ABSTRACT
How do I know what I know? I lean towards the intuitive, the personal, the visualization of ‘real life’ possibilities rather than the logical deconstruction of ideas. Maddeningly ‘female’ by social design, I am also competitive, ambitious, and prone to homicidal rashes whenever I hear the terms ‘biology’ and ‘destiny’ even remotely equated. It is due to this latter predisposition that I spent years primarily valuing the ‘objective’, the rational, the analytic, and strove to be successful in a world of logic, relegating my ‘gut’ to the digestion of food rather than ideas. I eventually entered a PhD program and was faced with the anticipatory unpleasantness of a much-dreaded dissertation. I was thus in a somewhat lugubrious state when I first approached Margot and asked her about a possible methodology to suit my thesis. Never mind that she charmed me with her spontaneity and warmth. And never mind (!) that an undercurrent of playfulness and good humor characterized our meetings. We discussed qualitative methodology, a new-fangled (in my eyes) approach to research that enabled the researcher to be creative, exploring new ideas that could take shape via intuition, vision, and personal experience, and to be analytical, so as to imbue that experience with meaning. While initially skeptical, on a deeper level, this research struck me as an excellent amalgam of rational ‘smarts’ and emotional intelligence. The two no longer appeared to be mutually exclusive or even particularly dichotomous. Suffice it to say: I was hooked.
