CAN WE FIND OUT ABOUT GIRLS AND

B o Y s T O D A Y - - O R MUST WE SETTLE
FOR JUST TALKING ABOUT
OURSELVES? DILEMMAS OF A
FEMINIST, QUALITATIVE,
LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH PROJECT
JULIE McLEOD
Deakin University

LYN YATES
La Trobe University

Q: 'What does the postmodem ethnographer say to the interviewee?'

A: 'Enough about you--now let's talk about me' 1

This paper addresses the problems and experiences of engaging in a longitudinal,

qualitative project of empirical research while trying to be seriously reflexive
about what we are constructing as researchers. It is a project which is born in and
takes seriously those traditions of critical introspection that are the butt of the
opening joke, but it also takes seriously the dangers for educational researchers of
the self-absorption that the joke signals.
Our research, 'The 12 to 18 Project', began in 1993 and is studying students
in Victoria as they progress through secondary school: the students are now in
Year 10. 2 In this article, we consider the design of and findings from this project
in the light of broader contemporary methodological debates, and outline a
number of issues that have arisen in relation to the specific features of lhe project.
In much current intellectual work it has become mandatory to include
autobiographical reflections, foregrounding the position of the researcher as an
integral element of the research text. What are the political, epistemological and
ethical implications of this trend for conducting research, and for trying to build
up new knowledge and understandings about, in our case young, people in
Australia today? Must we end up 'just talking about ourselves'? Is all research
AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER VOLUME 24 No 3 DECEMBER 1997

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ultimately only ever autobiographical? Given the prevailing hyper-reflexivity

about both the constituting role of the researcher and the partiality and
contingency of any truths produced by research, is there any point in attempting
to undertake empirical research?
The 12 to 18 Project is based upon a six-year program of twice yearly
interviews with 25 key students and their friends across four different Victorian
schools: these interviews are audio- and video-taped (for details on the design of
the project see Yates & McLeod 1996, McLeod 1997c, Yates forthcoming). The
project aims to investigate developments--changes and continuities---over time
within individual students as well as between individuals and between groups of
students from different schools. We are addressing three issues in particular:
students' changing relationship with and attitudes to schooling; students' sense of
their futures and of their pasts; and patterns and processes in the construction of
gendered subjectivity.
We begin this paper with a discussion of why, after many years of doing other
kinds of research on gender and schooling, we have chosen to embark on a study
of this sort. We then discuss the theoretical and methodological dilemmas we
have recognised in designing and conducting this project, particularly those
involved in attempting to study the construction of gendered subjectivities. How,
in practice, do you construct a project to 'find out' about the construction of
gendered identity as girls and boys proceed through their secondary schooling?
We discuss some problems inherent in studying processes of gender of
construction through interviews; some revisions we have made to our initial
decisions; and some ongoing limitations with which we must work. We conclude
by offering some examples of 'findings' and of interpretations from work in
progress, to illustrate ways in which a project of this type can add to our
knowledge of the empirical world and, at the same time, take account of our own
constructing role as researchers.
The argument of this article is not that all the dilemmas we outline have been
or can be conclusively resolved: they are ongoing concerns for us. Our point is
that acknowledging these dilemmas need not always lead to a relentless
introspective focus or to a debilitating scepticism about the possibilities of
researching social relations.

Research backgrounds and rationale of the project

This section outlines our different research histories and explains how they
shaped the setting up of the 12 to 18 Project and determined the kinds of
questions and theoretical issues we are investigating. It also locates the genesis of
some our own 'truths' and assumptionsmabout gender, schooling, subjectivity.

