- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week I found more sources: [list] and did a close reading of the base document from the Family Research Council. I think that the article from Deborah Tudor might only be marginally useful: her discussion of neoliberalism’s relation to gender politics could be helpful but the great majority of the article is centered around dissecting the television show Mad Men (which I have not watched), and thus it contains a lot of less relevant content. Two more articles that I found this week do more to provide direct evidence of conservative views on gender, which will be helpful to back up my paper in the views of actual demographics of people, rather than just one extreme lobbying group. It will help me to analyze the degree to which the FRC speaks for people and the degree to which it seeks to provide views to those it influences. In reading both the piece put out by O’Leary and Spriggs for the FRC, and the SPLC’s webpage about the group, I feel the need to evaluate at least most of the scholars that O’Leary and Spriggs cite, to see whether they fit into the category of extremely biased, poorly done research, or whether they have issued statements asking for their work not to be misconstrued and twisted by the FRC. I could start that next week, but probably wouldn’t finish it. Given that issue, I feel a need to carefully examine the actual data that I use, which would of course already have been important, but should be made more clear.
I also want to read the book by Melinda Cooper, Family Values, and then see if any of the Cooper that we read in class fits in, because the last chapter felt promising, especially now that I know that the FRC has campaigned against stem cell research.
Annotated Bibliography
Kroska, Amy. 2002. “Does Gender Ideology Matter? Examining the Relationship Between Gender Ideology and Self- and Partner-Meanings”. Social Psychology Quarterly 65 (3): 248-265.
Kroska’s article seems to be both a good explanation of one sociological mode of looking at how gender can be discussed in its constructions, and some rudimentary data, although outdated, on conservative gender ideology. She separates out her data into political leanings, and it is probably fair to say that by the nature of conservatism, conservative views on gender did not change all that much in the fifteen or so years after the data was collected.
Sharp Penya, Lynette, Suzanne Fournier Macaluso, and Garry Bailey. 2016. “The Attitudes Towards Gender Roles in Conservative Christian Contexts Scale: A Psychometric Assessment”. Religious Research Association 58: 165-182.
This article contains a survey of conservative Christian gender roles. Having at first misread the abstract, I was under the impression that the sector of gender roles in the survey had to do with the home and family, but actually the article concerns views on gender roles in the Church. This could still potentially be interesting for me to look at, but is probably too off-topic to use.
Comments:
Thanks for this Jackie. It is great that you are broadening your scope beyond FRC and including sources that address ordinary people FRC claims to represent. You could also include more conservative organizations in order to strengthen the argument that you will make in your paper. Hopefully, Cooper’s book will help you sharpen your focus.
When you look at the scholars that O’Leary and Spriggs cite, make sure to check if these sources are published in peer-reviewed journals or by reputable presses ( if you go to journals’ webpages, you should see if that is the case).