The Dilemma of Socrates’ Position: Interview Methods and Feminist Empirical Bioethics

Authors

Michiel De Proost, Ghent UniversityFollow

Abstract

There is a growing body of bioethics research that addresses the importance of adapting empirical, predominantly qualitative, methods to generate debate on ethical arguments. However, there is an absence of illustrative work examining how this could be realised from a feminist perspective. This article, seeking to address the research gap, examines interview methods through a reflexive lens. Drawing on the doctoral research I conducted through interviews with women who were interested in social egg freezing (i.e., healthy women freezing their eggs in anticipation of future infertility), I describe how I encountered a dilemma because of my gendered positionality and the intended Socratic method I had wanted to use. To handle the dilemma, I employed a combination of techniques for posing interview questions: descriptive questioning, Socratic dialogue, and an elicitation method. Based on my experiences of navigating these different methods through the interview process and discussing their effectiveness, I argue that there is value in overlapping different models of interviewing and thus contributing to greater critical reflexivity, an enhanced quality of data, and egalitarian research interactions. The article concludes with some suggestions for applying this fusion of interviewing approaches in future empirical bioethics research.

Keywords

empirical bioethics, qualitative research, interviewing, reflexivity, masculinity, feminism, social egg freezing

Author Bio(s)

Michiel De Proost obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the Free University Brussels with a dissertation on “social” egg freezing and reproductive autonomy. His research interests are in empirical (bio)ethics, the field of reproductive medicine, disruptive technologies, and feminist philosophy. Please direct correspondence to michiel.deproost@ugent.be.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Veerle Provoost, the reviewers and editors of this journal for the worthy feedback on the earlier versions of this manuscript. This publication was supported by the University Foundation of Belgium (Universitaire Stichting van België).

Publication Date

7-29-2023

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2023.6069

Recommended APA Citation

De Proost, M. (2023). The Dilemma of Socrates’ Position: Interview Methods and Feminist Empirical Bioethics. The Qualitative Report, 28(7), 2095-2112. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2023.6069

ORCID ID

0000-0003-0545-8515

ResearcherID

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