Integrated methods: multi-method research, action research and feminist legal research

1. Multi-method legal research

Nature. Multi-method (or mixed-method) research uses more than one method in the same study, typically combining doctrinal analysis with empirical work, or quantitative with qualitative data, so that the weakness of each is offset by the strength of another. It rests on the pragmatic view that the research question, not loyalty to one method, should decide how data are gathered.

Features.

• Triangulation. Norman Denzin distinguished data triangulation (several sources), investigator triangulation (several researchers), theory triangulation (several theoretical perspectives) and methodological triangulation (several methods). Agreement across them strengthens a finding; disagreement is itself a finding to be explained.
• Designs. Convergent (quantitative and qualitative data gathered at the same time and compared); explanatory sequential (a survey first, then interviews to explain its results); exploratory sequential (interviews or observation first, to build the instrument for a later survey).
• Integration. The methods are connected at the design, analysis or interpretation stage, not merely placed side by side.

Procedure. Frame the research question; decide which parts need doctrinal, quantitative or qualitative answers; choose the design and the order of the methods; collect and analyse each kind of data by its own standards; integrate the results; and report how the methods were combined and why.

An example. A study of the working of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 might analyse the Act and the case law (doctrinal), count applications, orders and compliance from court records (quantitative), and interview women, protection officers and lawyers on why applications fail (qualitative).

Potentiality and problems. It suits the questions socio-legal research cares most about: whether law works, and why. Its problems are cost, time, the skills it demands of one researcher, and the risk that the methods are used side by side without true integration.

2. Action research in law

Nature. Action research is research carried out in the course of trying to change a practice, by or with the people involved, so that the research and the change inform each other. The term is associated with Kurt Lewin, whose 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems” described a spiral of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action. Later writers (Kemmis and McTaggart) described the cycle as plan, act, observe, reflect, repeated. Participatory action research, developed by Orlando Fals-Borda in Latin America and others, makes the affected community a co-researcher rather than the object of study.

Features. It is practical (aimed at a change), participatory, cyclical, located in a particular setting, and reflexive (the researcher is part of what is studied). Its knowledge is local and tested in action.

In law.

• A legal aid clinic that records why undertrials in a district prison are not released, intervenes (bail applications, plea for review by the undertrial review committee), measures the result and revises its approach.
• A legal literacy campaign that tests which methods (camps, street plays, para-legal volunteers) actually lead people to use legal services.
• A court or police reform pilot run with the institution, evaluated and redesigned.
• Teaching: a law teacher who tries a new method, assesses its effect on learning and revises it is doing action research on legal education.

Criticism. Its findings are hard to generalise; the researcher’s commitment to the change may bias the evaluation; and participation can be nominal. Answers: careful records, an outside evaluator, and honesty about the limits of the claim.

3. The methodology of feminist legal research

Feminist legal research is not one method but a set of questions and commitments that can be used with doctrinal, empirical or philosophical methods. Its starting point is that law, presented as neutral, has often been made from a male perspective, and that this can be shown and changed.

Katharine Bartlett’s three methods (“Feminist Legal Methods”, Harvard Law Review, 1990):

1. Asking the woman question — how does this rule affect women; have women’s experiences been left out; is a supposedly neutral rule in fact gendered?
2. Feminist practical reasoning — attention to the particular context and to the perspectives of those excluded, rather than reasoning only from general rules.
3. Consciousness-raising — learning from shared personal experience, which reveals patterns that individual cases hide.

Other ideas the method uses: Catharine MacKinnon’s dominance approach (the question is power, not difference); Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care (In a Different Voice, 1982); standpoint epistemology (Sandra Harding), which holds that research beginning from the lives of the marginalised can see more of the social order; and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality (1989), which shows that discrimination on grounds of sex combined with caste, race or class cannot be understood by looking at each ground separately.

Techniques. Gender-disaggregated data; interviews and life histories of women litigants; reading judgments for the assumptions they make about women (consent, character, “normal” behaviour); rewriting judgments, as the Feminist Judgments Project in England did in 2010; reflexivity about the researcher’s own position.

Indian illustrations.

• The Mathura case, Tuka Ram v. State of Maharashtra, 1978 INSC 178, read by four law teachers in their 1979 open letter for its assumptions about consent: feminist doctrinal critique leading to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1983.
• Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, 1997 INSC 604, which arose from the gang rape of a social worker and used CEDAW to fill a gap in domestic law.
• Anuj Garg v. Hotel Association of India, 2007 INSC 1242, which struck down a ban on women working in bars and warned against protective laws that rest on stereotypes.
• Joseph Shine v. Union of India, 2018 INSC 898, which struck down the adultery offence as treating the wife as the husband’s property.
• Scholarship: Flavia Agnes on personal law and women’s rights, Ratna Kapur (Erotic Justice, 2005) on the limits of rights-based feminism, Pratiksha Baxi on rape trials.

How this is examined

Expect “Multi-method legal research: nature, features, procedure and potentiality”, “Action research in law” or “Methodology of feminist legal research”. For multi-method research, use triangulation and the three designs with a worked example. For action research, Lewin’s cycle and a legal aid example. For feminist research, Bartlett’s three methods, standpoint and intersectionality, and two or three Indian cases.