In 1998 Ann Oakley published an article in Sociology entitled ‘Gender, Methodology and People’s Ways of Knowing: Some Problems with Feminism and the Paradigm Debate in Social Science’. Within this piece she suggests that the main methodological concern of feminist sociologists is whether qualitative or quantitative methods are the best way to find out about people’s lives. My reading of the feminist literature leads me to disagree and to suggest that the relationship between the process and product, between doing and knowing, i.e. how what we do affects what we get, while using both qualitative and quantitative methods, is the main concern of contemporary feminists. In this piece I present my own review of the feminist literature in order to demonstrate the centrality of the process and product/doing and knowing debate. I draw on a range of work, including other work of Oakley, and I also refer to my own experiences of research and show how issues of process and product/doing and knowing are relevant for me.
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