Methodology
In undertaking this study it was important to use a method that would reveal the richness of experience captured by the ethnographic approach while making my findings more broadly generalizable (quantifiable) in terms of class and ethnic comparisons. To do this I combined participant observation, oral histories, and an in-depth survey of a selected sample of the female population, based on a systematic listing of the residents in the neighborhood (a census). Because this is a longitudinal ethnographic investigation I interviewed women and collected their oral histories at different phases of the study. In 1981 I compiled a master list of all of the residents in the neighborhood by knocking on 880 apartment doors in one census tract with the aid of several community women I trained. The goal of taking a census was to compile a master list of Puerto Rican households and to determine the total number of sterilized Puerto Rican women, 21 years of age and older, living there. Out of a census track of 880 households I chose a random survey sample size of 128 women because I thought that number of women would enable me to include women from different parts of the neighborhood and provide me, the sole researcher, with a manageable number of women whom I could interview. In order to select the women randomly I asked every third sterilized woman for an interview and every eighth non-sterilized woman.1
After completing the survey of 128 women I continued to work with five families. I collected oral histories from the mothers and grandmothers in the same family (3 generations per family x 5 families = 15 women). I kept in touch with these families over a span of 23 years and intermittently interviewed them. Between the years 2001 and 2002, I re-interviewed the mothers and grandmothers of all five families that I had initially included in the survey. Between 2003 and 2004 I interviewed and collected oral histories from the women in the granddaughters’ generation who had now come of age.
The women I interviewed range in age from 24 to 92 (1981 and 2006). The mothers’ generation was born in an agrarian society but witnessed the industrialization of Puerto Rico. With one exception they only had a second or third grade level of education because they left school to work and help their parents on farms and in the household. As children some of them worked in the needlework industry and later in the garment industry. Most of the women in the daughters’ generation were born in New York. They lived there when the city shifted from an industrial to a service economy, and lived through the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements. Some of these women graduated from high school but most did not. The majority of them worked in factories, as sales ladies in clothing stores, waitresses, and in other blue-collar jobs. The granddaughters’ generation grew up in a post-industrial and post civil-rights era. They lived in the inner city and witnessed gentrification and the challenges of a new economic and social structure. Most of these young women graduated from high school but a few did not. Some went to college.
As a Latina born and raised nearby, on the border between Brooklyn and Queens, I had certain advantages that facilitated my entry and acceptance into the neighborhood. It was indispensable that I speak Spanish fluently and that my family still lived in the general area. Confidentiality was of utmost importance in this study. I assured the women that they would not be identified and everything they said would be kept confidential. In some cases women gave me permission to record our conversations. Surprisingly, some of the women said that they wanted to be identified because they were proud to be a part of my study.
The methodology for my analysis grew organically from my conceptualization of the problem I had found in my research. The integral model of reproductive freedom and social justice does not focus on the binary framework of choice and constraint but provides a more nuanced analysis of how and why women make their fertility decisions. In order to understand Puerto Rican women’s fertility decisions from an integral perspective, we need an analysis of reproductive freedom that considers four major realms affecting women’s fertility experiences: personal, cultural, social, and historical. In addition, we need a synthesis that incorporates and transcends the individual by connecting the different realms in a dialectical way without reducing any of these to one unit of analysis. This avoids conceptualizing women’s realities in a linear, hierarchical, and reductionist mode. This model also includes an analysis of agency within constraints, which reveals how women negotiate and resist on a micro level.
- I included a small control group of 32 non-sterilized women in order to explore their perceptions of tubal ligation. Of the sterilized women 78 had tubal ligations, 11 only had hysterectomies, and 7 had a combination of tubal ligations and hysterectomies. After spending approximately two months in the field doing participant observation, I developed an in-depth questionnaire that contained 150 open-ended and closed questions. I divided the questionnaire into four sections, which helped me to ask women specific questions about their particular fertility experiences. [↩]