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These formative truths also have ongoing effects in terms of what we are looking
for and the kinds of interpretations we develop. But this is not the same as 'only
talking about ourselves': the discussion of how this project relates to our other
research, the concerns we have about methods in the narrower sense, also reflect
some commitment to research as more than an introspective project.
For both of us, the decision to embark on this longitudinal project represented
a departure from other forms of research we have been and are doing in relation
to gender and education. Julie McLeod is interested in the history of ideas
shaping educational change, and in understanding the social, political and
historical context of educational practices and discourses. Working from an
interdisciplinary perspective, Julie has investigated developments in gender and
schooling in terms of their relationship to the history of feminist ideas and to
concurrent debates in feminist and social theory: these studies have largely drawn
on theoretical and documentary sources (McLeod 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997a
1997b, forthcoming). A key interest has been understanding the relationship
between schooling and subjectivity and in particular examining the impact that
feminist reforms have on the construction of gendered subjectivity. The 12 to 18
Project offers Julie another way of investigating these issues, and is designed to
enable fruitful dialogue between research and theoretical literature on gender,
schooling and subjectivity and the observations drawn from interviewing young
people who are in the process of 'growing up', and 'constructing their
subjectivity'.
Lyn Yates has been primarily working with documentary evidence (especially
policies), and at an overview level, with the research that had been done by
others. She has been particularly interested in the interactions of research, policy
and practice and in the ways in which empirical research had constructed and
answered questions about gender (e.g. Yates 1987a, 1987b, 1993a, 1993b, 1995,
1997, Yates & Leder 1995a, 1996). For Lyn, the 12 to 18 Project arises out of
and is set against an interest in gender research, policy and practice as a
social/cultural movement, and an interest in the different contributions and
constructions offered by different theories and methodologies. From a strategic
perspective, the project is designed to complement/add to/pose questions in
relation to two other styles of research that have been particularly listened to by
policy-makers: qualitative, non-longitudinal studies of particular girls and of
policy reception (e.g Kenway e t at 1993, Davies 1989, 1993, Gilbert & Taylor
1991, Alloway 1993), and large-scale data-bases by which national funding
bodies assess progress and needs in the gender area (Yates & Leder 1995a,
1996). 3
A qualitative, longitudinal, empirical study thus marks a significant shift in
our usual methodological approaches. It has been a deliberate move to explore

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empirically ideas about gender, subjectivity and schooling that we have

previously researched in other ways. As well as extending our theoretical
understandings about gender and schooling, the research also aims to add to our
knowledge about education and young people today: particularly their changing
relation to schooling and their thinking about their futures; and the ways
schooling and biographies interact in the construction of social inequalities.
Our research backgrounds and interests have also produced a tension that is at
the heart of this project. This tension arises from a dialogue between, on the one
hand, certain feminist and poststructuralist methodological cautions (about truth
and the role of the researcher), and, on the other, a desire to conduct qualitative
research that produces new insights and knowledge.

Macro-methodological issues
Our interest has specifically been in studying 'processes' over time--of
schooling, of identity formation--and in building up comparative understandings
of changes within individual student as well as comparisons between groups of
students from different schools and social and class backgrounds. The macro
problems we faced in setting up such a project concerned the postmodern
scepticism about empirical research which we alluded to earlier, and related
issues regarding' the kinds of questions we would ask, and the form of
relationship and interactions we would establish with the students in the study-and the pragmatic, epistemological and ethical effects of the decisions we would
take.
We are highly cognisant of feminist, poststructuralist and other injunctions
that the researcher be reflexive about their position, recognise their authority and
power, and foreground the role they play in the construction of the truths they are
apparently 'discovering'. These methodological cautions tell us that the story
produced by the researchers will be incomplete (since telling all stories is an
impossibility) and embedded with the researchers' own values and purposes, and
indeed, in its empirical dimensions, constructed by them. Moreover, we are
warned that the act of producing that story is now suspect as a way of taking over
the voices of others to produce an account which dominates those voices.
These have been important insights, and need to be addressed by all kinds of
research, not only feminist, qualitative research. They can, however, be
heightened concerns in interview-based research where the exchange between
researcher and researched is immediate and sometimes intimate. The concerns
are both epistemological and ethical. They relate both to the impact the presence
of the interviewer has on the responses, and to the demands participation in a
research project can place on participants. Yet, at the same time as recognising

