Feminist researcher Patti Lather (1991) suggests four validation methods. Triangulation, to establish the trustworthiness of the data; systematized reflexivity, to ensure construct validity; recycling description, analysis, and conclusions to interviewees for face validity; and possible degrees of catalytic validity.

Triangulation: Researchers are expected to use as many different methods as possible to collect information. Working from as many locations as possible, they need to cross-check and verify the information they record. In this research project, the trustworthiness of our data was verified in many different ways. We had twelve different research sites with twenty-four different women involved in collecting information and reflecting on it first with their research partners and then with other women at the national workshops. We included both structured interviews and unstructured discussions with the two coordinating researchers. At the second and third workshops we planned simultaneous activities - sometimes with the same agenda, sometimes with different agendas - to see if women would come to similar conclusions. They did, as is demonstrated in some detail later in his book.

Systematized reflexivity: Researchers are expected to build in systematic ways to reflect on and critically question their own practices during the research. The research design should ensure that they are not imposing their own interpretations when they develop categories or analyses. Lather interprets many researchers' desire to have complete consensus as a "lust for authoritative accounts."(p.85) Authoritative accounts carry the weight of traditional expertise and are neither diverse nor contradictory. For example, authoritative accounts have been used for centuries to erase women's experience whenever it contradicts or adds nongeneralizable complexity to a standard (white, heterosexual, educated) male experience. To counteract this desire to generalize past the point of erasure, researchers must "construct research designs that demand a vigorous self- reflexivity".(p.66)

Lather suggests several very useful questions which can help researchers question their own practice, to restrain our desire for non-complex authoritative accounts. For example,

• Did I impose order and structure, or did I encourage ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity?

• What has been muted, repressed, or unheard? Did I silence the resistant voices?

• Have I turned my own voice into an authority in my text?

In our research, ongoing feedback from all the women involved ensured that we recognized and recorded diverse voices. Through the collaborative analysis and recommendation process, women raised their particular concerns. At times, some Women felt the workshop agendas and documentation process included too much opportunity for input and discussion. Occasionally, some women expressed concern that the coordinating researchers' unwillingness to move forward without everyone's input wasted precious time or resulted in watered down documentation.