ETHICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL TENSIONS IN APPLYING A POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE TO FEMINIST RESEARCH

We examine tensions that arise in applying postmodernism to feminist research. First, we consider epistemological tensions generated in the process of deconstructing existing knowledge and constructing new knowledge that benefits women. Second, we examine six ethical issues that reflect the tensions in feminist practice as we attempt to justify the dialectic between knowledge and power. In keeping with a postmodernist perspective, we pose these six issues as questions: Is feminist post-modernism postfeminist? Does postmodernist language mystify feminist practice and goals? Are qualitative methods more feminist than quantitative ones? Must feminists have a liberatory purpose in their research? Is the personal too personal? Whose aims are served, feminists or their collaborators? We conclude that by adopting a postmodern feminist perspective, we can embrace the struggle between knowledge and practice rather than privilege one over the other.     

Self-efficacy and Endurance Performance: A Longitudinal Field Test of Cognitive Mediation Theory

On demanda à 123 étudiants de cours de perfectionnement, désignés au hasard, de réaliser de leur mieux une tâche très difficile, au but presqu' impossible à atteindre, après cinq semaines d'entraînement à effectuer une tâche spécifique en trois minutes. Une période-test de quatre semaines suivit au cours de laquelle les buts des táches que devaient réaliser les sujets et leur confiance en leur efficacité furent mesurés une fois par semaine avant chaque évaluation de performance. Construit d'après une théorie de médiation cognitive (Garland, 1985), un modèle causal fut utilisé dans lequel des buts de tâches individuelles furent soumis aux effets de la performance, notamment sur l'efficacité des sujets. L'analyse des résultats à partir des quatre tests hebdomadaires confirma les propositions du modèle.
One hundred and twenty-three students in a fitness training course were assigned at random to a do your best, very hard, or highly improbable goal condition after five weeks of baseline training on a three-minute sit-up task. A four-week test period followed in which subjects' task goals and efficacy expectations were measured once each week prior to an assessment of their performance. Based on cognitive mediation theory (Garland, 1985), a causal model was presented in which individual task goals are proposed to influence performance through their influence on self-efficacy. Path analyses on the data over each of the four test weeks provided support for the proposed model.