Dealing with Difference: Researching Health Beliefs and Behaviours of British Asian Mothers

Contemporary sociology is faced by a central problem of conceptualising and rendering empirically operable the concept of difference without dissolution into perpetual plurality on the one hand, and recourse to fixed hierarchical relations on the other. Drawing on attempts to operationalise research categories within a research project on the health beliefs and behaviours of South Asian mothers, the paper explores the difficulties of operating concepts of difference at epistemological analytical and methodological levels. For example, within the research there are difficulties in operationalising concepts of local/global difference and differences between western and non-western medical systems without fixing one in a privileged position relative to the other or without seeing them as necessarily always equal. The research also raises questions of how to sample across multiple difference and develop interview and writing strategies which do not fix relations between researcher/researched in either equal or hierarchical relations. The paper draws on attempts to cope with these problems. It engages with post-modern approaches to difference but stops short of complete deconstruction, developing these approaches instead within a dialectical framework. A dialectical approach attempts to contextualise difference, recognising the interrelationship and contradiction between research categories of difference, temporally locating hierarchies between them. Methodologically, it also strives to develop an approach which steers a course in between a position of researcher as ‘expert’ and a position where our knowledge of others is treated as inconceivable.