Delphy pointed out that housework is carried out under very different social relations to those within the capitalist mode of production. The worker under capitalism exchanges a fixed amount of labour for a wage, but within the domestic mode of production there is no such exchange. The services a wife provides for her husband are not fixed or finite. A wife does not receive wages for her labour and she cannot change her husband in the way that workers can change their employers. These specific economic relations are the basis of what Delphy calls the ‘domestic mode of production’ within which the services produced by women are appropriated by men.
However, to accept Delphy’s work and my hypothesis assumes that the modern family is not symmetrical. My second source is drawn from Oakley’s research into housework in 1974. This feminist study revealed that few men had a high level of participation in housework and childcare. Only 15% of marriages did men have high level of participation in housework, and in childcare only 25%. . Oakley stated that husbands that ‘helped’ their wives still left the majority of the jobs for wives to do. Oakley claims “ being your own boss imposes the obligation to see that the housework gets done. The responsibility for the housework is the wife’s alone and the failure to do it may have serious consequences…the wrath of the husbands or the ill health of the children. This indicates that females have a degree of autonomy within the home but real power still resides with the male. Therfeore symmetry is not yet an assurity due to this form of inequality in the household.
Main Research Method and Reasons
The principal research method I will use here will be unstructured interviews within the more general method of random sampling by manual selection. This is the simplest way to select a large sample. By using random sampling I will ensure that any couple had an equal chance of being chosen to take part in the research. I will use this approach because I want my research to be more representative of the population. I hope that this will give my research more credibility and identify and give explanation for any trends found in my sample.
My sample will consist of thirty different couples, which will be chosen from a local electoral register. This will allow me to select a sample that is more proportionate to the population as a whole, which is vital to my research. I will also give each male and female an open questionnaire that will offer the opportunity to operationalize on the concept of patriarchy. But in order to do this, it will have to be essential to identify the skills and knowledge, which constitute patriarchy in the family sense. Therefore the frame questions of the interviews will be undertaken carefully. Once completed, I will be able to draw clear comparisons between the couples and make a general set of conclusions.
The unstructured interview will allow the respondents to respond in their own words, this will provide a more in-depth picture on their view of the family. This will also allow me to follow up issues arising in the course of the interview. The key disadvantage is that there will not be a guarantee of great levels of comparability between interviews within my research project. It is possible of two or more interviews to start of at the same point but to go off in different directions, making comparison difficult if not impossible. This lack similarity undermines the reliability of my approach.
Once the interviews have been completed I will then run a pilot in order to ensure that this is comprehensible to all my respondents. This will be particularly important in ensuring that the questions were clear and that there are no uncertainties over the questions relating to patriarchy and the family. Obviously, if problems do materialize then I will have the opportunity to resolve these prior to running my final interview.
Potential Problems
The problem is that these masses of information may neither be valid or reliable; the responses given may not be accurate and may not reflect real behavior. Respondents may lie, may forget, they may lack the information required. Interviewees may also be influenced by my presence. The answers given may be influenced by the way interviewees define the situation. A further problem with unstructured interviews is that there is more oppurtunity for me (without realising it) to direct the interviewee towards giving certain responses. Conciously or unconciously, respondents might give the sort of answers they believe I want to hear rather than saying what they truly believe. It can never be totally eliminated from the interview research simply because interviews are interaction situations.
In order to conduct an interview successfully and interpret the responses correctly, I must also be aware of the social conventions of the interviewees. Being that unstructured interviews are a source of qualitative data and tend to be discriptive, this can make it difficult to organise. The collection of qualitative data tends to be more time-consuming than the collection of quantitative data since I will be looking for a much greater depth of information. There may also be certain problems with the sample that chose and the way I chose it. Random sampling is not ideal. It relies on statistical probability to ensure the representativeness of the sample.
There is also the possibility of Hawthorne effect, which can render the results of the research worthless; it is necessary that the subjects of the research are unaware that the experiment is actually taking place. This, however, raises a further problem: the morality of conducting experiments on people without their consent.
