journey. The study undertook an inquiry into rural women leaders’ personal and community identities, family and community relationships, leadership role models and mentors, education, religion and leadership experiences within organizations. These facets of the women’s lives provided starting points designed to spark discussion about their personal experiences of formative situations in which gender roles are often prescribed and traditional. From this perspective, these areas of inquiry also opened avenues of exploration into the complexities that surround women and leadership – particularly rural women in leadership (Rosenberg and Howard, 2008).8
In-depth interviews
Having established that the most appropriate form of interviewing for any qualitative study is dependent upon the research question, the methodology employed by Pini (2005) in her research into Australian rural women in leadership set a valuable precedent for this research. The use of general themes and questions as a framework for semi-structured interviews allowed Pini’s participants to give self-reflexive answers about their own experiences as well as advice for aspiring women leaders. This study followed her example through the use of semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews – facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of the respondents’ contexts and experiences in regard to the particular topic of leadership (Hesse-Biber, 2007).
The interview is a method that allows the researcher to maintain respondents’ comments as valid and their experiences as valuable (Brewer, 2000), and helps steer the researcher away from forms of knowledge production that have come to be seen as patriarchal (Little, 2002). As such, interviews produced a wealth of rich data in the participant’s own words (Brewer, 2000) and thus opened spaces that had the potential to reveal ‘feelings, values and internal struggles’ behind the stories told in the interview process (Ni Laoire, in Hughes et al., 2000, p. 87). Reinharz and Chase (2002) recognize the hearing of women’s own words as an antidote to centuries of their masking behind men’s words, and put this method forward as particularly important when studying women. In view of the power struggles present in the experiences of women in leadership, this perspective was notably relevant to the research. Each woman was interviewed in depth once. The use of an interview guide helped ensure that the topic at hand was addressed, while also leaving room for the interviewee to articulate related issues or experiences that she considered significant (Kvale, 2006). The interview guide was adjusted slightly as themes emerged from interviews, producing continuity among the topics addressed and ensuring that the women’s voices were reflected in the questions being asked.
Participant observation
Fundamental to my attempt to ‘capture … social meanings and ordinary activities’ as a way of deciphering how the women in this study make sense of their leadership circumstances (Brewer, 2000) was the practice of conducting participant observation at meetings in which they interacted with other women leaders from rural areas. Rural research has commonly made use of this method (Hughes et al., 2000), and it has been described by LeCompte (2002) as an instrument for understanding broader cultural frameworks without masking differences among participants. Although it did not involve complete immersion into a field setting, early in the research I began attending meetings as a way of gaining acceptance among the women I studied (Brewer, 2000). This led to the recognition that their lives are quite complex and multi-dimensional – shaped by much more than simply their status and duties as leaders (Hughes et al., 2000). It also informed my understandings of the role these organizations play in rural life and provided deeper insights into the participants’ lives when they spoke about the organizations.
Particular attention must be paid to how much participation was appropriate to the setting (Buch and Staller, 2007). Wolf (1996) observes that research would not be undertaken if there were not existing differences between the researcher and the researched. Even in instances where the researcher shares some ‘insider characteristics’ with those being studied, it ‘is not enough to ensure that the researcher can fully capture the lived experiences of those he or she researches’ (Hesse-Biber, 2007, p. 141). Bourdieu (2003) attributes this to the foreignness of the researched group’s formative practices and experiences as opposed to those of the researcher. While claims have been made for the advantages of both insider and outsider statuses (Wolf, 1996), much feminist research considers insider/outsider status as fluid (Lal, 1996) or, alternatively, views the researcher as both insider and outsider concurrently (Wolf, 1996). McAreavey’s (2008) work gives further insight into the complexities of the researcher’s overlapping insider/outsider status through recognizing the continuous internal dialogue required to maintain both. This blurring of insider/outsider status was relevant to a point here, where my status as both an insider (daughter of a rural farm family) and an outsider (academic and native of the USA) informed my choices regarding participation.
Reflexivity
The common factor in both the interviews and participant observation was reflexivity. Reflexivity may be defined as a critical examination of the researcher’s perspectives and experiences as they have the potential to influence her/his research (Fonow and Cook, 2005). Feminist research values the practice for its usefulness in revealing biases that help deconstruct researcher objectivity and shore up experience as ‘a legitimate form of knowledge’ (Pini, 2004b). It is also a key way of recognizing both similarities and differences between researcher and researched and among the researched as a group (Katz, 1996), and is particularly useful to researchers interested in women in leadership (Pini, 2004a). Reflexivity must be recognized and practised, however, as a critical process rather than ‘a simplistic rendering of biography for its own sake’ (Pini, 2004b) or an exercise that falls into the trap of being either too brief (and thus inadequate and ineffective) or too long (and thus narcissistic) (Bourdieu, 2003). Bourdieu (2003) sets forth the requirement that the researcher subject not only her or his experiences, but also his or her relation to those experiences, to meticulous scrutiny – recognizing that the researcher’s location in the realm of academia will also influence research practices and outcomes. Unfortunately, in spite of the reflexive practices of feminist rural sociologists, reflexivity has had limited acceptance in the field of rural sociology (Pini, 2004b), placing it among the ‘sociological subfields’ Rosenberg and Howard portray as ‘stubbornly immune to key feminist insights’ (2008, p. 677).
Reflexivity is often relegated to the latter portions of academic studies. However, Hughes et al. (2000) advocate beginning the (continuous) reflexive process during the research design. Bourdieu (2003, p. 288) echoes Hughes by purporting that, without early reflexivity, researchers run the risk of ‘injecting scholarly thought … into the behaviours of ordinary agents …’. Ramazanoglu and Holland (2002, p. 14) bring this insight to bear on feminist methodology through their recognition of the unfeasibility of compartmentalizing segments of our lives as researchers – the impossibility of separating academia from our ‘everyday life’ – and so admonish feminist researchers to be mindful of the social context within which we operate. Beyond introspection, Naples and Sachs (2000) expand reflexivity to include how the research is presented, choice of contacts, formality or informality in dress and speech, and the researcher’s location during fieldwork – all for the purpose of exposing the process by which research conclusions have been formulated.
In the broader scope of sociology, Bochner (2001) embraces this element of research as humanizing the researcher, making space for the recognition of ways in which the research being undertaken is reflective of the ‘therapeutic’ and ‘scholarly’ intersections in our own lives (p. 138). However, this argument must also be tempered by Pillow’s (2003) admonishment to avoid forms of reflexivity that build false connections between the researcher’s life experience and similar (but not the same) life experiences of the participant. Pini’s (2004b) observation that reflexivity has a constructive role to play in revealing the context of knowledge production in rural research (particularly when
