Feminist Research Traditions in Health Psychology: Breast Cancer Research

Abstract

This article discusses three key traditions of feminist research: positivist empiricist, experiential and discursive. It explores the ways in which each is used in developing understandings of women’s health and improving health care services, focusing in particular on breast cancer research and activism, including my own work in this area. It is argued that all three research traditions are important for advancing feminist political goals: positivist empiricism enables us to expose the biases of mainstream health research and to develop better (i.e. more objective) research; experiential approaches enable us to engage with the diversity of women’s subjective experiences of health and health care; and discursive research enables us to explore issues related to identity management, accountability of conduct and the moral order of social life surrounding health and illness.