveals personal information about herself: she is a mother, divorcee, head of a household with two children, and about the same age as many of her participants. By personalizing her relationship with her participants, Seitz and the women of her study develop relationships of trust and mutuality, and in so doing, Seitz describes herself as an “outsider within” (Seitz, 19). She is a participant-as-observer who becomes an “observer-as-participant” when she conducts the intensive interviews.
According to Seitz, most of the intensive interviews were conducted during a period of ten months. In two to four sessions, with each session varying from three- to eight-hours long, these women told Seitz their life stories. She states that she guided, did not control, their conversation by use of an open-ended interview guide, which was reflexive; it varied with the women being interviewed and as their life stories were told.
As stated above and implicitly, Seitz’s primary data collection technique is intensive interviews, specifically life-story interviews. She states that she recorded all of these interviews and produced verbatim transcriptions of each interview within one week of their occurrence. These transcriptions include her observer comments, which are Seitz’s comments that “convey settings, describe processes, and reflect on meanings for both the subjects and the researcher” (23). These transcriptions are her primary data.
Other data, which “provided illustrative materials for analysis of the [primary] data,” include field notes, which were produced from interactions with women in the associations, videotapes, photographs, memorabilia, and other documents and print materials (24).
Seitz’s claims her analysis was an interactive process of going back over transcripts of each interview numerous times as each life story was reconstructed and used Denzin’s approach of bracketing central and recurring themes. Consequently, her analysis should have taken the following five steps (Denzin):
1. Locate within the life stories key phrases and statements that speak directly to marginalization and empowerment.
2. Interpret the meanings of these phrases and statements.
3. Obtain the participant’s interpretations of these phrases and statements, when possible.
4. Inspect these meanings for what they reveal about recurring themes of marginalization and empowerment.
5. Offer a tentative statement of marginalization and empowerment in terms of the recurring themes in the previous step.
Conceptualization is an important process for Denzin’s analysis, and it is for Seitz’s as well. She uses the process to locate marginalization and empowerment in the life stories and social environments of her participants. In this way, she presents the results, which are the recurring experiences and feelings of marginalization and empowerment, as they occur within the participants’ families, at work, and in their communities, in their own words and emotions and Seitz’s summaries of such.
What marginalization and empowerment mean to the working-class Appalachian women of her study is presented in chapters three to eight. Marginalization and empowerment began with the following working definitions:
Marginalization: To cause to live
on the edges of society by excluding
from participation in any group effort.
Empowerment: A process aimed at
consolidating, maintaining, or
changing the nature and distribution
of power in a particular cultural
context…
The twelve women of the study speak of being isolated and powerless because they are female, working-class, and Appalachian. Recurring experiences and feelings of isolation and powerless of these women are communicated in the third through fifth chapters on family, work, and community. For example, in the chapter on the family, Seitz presents the following summaries,
· 10 participants “acknowledged that the most difficult aspect of growing up was recognition that their sex made them powerless”(4).
· Staying home and missing school was routine and accepted by schools because girls were expected to mother their younger sisters and brothers.
· “Threats of abandonment and shunning by family members, and fears about life outside the extended family network were recurring themes in the interviews” (66).
· Not to marry was not a choice, for all participants.
· 9 women spoke of verbal abuse, “being ‘put down’ or told that they ‘weren’t worth anything’” (58).
· 7 spoke of being slapped, 4 of being beaten, and 1 of being raped by her husband.
· “For wives of workers in an uncertain and vulnerable industry, dependency was enforced economically as well as physically” (56).
Along with experiences and feelings of isolation and powerless in their families, at work, and in their communities, the women also speak paradoxically of experiences and feelings of empowerment in their families, at work, and in the community. For example, in chapter three on the family, Seitz reports:
· Some women married as a way to “escape the
deprivations or degradations of both poverty
and being female” (53).
· “the women still perceive a primary
relationship of equity and mutuality as their
ideal, if not their experience, of marriage”
(61).
· “Women found the strength to endure and some-
times resist abusive relationships with
husbands because of their children” (63).
· 4 of the 6 women who divorced, “initiated
separations to protect their children if not
themselves” (64).
· 1 woman’s form of resistance was staying in
her marriage to give her child financial, if
not emotional, security, as a form of
resistance.
