ABSTRACT
Academics have played a significant role in trivializing women's issues. Many feminists have pointed out that most academic fields are dominated by men without gender consciousness, so that women's issues are excluded or marginalized in academic study. This chapter demonstrates how the gender dimension can be reinstated in commonly researched phenomena - lone parents and new town problems. Traditional 'mainstream' social research is very critical of feminist research for being biased toward women and 'non-objective'. In Hong Kong, studies on women's problems are frequently dismissed as biased and unreliable. Many feminists have criticized the limitations of traditional social research. The major problem with traditional research is that it reproduces patriarchal domination through defining problems and developing solutions from a male perspective. Some feminists prefer to adopt qualitative approaches like in-depth ease studies, ethnography and ethnomethodology. Ethnographical methods emphasize the natural experience of everyday life as it is.