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the validity of these cautions, we are concerned that intensive reflexivity can too
easily lead to a self-indulgent form of self-positioning and autobiographical
introspection. Here, the object of enquiry risks becoming the researchers' own
investments in and responses to the interview exchange.
The implications of these debates about truths, power and voices are thus
ongoing issues for our project. As we have argued elsewhere:
We see [these debates] as pointing to the need for reflexiveness about the
work that is done, and its reporting, but not as ones which specifically
undermine this form of empirical work as compared with other modes of
research. The ongoing construction of education in schools (by teachers,
by students, policy-makers and feminist reformers) and the ongoing
existence of inequalities in Australia, is not merely a chimera. In the
context of education research, then, neither the strategy of turning all
research into a project of sophisticated theoretical introspection about the
researcher, nor the strategy of seeing 'democratic', 'participatory' action
research as the only legitimate form of relationship with others in the
project, seems to us to warrant a privileged methodological position.
Forms of research that embrace some concern with an empirical quest for
new knowledge, and for further understanding, we would argue, are both
epistemologically and politically defensible. So too is an approach which
takes seriously the learning, knowledge, and interests and conditions of
work of the researchers and the different interests and conditions of the
participants in the study, and does not insist that these can always reduce
to a common participatory agenda (Yates & McLeod 1996, pp. 90-91).
With these concerns as background, we decided to undertake a longitudinal study
whose purpose was neither to work with the students in the project on issues of
concern to them (democratic, collaborative research), nor to contribute to action
research in their interests. Such approaches might disguise, but they do not
remove, the researcher's authority and its associated dangers. We decided, rather,
to adopt a style of research where the relationship between the researeIaer and the
researched is relatively formal and distant, where the emphasis is squarely on the
students' and not the researchers' responses to the questions. The interpersonal
interactions between interviewee and interviewer and the personality of the
interviewers are down-played. Of course, our presence is still felt and is part of
the exchange, and this insight remains central to our interpretations, but the style
of questioning and interaction is one which aims to be minimally interventionist.
Our mode of self-presentation is relatively formal, we are deliberately not
intimate and do not seek to cultivate 'chummy' relationships with the students.

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We have chosen to remain fairly anonymous and distantmadult women from the
university.
We have, then, intentionally not turned the interview situation into a series of
quasi-therapeutic confessional sessions where we demand that the interviewees
speak the truth about their inner selves, and reveal their private secrets to largely
unknown researchers. Now, in a project which aims, among other matters, to
investigate the construction of gendered subjectivity, this might appear as a rather
perverse strategy. For surely, it could be argued, encouraging students to speak
openly and freely about themselves would provide the sharpest and most
meaningful insights into gender identity and processes of subjectivity. Our initial
quarrel with this line of argument stemmed from both ethicalmsome of which we
have notedmand epistemological reasons.
First, if we follow the argument that all truths are partial and contingent, then
confessed truths are no more authentic or wholly truthful than any other truth,
despite the allure of immediacy (MacLure 1993). Second, as we have found,
interviewees do not simply 'tell the truth' about themselves--they do tell their
stories in relation to who is their audience, and their telling of their truths is
enmeshed in acts of self-presentation and construction. In other words, the
confessional mode does not necessarily offer unmediated access to some core or
central truth. Third, in studying gendered subjectivity we have been looking for
what Hariet Bjerrum Neilsen calls, 'unacknowledged gender' (Bjerrum Nielsen
1996, p. 11). That is, we are wanting to observe the 'construction of gender' even
when 'gender' is not a foregrounded issue for the participants and to see how this
process and identity take shape and form in answers to relatively unmarked
questions. We do not, therefore, regard intimate or confessional questions and
answers as providing the only legitimate kind of insight into gendered
subjectivity.
We saw the non-collaborative form of our project as ethically justifiable in
broad terms. Politically and strategically, we were concerned with addressing the
broader field of gender and schooling rather than with providing an intervention
in the lives of these students. We also regarded more collaborative forms of
research to be no less intrusive than non-collaborative forms in terms of the
relations it established between researcher and researched. As a consequence of
our non-reciprocal exchange with the students, we recognised the need not to
demand too much of them, and to limit intrusions on their privacy.
In terms of 'truths' and 'findings', we recognised as a starting point that any
study frames and constructs, that no study sees everything. But, given the
questions we are asking and our desire to contribute findings of some weight to
political and research discussions of gender and schooling, we wanted to
minimise the effect of the project itself in shaping the lives of the students. Now,

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of course, this is a matter of degree. Our, however understated, presence, the fact
they are being video-taped, their lives recordedmwhich they mostly really enjoythat they, and not other students, have been selected to participate in the study, all
has some impact on their lives. But we are trying to avoid the impact of the
project being an overt and integral part of what we are studying. 4

D i l e m m a s about m e t h o d s
The design of the project and our decisions about how we would negotiate our
relationships to the participants have, by this stagemfour years into the projectm
given rise to a range of ongoing problems. In this section, we shall discuss two
specific dilemmas: working out practicalities and relations with students; and
how to understand the process of the construction of gender through an
interview-based study.

