A Glimpse Inside by Diana Scully - Essay Example

            The first focus of justification is proving that the research is new and necessary.  Scully supports this claim by pointing to an androcentric bias in the sciences and the need for feminist research within the world of men.  According to Scully, the science behind this topic has traditionally been conducted from the perspective of men, focused on what men feel to be important, and revealed what men understand to be the issues.  When all of the studies on rapists and their motivations are conducted by men, the female perspective remains lost, there remains a lack of understanding and the feminist literature risks the same glaring mistake made by the male literature in the case of the other gender is kept mysterious. 

            Having proven to her satisfaction that the research is required, Scully then justifies her choice of subject.  She openly acknowledges the difficulty of accurately determining the size and characteristics of the male population that rapes, the low proportion of convicted perpetrators to probable actual perpetrators, and the difficulty of finding rapists who have never been convicted to interview.  From this point, she moves on to discuss why convicted, imprisoned rapists are the best candidates for her research because they are the most likely to disprove her theory.  This section closes with her sampling strategy for choosing candidates for the research study. 

            As she talks about her personal experience within the prisons, Scully reveals the conditions she found within, how that affects the prisoners on a psychological level, and how that made her feel while she was visiting.  She uses existing literature to support her hypothesis that the men would be more willing to talk with her because she was a woman and she provides some information about the interviews that were conducted as a central part of the study.  This included issues of participant-researcher neutrality and other difficulties in the interview environment.

            Scully dedicates another entire section to reviewing the processes by which she ensured the protection of her participants.  This includes a literature review of the applicable laws and a discussion of how she applied these laws to her own research.  This also includes discussions of the particular obstacles she encountered as she went through the process of gaining approval for her proposed study.  She concludes the chapter with a few more notes on the difficulties she experienced in trying to conduct her research in prisons that didn’t neatly fit into any of the previous sections.