Seitz analysis demonstrates that she satisfied her goal to limit her intensive interviewing to women who have been changed by their participation in one of the six associations, and in the process is able to compare the opportunities for change that these associations allow. Women in the Gender Equity Support Group and Income Generating Cooperative reported that participation in their groups increased their and their peers’ individual self-esteem and self-confidence, and helped them recognize their “inadequacies as productive workers were based on structural inequalities” (143). Participants in the Coal Employment Project (CEP) expressed that their participation in CEP allowed them to both identify their needs and determine how they could participate in association; it helped them develop a gender consciousness. Those in the Family Auxiliary told stories of improved self-esteem and strategic collective actions that were taken during the union’s dispute with the Pittston Coal Company and which changed them by raising their class consciousness and gender consciousness. The women in the Dungannon Development Commission (DDC) reported that their participation in DDC changed their foci from individual self-interest to the interest of workers in the factory, and then to the community as a whole, with the conviction that community development should be indigenous and inclusive. Finally, the women in the Ivanhoe Civic League communicated that through their participation in the League they have become conscious of and have acted on strategic gender needs, and in the process have recognized that they, as women, “have some power within their communities,” and within their homes (216). ,
Any ethnography, from positivist to postmodernist, should include a discussion of reliability and validity because they have traditionally been the methods used to evaluate academic research, especially positivist research. To this, Seitz does not disappoint because a section in the second chapter is entitled, “Issues of Reliability and Validity.”
For Seitz, reliability refers to replicability, and specifically to the question, “Would similar recurring themes be described by different respondents?” That the answer to that question is a concern to her is evidenced by her research strategy to select women who were identified by others in their groups as being able to speak for their experiences. Furthermore, she reports that she asked similar questions to other women in one association to assess the commonality of experiences of change (25):
In one association, … I have had
several opportunities to ask similar
questions of other members and to
discuss my analysis of their
collective experiences with
respondents and with others. Other
members have described similar
processes of change through
participation in the group.
Seitz defines validity as an assessment of the veracity of the respondents’ accounts because it is the women who describe and explain their marginalization and empowerment. Because she is a critical feminist, and because she believes there are multiple, socially constructed realities and each life story is a “’fiction of self-representation,’” she rejects concerns for validity and instead shifts the concern to “’subjective mapping of experience” (26). By making that shift, she rejects concerns that participants may lie or be misinformed and, instead, tells us that these women should be heard because we can learn from them.
Linked to reliability and validity is an approach called “triangulation,” which refers to the crosschecks made to assess if data are valid and an effective representation of the phenomenon being studies (Schensul et al.). Crosschecks are made by obtaining information in different settings, from different persons, and at different times (Class Notes). Seitz interviews twelve women who are members of six different associations, and as stated above, she poses similar question to different women in one of the associations. Furthermore, she interviews the twelve women not just in one session, but, instead, in two to four sessions that range from three to eight hours. The life-story interviews are conducted as conversations in the women’s homes, in a park, laundromat, restaurants, coffee shops, and their places at work, with concerns for the idiosyncratic effects of place on the life stories. For example, at least one of these women is always interviewed in the same place (24):
one respondent who was not overtly critical
of a project organizer was always interviewed
in the group’s meeting place [because] her
husband would not have appreciated [Seitz]
coming to her home.
Social sciences researchers are also traditionally concerned with generalizability, which refers to the ability to make inferences about a larger population based on research results from a sample (Schensul et al.). The women of Seitz’s study are working-class Appalachians from Southwest Virginia who have participated in six specific associations and experienced epiphanies because of their participation. Seitz does not claim that the twelve women that she interviewed speak for all women, all of the working-class, or all Appalachians; instead, she reports that these twelve women speak for the experiences of other women in their associations.
Ethical concerns are imbued throughout Seitz’s research process. First, she does not hide her motivations from the reader; she identifies herself as a critical feminist who has lived in Southwest Virginia for fifteen years and how that motivates her study. Second, she does not conduct her research in secret. She declares that she “was careful to fully disclose the purposes of her research and to ask permission to carry on the study” in both formal and informal meetings with members of the associations (22). Third, she protects the confidentiality of the women and assures their anonymity. She does not report data in ways that could be used to construct “individual profiles” and then identify the women, nor does she create fictionalized composites of working-class, Appalachian women, because Seitz wants each woman to be heard in her own words (26). Fourth, she respects requests to speak off the record. For example, Seitz reports there are few quotes from one participant in the Coal Employment Project because “she asked that the tape recorder be turned off while we were discussing this association” (244). Fifth, and finally, she admits that although every participant is quoted or summarized at least once in each of the analysis chapters, “not all women are given equal voice on the page” (26).
Just as Seitz’s ethnographic research is an iterative and reflexive exploration of the experiences of working-class, Appalachian women in community associations, a reading and review of her ethnography is an iterative and reflexive process. What can appear as a complicated and, at times, inconsistent mix of elements from alternative research paradigms can also appear as a strategic and thoughtful feminist interplay. Furthermore, what can be judged as a compelling, but, at times, flawed mix of empirical statements, can also be understood as inevitable products of the dialectical tension between subject and object, between researcher and researched, between powerless and empowered, and between insider and outsider. The women of the study are marginalized as women, as working-class, and as Appalachians, yet, despite and because of their marginalization, they have acted for the betterment of their families and communities through strategic collective interaction, and in the process, transformed themselves.
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