Citation

Guimaraes E. Fem. Psychol. 2007; 17(2): 149-161.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0959353507076547

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article focuses on the ethics of my own conduct during the course of recording interactions between women and the police to whom they were reporting abuse in a women's police station in Brazil. Using conversation analysis I explore how my own research practice changed over the course of the data collection phase. I began with a commitment to 'objectivity' and abandoned that as I increasingly felt a debt to women who let me record their interactions, learnt progressively more about police work, and felt a moral responsibility as a feminist to intervene if I thought I could help women. I present one data extract from my first day in the police station and show how I try to disengage from a woman's attempts to elicit my involvement in her case. Then I show one data extract from my last day in the police station, in which I actively intervene in the situation, giving advice to a woman about what should be included in the police report. My research contributes to other work on the ethics of feminist research method in being based on fine-grained analysis of actually recorded (rather than remembered) interactions.