ABSTRACT
As Gabriele Griffin observes, it is necessary to make the practices of research and its processes transparent. In this chapter, the methodological basis of my empirical research and the impact of this on the methods I chose with which to explore women’s experiences of their adult children leaving home are discussed. Caroline Ramazanoğlu and Janet Holland highlight the need to distinguish between the two terms method and methodology:
Thus, the reasons why particular methods are chosen and how they are applied in social science research is indicative of the researcher’s ontological and epistemological standpoint. As Mary Maynard (1994: 23) succinctly states: ‘all feminist work is theoretically grounded’. To further clarify my own research practices, I add here that my background in gender studies, with its inherent interdisciplinarity, heavily informed the decisions I made in the design of the research and the data analysis.