i) Relations with students

An initial concern was how to keep students interested in coming along to
interviews over the length of their secondary schooling. For both ethical and
research purposes, we want their involvement to remain voluntary, so we were
conscious of not placing too much pressure or too many demands on the students.
These concerns, as well as our 'minimally interventionist' approach and
preference for relatively formal relations with students, influenced our decision to
limit the study to interviews and not to construct a project that required further
demands on their time or intrusions into their p r i v a c y ~ s u c h as classroom,
playground or out of school observations and interviews. At this stage, all the
students attend the interviews willingly, and most arrive with interest and
enthusiasm.
When asked their thoughts on participating in the interviews, several students
have said that they liked the way that 'we didn't get too personal' and didn't
probe and push them to say more about private things. However, a few students
have confided in us their strong unhappiness with home, school or friends, or told
as at length about other personal matters that are troubling them. Our~ 'contract'
with the students is that we will not tell others of anything they tell us, and this is
we think, along with the fact that we are only fleetingly there and are detached
from their ongoing school or family life, one of the reasons why they have
chosen to talk at length about personal issues. This raises some feminist and
ethical concerns about reciprocity: whether in some cases we should give advice
and not simply maintain our interested but detached interviewer status; whether
and in what ways the participants should have a role in speaking back to our
project, and in commenting on what we say about them. The decision, then, to be
minimally interventionist poses ongoing challenges.

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For other students, who have become very interested in the project, the
problem is not one of us demanding too much, but of whether we are allowing
them as much involvement as they would like. Several students are now asking to
watch the video-taped interviews of themselves. (We told them at the beginning
that we would give them an edited copy of their tape at the end of the project.)
Our initial decision was that students would be discouraged from watching the
earlier videos as we did not want their reactions to themselves when younger, or
to certain ways of previously answering questions, to influence the ways in which
they responded to questions in the present. Students do 'perform' in interviews
and often respond according to their perceived sense of what we as interviewers
want. Watching the videos could, we thought, lead them to deliberately
accentuate or minimise earlier aspects of their interview persona in current
interviews. As well, given that most of the interviews have been conducted with
students in small groupsmof usually three students--there were important
questions to consider about confidentiality and the wishes of other students
involved in the interviews. On the one hand, then, we are reluctant to allow
students access to the videos, but, on the other, we do not want to alienate them
from the project: and there are also issues again of reciprocity and what we can
offer the students for their involvement in the project.

ii) Investigating processes of gender construction via interviews

In examining 'processes of gender construction', we are looking at two
interrelated dimensions. The first is cultural discourses on gender and the second
is the development of gendered subjectivity within individual biographies. We
are looking at how these discourses and processes develop over time both within
individuals and between groups or types of students.
We have attempted in a variety of ways to get glimpses of the ways in which
gender is constructed. We are observing the ways in which cultural constructions
of gender are being negotiated by students in their answers to a range of
questions about, for example, school, family, friends or futures. In order to think
about biographical process over time, we also try to find other ways of asking
about personal identity, and this issue is one we have been grappling with and
revisiting as the project proceeds.
In our initial rounds of interviews, with the students in grade 6 and year 7, we
asked a number of questions which many other researchers have used to develop
interpretations about gender identity and gender difference: questions about how
students see themselves in the future, how they describe themselves and their
friends in the present. Our initial response to what we were hearing was that
gender differences were not as sharply defined as much previous research had
suggested. We heard young boys speaking openly and tenderly of their feelings
and fears, of the closeness of their friends, of the value of being kind and helpful

