In other words, both the researchers and the subjects have particular epistemologies - particular ways of knowing things. Some of that knowledge comes out of experience. Some of it comes out of access to different kinds of information. Some of it comes out of affiliation with particular groups or organizations. What is important in feminist research is that we recognize some central principles. For Liz Stanley (1990) those principles include several important considerations:

• There is a social relationship between the researcher and the subjects that operates on many levels.

• Emotion is an important component of the research experience.

• The researcher's intellectual autobiography, the books she has read and the theories she subscribes to, will affect the research process.

• The researcher and the subjects will have different realities and understandings of the same situations.

• The research process and the final production of documents will be influenced by the different kinds of power held by each of the participants.

If we agree that the creation of knowledge is influenced by these different conditions, then we need a research design that begins from the position of women located in their everyday lives, a position of women "actively constructing, as well as interpreting, the social processes and social relations which constitute their everyday realities." (Stanley, 1990, p. 34)

There is a twenty-five year history of sociological research that begins with people's everyday lives. It has a theoretical base, beginning in 1967 with the concept of "grounded theory." Two sociologists, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, wrote about research as a way of generating theory rather than as a way of testing theory. Instead of having a hypothesis and research design rigidly in place before collecting data, the researchers would go into the research setting without preconceived ideas about what might happen. Immersing themselves in the ordinary events of the setting, the participant observers would work with the research subjects to explore tensions between their experience and the researchers' analysis of what was happening.

Fifteen years after Glaser and Strauss developed their concept of grounded theory, Robert Owens (1982) outlined some of the major differences that had developed between what he called the rationalistic and naturalistic paradigms. Central to these was the qualitative-phenomenological hypothesis which states that we have to know how people in a research situation interpret their own experience - how they use not only their thoughts, but their feelings, values, perceptions, and actions - to understand what is happening with them. If we enter into a research setting without having the perspective of those who live there, then we will not gain knowledge that is of any real use.