Chapter Six
6.5 Qualitative research actually liberates people! Phumzile - an experienced academic (UNIZUL)
It's true that we women don't stand up for our rights as often as we should.
Unfortunately, research is a male dominated area and we wouldn't be accepted
if
we did.Itwould just make it harder
if
the men rebelled against us. Less and less women would get access. It ends up being very tricky. Education is the key. Women have to be educated about their rights, about being equal and deserving a chance. But I am sure things will turn around some day. In fact, I am confident about that. If not, I wouldn't be here talking to you.In the mean time I feel it is more important to have women in the university. Women who are seen as being just as capable of doing the job. I think that will have a huge impact on attitudes - especially about women's role in society. I am a female lecturer and I hope that my presence in this male dominated field will encourage other women and girls to try it - more especially black women.
We have to show that women are real and important and give recognition of women's contributions in history. Like I said earlier, education is the key. By informing people of women who are successful in research you encourage more and more to try these fields.
The more women are recognised for their achievements and skills in research the more they will be accepted in the workplace.
I have found out that having clear milestones and having an idea of what has to be done, makes women start contacting other women, and holding meetings to get funds and so on.
In other words establishing a working network. I hope my ideas can be useful to your research.
6.5 Qualitative research actually liberates people! Phumzile - an experienced
you acquire information, planning the programmes, you are busy with research. And this is the skill that is very necessary and important but a skill that has been neglected by the university. After working for about six and half years, I then moved back to the university after being encouraged by a colleague to apply for a position as a lecturer at the University of Zululand. I was very unprepared for the job I was applying for and it is very peculiar that with just an undergraduate degree I was employed as a junior lecturer at that university. Fortunately for me I had an aunt studying at an American university. She wrote to me stating very categorically that I was not university material, that I needed to study more, that at the American universities one didn't teach
if
one was not a professor.This I suppose channelled my thinking and attitude towards academia. After registering for an Honours degree in 1980, I became very interested in what I was doing. I feel that was my first introduction into research proper. I was expected to write a dissertation and after six and half years of being absent from any kind of academic work, it was really a struggle and I feel very embarrassed with the product that I had at that time. But at the same time also proud that I did it and I can now look back and say confidently now that these are the things that people need to be taught, this is how research training needs to occur for people to succeed in research and academia.
The whole idea of managing a research project and to teach at the same time is daunting.
As I said earlier my understanding of research was very minimal. So here I was having to decide on a topic for instance, on what to study and everyone says to you to try and delimit your study. You think of so many issues and they are all important to you and you only have one year to do it in. I started to think about the topic I had chosen for myself 1just couldn't figure out exactly what it was I wanted to study. So I think that's the key issue, trying to help shape the topic and questions that a person would like to study. Whether that subject is worth studying and how you are going to come around and formulate them into a researchable problem, I don't think that we are well vested with an understanding of what a researchable problem is. My second problem was getting guidance from a person who was 'supposed' to be my supervisor. He kind of accepted everything I was bringing to our supervision sessions. I would ask
if
this was okay and he would sayif
it's okay with you then it is okay! A colleague of mine who was in education read my analyses and said to me "you've got your tables and you are telling us what the tables are saying but that is not enough because its obvious. For instanceif
you say 90% or the majority of people are saying this, what does that mean to you?" I did not know how to respond to him. Whatsense could I make of this information? So for me these insights came towards the end of the whole year of struggling with my research. At the end of 1980 I was done with that research. I was proud that I had finished it mainly because I had no other reference or anything else to give me the status or credibility that I desired.
It was about3or4 years before I became engaged in research again. In my new job I was not very engaged in research anyway, nobody was making demands on me in terms of research, in terms of studying further, all they wanted was for me to get my teaching done.