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to other boys; many examples of desires by girls to be sports stars, and to lead
independent and exciting lives (Yates & McLeod 1996, Yates 1997).
These various confirmations or disconfirmations of conventional gender
difference raised a number of questions for us: one possibility was that the forms
of gender difference are definitely changing and we were observing these
changes at a key transitional moment. A second possibility was that gender
difference, or the markers we are looking for, are not as salient in the junior years
of secondary school as they might be in the middle or senior years of schooling;
yet another possibility was that we are either not asking the fight questions or not
reading the answers to them subtly enough, that is, we are missing the cues and
the evidence of gende~ difference.
One response to this initial stage of the project was to reconsider the existing
literature on the construction of gender and its adequacy to what we were seeing
(e.g. Gilbert & Taylor 1991, Davies 1989, 1993, Walkerdine 1990, Butler 1990,
de Lauretis 1990, Riley 1988, Donald 1992, Kenway et al 1993). Here we felt
that piecing together that process is more complex than is often suggested by the
vast of amounts of feminist, educational and especially poststructural material
written on the topic of the construction of gender. Moreover, and more
specifically to the intentions of this project and its interest in process over time,
we could see that recognising familiar or unfamiliar instances of gender
difference or even anomalies and subversive quirks in the performance of gender,
is not the same as gaining insight into how gendered subjectivity is constructed
over time, or has effects as an ongoing process, or is experienced, understood,
inhabited and negotiated by girls and boys withirt~heir individual biographies.
Another response was to continue reassessing the questions we were asking;
to look for ways in which we might hear more about biography, process and
gender. For exampl e , one area we are exploring is students' memories of
themselves when very young and of their primary s c h o o l i n g u w h a t they
remember as significant about their childhood and early schooling, and how they
recollect and re-present themselves then as compared to now. We have also asked
students to bring in a favourite photograph of themselves and to talk about what
is important about the photo and how they describe themselves in it. Students
have been asked to describe themselves to a stranger, for friends to describe
them, for them to envisage themselves at 18, then at 25, and to consider What
they would like to be compared to what they think they will end up being.
Answers to these and other questions will, over the length of the study, help us to
build up a picture of how students construct, negotiate and present their gendered
subjectivity.
We have also begun to ask whether our 'minimally interventionist'
methodology is in fact an appropriate one for the questions we are asking about

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gender and subjectivity. In response to these self-critical queries we have

conducted some less structured interviews with individual students, and in
interviews have become more adept at pursuing issues which students raise
obliquely. But we are also conscious of our initial concerns about privacy, and
our initial description of this project to the students and their parents. In setting
up the project in the way that we did (as a project firmly based in education), we
accepted limits on how extensively we could pursue issues of sexuality or
relationships in the home. But always these decisions and emphases are matters
of degree, with not clearly specifiable boundaries. We have argued that adopting
more intimate and probing strategies alone does not solve the problem of how to
read and analyse the process of the construction of gender, but equally we have to
recognise the limits of what we ourselves are pursuing and working with. 5
We are dealing then with the implications of a project which investigates
'processes' and changes within individuals over time but which also has limited
strategies. It is confined to interview evidence; and within that to interviews
based on a particular type of relationship and on certain styles of questions and
not others. While we recognise these limitations, we also see the strengths of a
longitudinal study in being able to observe negotiations of gender, and the
process of subjectification over time. At this stage, we can see patterns and
recurring pre-occupations and ways of thinking in individuals, and we are
building up a strong and nuanced sense of the investments students have in
particular identities and of the complex of factors--class, regional location,
ethnicity, type of schooling, family backgroundmwhich along with gender shape
their subjectivities (McLeod 1997c, Yates & McLeod 1996). Moreover, a
longitudinal study enables us to observemmany times and in many different
waysmthe intersection of cultural discourses on gender with the idiosyncratic
history of individual biographies. This kind of study also points to the tensions
and unpredictable outcomes in these intersections and underlines, as Harriet
Bjerrum Nielsen and Monica Rudberg have argued, that 'psychological life
stories and cultural discourses are not reducible to one another (1995 p. 86, for
further discussion see McLeod 1997c).

'Reading our findings'--some examples

How, then, are we to read interview exchanges which acknowledge the
specificity of the context in which a particular answer is given; that acknowledge
the 'arbitrariness' of our twice-a-year contact with the students; and yet which
makes claims to some significance beyond the reporting of fleeting and random
incidents? In this final section of the paper we take some examples from work in
progress.

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Here we think it is possible to say something about 'the construction of

gender' as it is being worked out by these young people today. The comments
made by the girls and boys in response to particular questions and interview
situations give some qualitative insights as to how discourses of gender have
changed or not changed in past decades of feminist reform, and show how gender
is not a unitary phenomenon. Answers to quite ordinary questions give some
access to the complex of values, concerns, public agendas which are being put
together in particular ways by young people today.

