ABSTRACT
Feminist participatory methodology attempts to ‘shift the centre’ of knowledge making, by seeking out subordinated, often unintentionally overlooked perspectives, to provoke critical analyses of power distribution (Collins, 1998; Dodson, Piatelli, & Schmalzbauer, 2007). This study was guided by the principles of feminist participatory inquiry to explore how women living in poverty experience consumption-related strain. To achieve this, the research design adopted a multimethod, qualitative approach to data collection in the form of focus groups and in-depth interviews. Methodologically, stress researchers traditionally engage a topdown or nomothetic approach to research (Allport, 1954; Fine, 1985) through the use of stress inventories, where participants are asked to rank how stressful each episode is from a predetermined list of events. These events are usually selected in an arbitrary manner and of those selected, can disproportionally represent events more likely to occur to some social groups than others (Aneshensel, 1992). Chronic or more persistent issues are often omitted from quantitative investigations. The aim of this study was to foreground the lived experience of stress for a diverse group of women living in diverse poverty contexts, therefore it was important that this examination of stress was refocused along more experiential lines and moved away from what feminist researchers view as, detached inquiry or notions of objectivity, which can serve to reify existing hierarchies and oppression.
