George discussed her account of her gender based research with Keralite Christian immigrants. She noted the unusual trend of women nurses immigrating to the United Stated before their husbands and children. These women often became the primary breadwinners in the family, and then sponsored their families’ later immigration to the States. Husbands of Keralite nurses in the United States often experienced a demotion from their previous statuses held in their native land, often earning less money than their wives and having to engage in stereotypically feminine tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. This economically instigated situation is quite a large role reversal between men and women from the roles they encountered in India. Consequently, Keralite men in the United States tend to assert their dominance over women in social and religious contexts in an attempt to retain/regain a sense of personal power and prestige. The consequent economic, domestic, and cultural interactions between Keralite men and women result in an identity crisis between the two sexes over gender issues in the home and in the community.

The aforementioned facts constitute a brief overview of the gender matters that George studied amongst present-day Keralite Christian immigrants. Her analysis on the subject was very informative; however, I was particularly intrigued by the methodology of her research, as her comments tie in heavily with a class I am currently taking centered upon the ethics in human research. George discussed how she became personally involved with the church-based community of the population she was studying, particularly since she herself was of the same ethnicity and religion as the St. George Orthodox Church community. She maintained that, although she was at first apprehensive at the potential repercussions of such an intimate relationship with the people she was supposed to be studying, the closeness between her and the members of St. George greatly enhanced her research. The personal interactions with her research subjects engendered a sense of trust between George and the community, in addition to providing George with great opportunities for unusual and privileged moments of observation of the church’s exclusively male interactions. The reason why I find this opinion to be so fascinating is because it is in direct opposition to traditional methods of social science research, especially in the field of psychology. In the past, great emphasis has been placed upon maintaining an objective distance from one’s research and research subjects, holding that refraining from developing or placing personal biases on the research will produce better academic results.

However, in light of recently reading George’s opinion on the matter, in addition to Michelle Fine’s writings on qualitative activist research, I personally find much more validity to George’s call for a more interactive means of conducting research. I agree with her assertion that the more a researcher puts into the project, the more he or she will get out of his or her work. In order to be able to contemplate the full range of facts and sides to a particular issue, one must be willing to dive headfirst into the subject at hand. A certain level of familiarity and trust must be developed in order to be able to garner real results (although any resulting personal biases must be recognized and formally recorded). George is in a unique situation regarding her research, as she notes that her identity leads to a certain fluidity between her status as a researcher and her status as a member of the community that she is researching. Although, as indicated before, proponents of a more traditional approach to research might label her work as biased and somewhat invalid, I reiterate in saying that I find that her level of intimacy with the topic at hand to be a very fruitful relationship. I would rather become informed on a particular subject by a person who cares about the people he or she is researching, and has a certain amount of close interaction with the community being studied.