Methodological issues in feminist research

This paper outlines some of the issues raised for a man contemplating research on women. Many of the issues are serious but they only make such a research more difficult and not impossible. The present male researcher was abie to gain the cooperation of some individual women and the organisations that support women in prison by taking feminist methodological issues seriously in his study of ‘Black Women and the Criminal Justice System’. This paper concludes that feminist research has very useful insights which should be adopted by all researchers whether or not they are feminists especially because such insights often derive from more conventional approaches with which feminist writers do not fully agree.