Examp le 1:
In our interviews when the young people were in their first year of secondary
school, we asked them 'What do you think you will be doing when you are 25?'
and then 'What would you like to be doing then?' At a simple level, we are
laying the foundations here for some comparisons we want to consider in the
longitudinal project:, comparisons over time (how do individuals differently
construct their futures as they proceed through secondary schooling? what
generalities exist by age? is there something common about the types of
responses given at the beginning of secondary school as compared with midway
through this as compared with in the final years?); comparisons according to
class or ethnicity or school attended; and comparisons between gifts and boys
both as a group and within those other categories. Positivist research, paper and
pen surveys, might set up similar questions. But we think that the quality and
detail and nuances Of what is being said in the interview situation differently
constitute 'findings' that are of some interest.
In one example, a girl from a wealthy background talked at length about how
she would like to be a part-time barrister and a part-time journalist, and travel the
world, and take a lot of photographs. And then she looked at us and paused,
presumably assessing her audience and what she thought we would value, and
began to talk about how she would really also love to go over to Somalia and
spend time helping the people there.
A number of things seemed to us interesting about this exchange. First, in
common with most of the other children of this age, wealthy and poor, urban and
rural, this answer is marked by an air of dreams and fantasies rather than the
strategic and rationalistic career planning that vocational educational strategies
often assume. But, in common with other girls and boys from wealthy and
professional backgrounds, the language used here shows a finer knowledge of
distinctions within the professions of choice: 'barrister' rather than the generic
'lawyer'.
Secondly, the length and the fluidity of the response as well as the pause and
redirection during the interview (again considered against other interviews with

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students from like and very different backgrounds) shows a self- awareness and
ease about the presentation of self to strangers. Students from the provincial area
seemed much less to be self-consciously monitoring and modifying the face they
presented to the public world.
Thirdly, the response of the would-be barrister/journalist/charity-worker
points to some continuing strands and conflicts in the construction of gender for
middle-class girls. As Carol Gilligan (Gilligan et al 1990) found in her study of
privileged girls in Boston, here we see echoes of the strain both to achieve the
demands of capitalism and individual achievement, but also not to be found
wanting in one's feminine responsibility to care for others.
That this is a class-related strain for those who see the world as open to them,
and limited only by their own ambitions and hard-work, canbe seen in contrast
with an answer from another girl in our study to the same set of questions.
[Int] What do you think your life will be like when you leave school?
Do you think about that much?
(silence ... all three girls shaketheir heads)
Int] What would you like to be doing Melanie? [names are changed]
[Ist girl] Maybe babysitting ... and play for Australia in netball.
[2nd girl] Babysitting.
[3rd girl] Same.
[Ins] What about when you're 25. Any ideas?
[lst girl] (shakes her head)
[2nd girl] (taking on a serious expression) Help look after Brendan when
he has asthma.

[...]
[Int] What about if you could have a wish and do anything you really
liked. What would you like to do when you're 2S?
[2nd girl] Live with sister--the oldest one---[...] in (nearest larger town)
[3rd girl] (who has virtually said nothing to this point in the interview)
Get a job.
In this interview, the monosyllabic responses to our questions, the downcast eyes
and nervousness of the girls, all formed a contrast to the ease and fluency with
which the earlier girl and her friends presented themselves. As researchers, we
were using much the same 'methods' in each interview, but the situation was not

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35

constructed identically by those who had agreed to take part. In both cases,
however, the responses of the girls show the intertwining of thinking about
'independence' and caring, but with a differently constructed set of possibilities.
A girl [2nd girl in interview] who already seems to bear considerable
responsibility for her younger twin sister [3rd girl] and her younger brother, and
who is more capable and vocal than her sister throughout the interview, is
nevertheless so constrained by the sense of her gendered responsibility that she
has trouble envisaging any future that is different from the present, and, even, as
a fantasy, only extrapolates a slightly less burdensome form of existing life
within the family. Her quiet sister doesn't visualise any particular future for
herself in response to questions about what she would like to do, or what she is
likely to do when she is older. It is only when put in terms of fantasy ('if you
could have any wish') that she produces the poignant, unspecific, unfilled-in
thought about the public world, 'get a job'.

