Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Acknowledgement
- Note on Numbers
- Introduction to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Origins
- 2 ‘A Friend a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’: Social Support and Health
- 3 Sickness in Salonica and Other Stories
- 4 Eve in the Garden of Health Research
- 5 A Bite of the Apple
- 6 Who’s Afraid of the Randomized Controlled Trial?
- 7 ‘One of Mummy’s Ladies’
- 8 Four Women
- 9 ‘Real’ Results
- 10 Women at Risk
- 11 The Poverty of Research
- 12 Models of Knowing and Understanding
- Appendix I Study Guidelines
- Appendix II Publications from the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome Study
- Notes
- References
- Index
12 - Models of Knowing and Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Acknowledgement
- Note on Numbers
- Introduction to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Origins
- 2 ‘A Friend a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’: Social Support and Health
- 3 Sickness in Salonica and Other Stories
- 4 Eve in the Garden of Health Research
- 5 A Bite of the Apple
- 6 Who’s Afraid of the Randomized Controlled Trial?
- 7 ‘One of Mummy’s Ladies’
- 8 Four Women
- 9 ‘Real’ Results
- 10 Women at Risk
- 11 The Poverty of Research
- 12 Models of Knowing and Understanding
- Appendix I Study Guidelines
- Appendix II Publications from the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome Study
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
But one obstacle remains. Even after the two domains of the ethical and the epistemological are set apart, some argue that the latter should have priority. It is useless to be overly concerned with truthfulness, they claim, so long as one cannot know whether human beings are capable of knowing and conveying the truth in the first place … Once again, the exalted and all-absorbing preoccupation with ‘truth’ then comes to nourish the reluctance to confront falsehood. (Bok 1980: 9)
This book began with three aims: first, the simple telling of a story about a research project; second, a reflexive articulation of the process of undertaking research; and, third, addressing questions to do with the status and gendering of sociological knowledge itself. Like the imposition of a division between qualitative and quantitative methodology, the separability of the three aims is theoretical rather than practical. Few stories can be simply told. Because it concerns a research enterprise that straddles the two knowledge domains of the social and the medical, the story of this one inhabits the double hermeneutics of its ideological space. It moves backwards and forwards from one domain to the other, uncomfortable with each but unable to let go of either in the effort to create its own original merging of the two. In this, the book's narrative resembles the fate of women under patriarchy – living their own lives but as men see them, and forging, if they are lucky and/or sufficiently determined, an existence which is their own novel (qualitative) creation rather than mere mechanistic (quantitative) survival. As Kate Millett said, now many years ago, the challenge is to create ‘a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit’ (Millett 1969: 363).
So Social Support and Motherhood has told a story, but/and in a self-conscious way. Addressing the third aim, of exploring traditional assumptions about knowledge, has been implicit throughout most of the text, perhaps even uneasily so, in a disjunctive leapfrogging between the different textual modes of description and analysis; and between the central conundrum of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the generation and presentation of research data.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Support and Motherhood (Reissue)The Natural History of a Research Project, pp. 411 - 429Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018