I suppose my life is punctuated with people who've been kind of umbrellas or support systems to me because a friend kept calling and saying: "are you studying towards your masters" or "what are you doing wasting your life?" and I kept saying, yeah, I'm too busy teaching but I would like to register. I even remember writing to make enquiries but not having the time to follow up. So eventually I didn't register for further studies. Another friend suggested that I go to Englandfor a year and be done. I was interested to go Cape
Town, they had a research programme, which was a taught Master's programme and I was very interested in a taught programme. I felt that I needed more guided work in my studies. Fortunately for me the British Council was funding studies in the UK. I wasn't even aware of that until a colleague pointed me in that direction. I then applied and went to study in the UK. Although we had a person who was responsible for research training, looking back now I feel it wasn't really adequate. There was no clear focus on research as such. So I studied all of that but appeared to have been quite disoriented, or I suppose being away from home, having no support that I could count on! It was tough going. I did eventually write a dissertation, a much better dissertation than my last one! But a dissertation which is only a partial fulfilment of a bigger programme is just not the same as writing a fully fledged research masters dissertation. Although that time around I was proud of my work, I still felt that my background was not strong enough. I didn't feel properly grounded in research.
When I returned to South Africa, I started reading more around issues of research. I was actually forced to start reading around the subject because there were such big expectations. Especially being a black woman, having studied abroad and now I had a Master's degree! So I was expected to teach research courses at the university until I left in 1990 to study abroad again but this time I went to the USA. In all of the ten years at UNIZUL, although we did try to get publications and do research, there wasn't any
pressure or accountability associated with those activities. My HOD would ask me how many publications I had or whether I was busy with any type of research just in passing.
The main focus was still teaching. That had to come first. And besides that you know the whole story of teaching first years and the load of work that you have and how little time you have for engaging in research. So there was some neglect there that
if
you are junior, let aloneif
you were black and female, nobody really cared about the progress you were making.In the US I had to take more research classes in order to be at the level that they expect one to be at for the PHD level. They expected me to take a summer class. So I joined their Masters programme to update my research whilst at the same time I was taking research classes with my PHD colleagues and a statistics class. The programme expected everybody to take three research classes and three statistics classes. That for me was good preparation. They had good teachers of statistics and research but you know, you hear about teachers who are good, who are excellent, and you are encouraged by others.
Teachers, they also advertise. So I heard that there was this very interesting, very good teacher Patti Lather. So I resolved to register with her. She was conducting qualitative research classes in the fall of 1991. Unfortunately I couldn't join the class because it clashed with a required class of mine. I made sure that in winter I joined her class.
I saw the content of her classes. She was doing qualitative research and although I had already taken a qualitative research class, I really wasn't impressed because there were no guidelines that were set out and I believe that
if
you join any class, even a PHD class, I want to believe that there should be boundaries that are set and that you are given certain readings and that there are expectations either to produce a paper or to do whatever. The lecturer had no guidelines, he gave us few books to read and asked us to evaluate these books. In terms of what? I asked him. He would say, qualitatively and I would say that's not adequate.So when I looked at the content of the other classes in education, I really felt that this is the class I wanted and students who had gone through her were saying the most wonderful things about her. So I attended her classes and I never turned back.
My department back home didn't encourage qualitative research at all and I suppose because they didn't believe it was research. If for instance the HSRC is saying participatory research is not research, then I'm really worried. There are a lot of people, not just the HSRC, who are very quantitatively oriented, that do not believe that qualitative research is research, let alone when you are moving into participatory research.
After three classes of statistics in the US, I was ready to write a dissertation and used the statistical methods that I was now properly grounded in. But I didn't feel that quantitatively I could do justice to the areas I wanted to do research in. I thought that qualitative methods were very good. I was comfortable that it would not alienate me from the people I was trying to research. I think from that moment I was attracted to qualitative research methods. The way that one worked, the way that one analysed the information and the books that I was reading actually led me to the belief that this is the research method, qualitative research that actually liberates people that you are researching. It was also something that appealed to my feminist leanings. They are not objects to be studied and abandoned. I don't believe in researching people to death or keeping people at that level where they will always be researched and yet not liberating them in order to develop further.