Example 2:
At the time we were doing a round of interviews with the students in year 8
(when they were around 13 or 14 years old), there had been a wave of articles in
the press about young girls and anorexia, and worries about young girls in
primary schools going on diets. We asked the students in the study what they
thought of this. We were interviewing them in friendship groups of three, and in
all except one case, the friends they selected were of the same sex as themselves.
So the discussion reported here arises from an interview setting where the
students are among same-sex peers, and are being interviewed and video-taped
by two women.
In almost all cases, both verbally in their tone of voice and gesturing, girls
and boys responded by saying that they thought the girls who did such dieting
were 'stupid'. These responses of course are being given to a question by us, in a
situation in which students might well construe their dismissiveness and scorn for
girls who engaged in such practices as the response most likely to draw the
researchers' approval. But seeing the answer here as a 'construction' within a
particular context by no means rules out its interest as an insight into;discourses
of gender as they are taken up today.
What the students know about us is that we are doing a project at four schools
over the years of secondary school and asking questions about what is going on
in their schooling and out of school time, and also about how they think about
themselves, their schooling and their future. They see us as 'researchers from the
university' and in some cases that has a fairly detailed meaning, and in other
cases merely makes us a category of relatively unknown adult (but an adult
operating in a schooling context). So when they say to us that girls who diet are

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McLEOD AND YATES

'stupid', they are reflecting back to us a public face of what they interpret as
formally desirable: that is, that appearance should not matter, and should
certainly not be taken up in a way that endangers 'health'. The situation reminded
us of the comments made by Judith Williamson (1980/81) when she was
dismayed that her attempt to teach about media messages about gender was being
interpreted in practice as a message about how women are stupidly duped by the
media. As Susan Bordo (1993) has more recently pointed out, understanding the
dominance of cultural images relating to slender appearance, does not make the
cultural effects of those dominant images cease to exist.
Some extracts here show the workings of discourses of gender in which the
effects of what is culturally desirable are noted but disowned, or seen as the result
of individual choice and wilfulness.

i)
[Int] Is body image important to you, Ricky?
[Ricky] No, if they say something to you, you just don't listen, just ignore
them.

[Int] Is it different for girls?

[Ricky] Yeah, they have to like ... if they're fat or something they have to
go on a diet, whereas males wouldn't really care. They don't really care
how they look. Like if they were really fat or something, they'd have to
try and go on a diet or something or exercise, but most males are just
normal [sic].
[2nd boy] Some of the girls around our age, they think they're fat when
they' re not even fat, they' re just like...
[3rd boy] Yeah
[2nd boy] They just want to look perfect for all the boys, like to show off
or something
[Ricky] Yeah, when the boys don't really even want ... or care ...

[Int] Do you think girls being skinny is important for boys?

[Ricky] Not really
[2nd boy] Like, if you want a girlfriend, sometimes you'll sort of say to
your mates, 'oh look at her, she's a babe, she looks good'. We'd like a girl
to look good, but it really doesn't matter about that I suppose like, as long
as their personality's OK, like. It doesn't matter what they look like.

CAN WE FIND OUT ABOUT

GIRLS

AND BOYS TODAY

ii)
[boy] I'm losing weight now, because I was born fat, and people then
called me fatso, and I got sick and tired of it, and I' ve just been eating the
right foods, and walking to school every day

(later in the same interview)

[Int] (on diets) Is it different for girls compared with boys?
(All three boys adopt sneering tones compared with their earlier
comments about themselves)
[ 1st boy] They worry if they'll get fat
[2nd boy] It's more worrying for them than what boys are, because they,
because we really don't care ...
[3rd boy] Some are skinny, and they don't want to eat ... and go on these
really strict diets because they're fat, and everyone calls them fat ...
[2nd boy] and they're really skinny really
[ 1st boy] Sometimes all they have for lunch is like a salada biscuit, and
that'd kill me [...]
[ 1st boy]For models it's more important
[2nd boy] The girls look at these magazines, and they want to be like the
models. They cut down and they get sick on it too.

iii)
[girl] ... no-one really diets at school ... you get a bit of exercise, and
noone's overweight in our class; everyone's sort of different but no-one's
really overweight ... and no-one really cares
(earlier in same interview)

[Int] Is body image important to girls and boys of your age?

[girl] Yeah ... um ... well, it sort of depends really, because, everyone
says it doesn't matter what you look like, but it does. Because" all the
popular people are just the most beautiful people you've ever seen, all
gorgeous. [...] I think body image is very important.

iv)
[girl] None of our group diet ... I mean they watch what they eat, but they
don't diet.

