Researching Empowerment: On Methodological Innovations, Pitfalls and Challenges

This paper presented at ‘Pathways: What are we Learning?’ conference held in Cairo from 20-24 January 2009, reflects on the linguistic and methodological challenges of researching aspects of women’s empowerment in Ghana. It shows how by using both surveys and indepth interviews across three generations of women, researchers were able to highlight how various factors such as education changed in significance over time. The research process also drew attention to importance of selecting the right words to use during the planning stages in order to avoid biasing responses, for instance the words for ’empowerment’ and ’empowering’ had different significance in terms of strength and type.