So I took two classes with this woman. The first class was the study of research methods and the second class was studying the analysis of qualitative research. Both of these classes were very interesting for me. I felt relatively confident before I went on to do my comprehensive exams. We had to write our comprehensive exams and later defend orally everything that you've done. At this point I felt comfortable doing that before a panel of about6to 7people including people who were not in my college.
Then came the big test of doing your own dissertation that was really a test in terms of whether it will be acceptable in my own college knowing that they didn't like qualitative research so much. Thankful that there were three or four people who were before me who had attempted to do it and they were accepted. So I felt comfortable even discussing this with my advisor. So I still relied more on Patti for guidance more than my own advisor because as I pointed out he wasn't very versatile with qualitative research and besides in our own classes we had developed what we called not mentors but peers, people who could check your research, check the information that you have and they will help you in
clarifying more your topic or clarifying the data that you have. So I had two wonderful women who supported me and I used them as my peer debriefers in checking the information that I had, who kind of guided the process and when I finished, of course I returned here.
One thing I can say about my programme is how interesting they made research to be. It wasn't a chore anymore. It was something that could be done easily; it was something that was accessible to everybody. It was something that you could do on a daily basis.
The Americans are fond of statistics even in sports, even in their everyday life, they are saying this and they like observing basketball. So each time a player was there they would focus on him. They had everything on him from where they have studied, to what his achievements were and so on. That in itself was enough information about the person in that you could write and analyse the information and compare.
So for me when I returned to South Africa, this was so interesting. I started doing research for papers and its unfortunate that some of them are not published. So I began tentatively to do research and write it and I didn't publish it. It was for the consumption of people in conferences. And I just kept it there and then my load of course was different. I found that students were supposed to write a dissertation like how I was expected to write my dissertation. So I kind of reflected on the lack of caring, lack of advice and guidance. I found that students were not able to finish at the end of October as expected because I don't think they had sufficient guidance. Later on I heard that I'd been allocated to supervise all these students. I suggested in the departmental meeting that I would like students to study research while they are busy writing because I didn't believe that they had enough information for them to do individual work and that was accepted. The way that it was structured was the same way as I had studied. For instance, beginning with just a critique of an article, get into the mode of looking at somebody's work from outside instead of being engaged in and absorbed by what this person is writing. Which in itself is okay, but if you are going to write a dissertation you need to be critical of issues and be kind of above the information most of the time.
But as numbers grew I just wasn't able to do all of this alone so I divided the work. My colleagues were quite happy to do that.
But another dimension of the research process entered my life when I had returned to South Africa. I found that there was a group of colleagues who had started what is now known as a research development forum. These were only black members of staff who were unhappy about not getting the attention they desired as black women academics.
They were not qualifying for funding for conferences and research because of all the daft regulations that made a mockery of their lives as academics. I'm sure you are quite aware of this, about being published before and published in a recognised journal, that you have an existing project and so on. My colleagues decided to start their own research forum where they could encourage and support each other in the research process, in the writing of articles and so on.
It was not a university initiative but we liased with different departments and had meetings and really made quite an impact. Our white colleagues wanted to join and we told them that they are already publishing and are competent with the language. If they joined some of the women who were not quite conversant and competent would be made to feel insecure if they compared themselves to the white academics and not develop themselves.
It became a very serious issue. We were labelled racists and so on by the white women academics. I tried to explain that it's not about that. It's about black women wanting to feel comfortable first and then competing later, on an equal footing. Relationships of- course are terribly unequal and the white women didn't want to believe that. Eventually we had a representative on the Senate research committee meetings. I was the first rep then. So when they sat listening and perusing applications of people saying why this person hasn't fulfilled this or that, I would remind them about why I was there. I was representing a group of black women academics who wanted desperately to be at same level as their white counterparts and given the same opportunities. That worked so well that we now have people who are publishing for the first time. The women were now comfortable enough to present their work. I mean they were wonderful writers just scared of showing people that. Many of them enrolled for Masters degrees because most of the junior members didn't have masters degrees and so two huge workshops have been held and it has become an annual event now. I started last year encouraging black postgraduate students to enrol, have mentors and get published. So we had Honours and Masters students interested as well.