37

38

McLEOD

AND YATES

In relation to discourses of gender today, one line of feminist work, the concern
that women should aspire to and be judged by matters other than how they look,
is widely known, and it has certainly led to some changes in the aspirations and
career patterns of girls and women, including those in our study. But it is largely
read, as Bordo has indicated, as if this is something that can be easily resisted on
an individual basis. And it feeds an idea that it is acceptable to ridicule girls and
women who succumb to such concerns. Some consequences of this are that some
aspects of girls' concerns (the magazines they read, which are filled with diets
and other advice about appearance) and of the conversations they have with their
friends are deemed shameful in the public discourse of schooling (see Turnbull
1993); that both girls and boys tend to separate their 'formal' thinking about
gender from other aspects of their gendered practices; and that boys are able to
not see their own practices as part of the same processes and disapproval as has
been associated with the critique of traditional femininity.
So in relation to some specific 'moments' of our study, students respond to
particular questions and say particular things. They might have said other things
if we had asked other questions or if other people had asked those questions. But
the particular moments and comments are not random and meaningless. Read in
dialogue with other research, and compared with other responses within the same
interviews, or over time, or within this study, we present an interpretation which
we believe does have some substance. The examples suggest that the
'construction of gender' is being read by these adolescent girls and boys as a
Story about stupid girls being duped; that, for girls the issue is not a unitary story,
but one in which general understandings do not neatly connect with
understanding about themselves; and that language and discourse make it
possible for boys to talk about their own practices as not part of this issue of
gender and cultural constructions. 6

Conclusion
In this paper, we have outlined some of the methodological dilemmas we have
encountered in conducting a qualitative, longitudinal study of secondary students.
These dilemmas have ethical, epistemological and pragmatic implications, and
they were discussed in terms of both macro or foundational methodological
issues, as well as questions and problems specific to our project. We argued,
however, that being sensitive to these various dilemmas, acknowledging their
validity and cautions, and integrating them within the design, carrying out and
interpretation of the research does not preclude the possibility of conducting
empirical research that builds new knowledge and understandings, about, in this
instance, young girls and boys and schooling today. The second half of the paper

CAN WE FIND OUT ABOUT

GIRLS

39

AND BOYS TODAY

e l a b o r a t e d s o m e o f our c o n c e r n s about the strategies for i n v e s t i g a t i n g p r o c e s s e s

o f g e n d e r c o n s t r u c t i o n , and p r o v i d e d some e x a m p l e s o f h o w we h a v e b e g u n to
r e a d our findings a b o u t the w a y in w h i c h girls and b o y s are w o r k i n g out a n d
e n a c t i n g the construction o f gender.

Notes
1

A recent joke doing the rounds of research conferences in the USA and in Australia.

The 12-18 Educational Research Project received a Small Grant from the Australian Research
Council for the years 1994 and 1995; and was awarded a three year ARC Large Grant for
19961998.

In 1995, in conjunction with Gilah Leder of La Trobe University, and in association with
Margaret Batten, Lyn Robinson and Mike Long of ACER, Lyn Yates directed a project to review
and overview national data-bases related to 'student pathways' and 'gender equity' (Yates &
Leder, 1995a. 1996). This study was funded by the ACT Department of Education and sponsored
by the Gender Equity Task Force of the Ministenal Council on Education Employment Training
and Youth Affairs. The study drew attention to ways in which the categories construct particular
ways of seeing 'ethnicity' or 'disability' and their gendered pathways and to ways in which the
longitudinal, quantitative data-bases provide very crude assessments of any effects of educational
and social change in relation to gender (because the nature of the questions and the form in
which answers must be recorded and then interpreted does not allow adequate contextual
readings).

By comparison, in the British documentary series'7 Up'. participants are shown previous videos
of themselves before they are interviewed, and in the interviews they comment and reflect on
themselves at other stages in their lives. The participants also speak of the major impact that
involvement in the project has had on their lives, and this has not always had a happy or
positively transformative effect.

In recent seminar and conference papers on the 12-18 Project some audience members have
raised the issue of whether this approach really silences sexuality as part of the construction of
gender: this is a legitimate concern, and it signals some of the limitations of our approach.

See Burns 1993: reform policies too are schizophrenic~gender is anti-anorexia, but
health/physical education goes in a different direction. And in relation to our methodology, it is
interesting that different types of questions do raise a.rather different way of talking about gender
and body image.

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