When Frances Ennis visited the Toronto ALFA Centre in Toronto she met with some members of the women's group. Front, Moisley. Back from left, Christeen, Amele, Davie.

At each program, Frances and I would spend from four to eight hours talking With the two contact women about their community, their program, and their woman- positive activity. We often talked about the first workshop and lingering confusions, frustrations, or concerns. We also had a list of questions to review at each site. We asked about what had happened around the research so far, how students and staff had responded to the woman-positive activity, and how the contact women were able to document those responses. We explored what they were uncovering about their own responses.

We wondered how women fit the woman- positive activity and half day of research in with the rest of their lives. We wanted to know how their involvement had affected their personal, professional, and political lives. We often took part in the activity while we were there, getting to know students and administrators, observing the activity in its particular context. Finally, we worked on drafting a description of each community, program, and activity so we would have a "public" version of what was happening in this research.

2-4 The first interview

During this first visit, Frances and I taped an interview with each contact woman. We asked how she remembered finding out about the project and what she thought we wanted to do. We asked how she understood the idea of "woman-positive" at the beginning of the project and if that understanding had shifted. We discussed what had happened so far that she would describe as positive and what had happened that she would describe as less positive. Following up on some of the discussion at the first workshop, we asked how women would describe the relationship between woman-positive and feminist, and whether their involvement, or their program's involvement, would have been different if CCLOW had used the term "feminist" rather than "woman-positive."

We usually taped the interview at the end of a two-day visit. We used the interviews to discuss any leftover questions from the first workshop and to lead women into reflection on the response of others in their programs. Each woman received a copy of the transcript from her interview. She was invited to change anything she felt was confusing, to add thoughts that she had had since the visit, or to ask that information be masked or deleted. After these responses were integrated into the transcripts, they became part of our data.