3) Methodology:
While gender equality is increasingly witnessed and promoted within different aspects of lives in the contemporary society, pornography as a recent social phenomenon has commonly neglected females as potential producers, consumers and users. In comparing pornography research conducted in the West, it further noted that majority of the Asian academia have omitted pornography as an important research topic. Thence, the main objective of this comparative qualitative research is to probe whether there are dissimilar attitudes between female consumers and non-consumers towards pornography and its consumption. This research employs a semi-structured interview to quest the attitudes and insights of young Chinese women regarding …show more content…
Therefore, the qualitative approach with the use of semi-structured individual interviews is particularly appropriate for this study for researching the relationship between women and pornography consumption. This is because a qualitative research design with semi-structured interview usually has an open character that empowers research participants to present and to demonstrate their understandings, as well as to attain more useful in-depth data of women’s opinions and attitudes towards pornography. Though many social scientists (e.g. Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Wainwright, 1997; Creswell; 1998) argued that the findings derived from qualitative research approach cannot be generalised, other scholars (e.g. Hankivsky, 1999; Yin, 2003; Ian and John, 2007) believed that the value of qualitative research is grounded in the responses of research participants to the research context. For instance, Hankivsky (1999) noted that the depth and the diversity of the collected data as well as the complex comprehensions of particular findings from qualitative research often outweighed the disadvantages of having small sampling, because qualitative data provide researchers a very useful means to recognise for future research directions (Hankivsky, 1999). Thereby, the rationale for opting a qualitative research approach in this research is not merely laid in the fact that it offers more in-depth insights and meanings that sexuality and pornography have for women, it also aims to offer other researchers a future direction when researching the relation between women and pornography
While gender equality is increasingly witnessed and promoted within different aspects of lives in the contemporary society, pornography as a recent social phenomenon has commonly neglected females as potential producers, consumers and users. In comparing pornography research conducted in the West, it further noted that majority of the Asian academia have omitted pornography as an important research topic. Thence, the main objective of this comparative qualitative research is to probe whether there are dissimilar attitudes between female consumers and non-consumers towards pornography and its consumption. This research employs a semi-structured interview to quest the attitudes and insights of young Chinese women regarding …show more content…
Therefore, the qualitative approach with the use of semi-structured individual interviews is particularly appropriate for this study for researching the relationship between women and pornography consumption. This is because a qualitative research design with semi-structured interview usually has an open character that empowers research participants to present and to demonstrate their understandings, as well as to attain more useful in-depth data of women’s opinions and attitudes towards pornography. Though many social scientists (e.g. Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Wainwright, 1997; Creswell; 1998) argued that the findings derived from qualitative research approach cannot be generalised, other scholars (e.g. Hankivsky, 1999; Yin, 2003; Ian and John, 2007) believed that the value of qualitative research is grounded in the responses of research participants to the research context. For instance, Hankivsky (1999) noted that the depth and the diversity of the collected data as well as the complex comprehensions of particular findings from qualitative research often outweighed the disadvantages of having small sampling, because qualitative data provide researchers a very useful means to recognise for future research directions (Hankivsky, 1999). Thereby, the rationale for opting a qualitative research approach in this research is not merely laid in the fact that it offers more in-depth insights and meanings that sexuality and pornography have for women, it also aims to offer other researchers a future direction when researching the relation between women and pornography