A Feminist Research: Paradigmatic Foundations and Critical Debates

The foundation of feminist methodology is a critique of both natural and social sciences as being andocentric. The feminists believe that research questions, concepts, theories, methodologies and knowledge claims, which are supposed to be value – free/ gender – free, have produced a distorted and injustice understanding of both nature and social life. It is argued that the orthodox social science has omitted, or at its best sense, underestimated the women experiences taken place in their social world. Then, by the second half of twentieth century, feminism, whether as a critique, theoretical perspective based on critical paradigm, or as an independent paradigm emerged in contemporary social sciences, has raised a number of serious questions to challenge the basic principles and assumptions of traditional consensus-positivist paradigm. Accordingly, it has proposed its own alternative ontology, epistemology and methodology. Feminist perspective emphasizes that the knowledge is essentially local, situational, contextual and historical rather than universal and meta- contextual entity. This Paper aims to explore the paradigmatic foundations and critical debates in feminist research. In doing so, beginning first with a brief review on general perspective of feminism and its historical trend, it addresses the subapproaches of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint and feminist postmodernism. Then, it focuses on the paradigmatic foundations of feminism including that of ontology, epistemology and methodology respectively. The final part of paper deals with the feminist methodology, methodological critiques against positivist research and the principles and procedures of feminist research methods.