In protestant theological institutions: a critical appraisal of contextual challenges in kerala, india jessy jaison b b s., M d

CHAPTER 4: CONTEXTUAL CHALLENGES OF WOMEN IN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN KERALA: METHODOLOGY AND CONDUCT OF RESEARCH

The research setting and its distinctiveness require a discussion of the methods appropriate for the gathering of data. Affinity of the study to social science methods and feminist methods are recognized, evaluated and the reasons for the specific choice stated. A central concern, both academic and practical, was to discover the hidden structures and attitudes in theological education by listening to various constituencies in training, including women.

4.1 Qualitative Inductive Approach- A Practical Theology Focus³¹¹
This qualitative research attempted to collect and analyze empirical evidence in order to understand and explain the specified social reality. An inductive approach could make it, “highly effective for creating a feeling for the whole, for grasping subtle shades of meaning for pulling together divergent information and for switching perspectives.”³¹² Generalizations may not guarantee universal value as the study limits itself to a particular geographical area that is culturally unique. Nevertheless its implications could correspond to the situation of women in theological education elsewhere. Challenges of women in theological education are assumed to have many social and ecclesiastical underpinnings.

It is therefore, not enough to naively observe what a person is doing or how they are behaving in a given situation. In order to understand what is actually going on within that situation, it is necessary to understand the meaning of their actions, the way the situation is being interpreted by those performing within it and the reasons behind the ways individuals and communities act in the particular ways that they do.³¹³

The ‘inductive’ task in the study began with detailed observations of the context and moved towards more abstract generalizations and ideas. For Neuman,
Researchers adopting an inductive approach follow a slightly different process. Inductive theorizing begins with a few assumptions and broad orienting concepts. Theory develops from the ground up as the researchers gather and analyze the data. Theory emerges slowly, concept by concept and proposition by proposition in a specific area…. Over time, the concepts and empirical generalizations emerge and mature. Soon relationships become visible, and researchers weave knowledge from different studies together into more abstract theory.³¹⁴
The overall method followed in this research was critical and interpretive, which is,
the foundation of social research techniques that are sensitive to the context, that use various methods to get inside the ways others see the world and that are more concerned with achieving an empathic understanding of feelings and world views than with testing laws of human behaviour.³¹⁵
However, the positivist research approach does not endorse this. The pure theoretical orientation and the deductive logic of positivism did not seem to be effective in the production of the rich descriptive data on the issue. Therefore, a practical orientation was necessary, in which the actual happenings, attitudes, perceptions and verbal explanations of men and women could become the major focus in data-gathering. Yet, this study guards itself from criticisms on risky subjectivity by employing measures to enhance objectivity which is an approved task in qualitative research methodology.³¹⁶ The study as a first attempt on the concerns of women students in theological education demanded detailed data on the general scenario of theological education, experiences of women in seminaries, factors that motivate them to join seminaries, outcome of their training and attitudes of the church and the society towards their training. While positivists criticize the inductive logic on the ground of its bias and inability to replicate the findings to a universal level, interpretive and critical researchers of social science emphasize sensitivity to context, empathic understanding of feelings and people’s large measure of freedom to create and explain meanings of their situation, which would form the methodological foundation of this study. Furthermore, according to Smith, “Without first hand information about the research setting, it is difficult for quantitative researchers to develop adequate conceptual frameworks for their studies”³¹⁷ This qualitative work might, hence, prove to be a starting point for some later quantitative studies. As a primary attempt on women in theological education, the current men-women enrolment ratio was estimated from the sample institutions expecting this to enhance the internal consistency of the study (as stated in ‘combination of methods’), and will serve as a guide to estimate the difference between Episcopal and non-Episcopal institutions on women’s enrolment and possibly to contribute to the historical documentation of the topic. However, there was no rigorous attempt for further quantitative data in this research.

This research is more than a description of the concerns of women in seminaries and a theological discussion on women’s status. It expects to make a significant contribution to the field of practical theology by exploring hermeneutical solutions and suggesting improved ways of training women. The qualitative approach in social science could be effectively employed in practical theological studies, especially ones that focus on social realities.³¹⁸ “Irrespective of the theological and methodological diversity, the common theme that holds practical theology together as a discipline is its perspective on, and beginning-point in, human experience and its desire to reflect theologically on that experience.”³¹⁹ This academic concern is practically necessary as any continual action would prove meaningless when it is carried out without critical periodic reflection. The research approach is to evaluate and identify the difference between ‘what we think we are doing’ and ‘what we are actually doing’ and hence, by increasing awareness of the differences, to be a force in social transformation. Such studies bring to light the unidentified challenges, the untapped resources and the unseen potentials. “…through a process of critical reflection on situations, the practical theologian seeks to ensure faithful practice and authentic human living in the light of scripture and tradition.”³²⁰

It is also important to recognize how far this research relates itself to feminist research. The account below is a basic presentation of feminist approaches, specifically to help the methodological explanations of the research.

4.2 Influence of Feminist Scholarship on the Research
This is not a feminist study in terms of holistic acceptance and application of exclusively feminist methodological priorities. But it is, in the sense that the researcher herself is a woman, studying about, on, with and for women and appreciating and employing the feminists’ contributions in terms of women education. Practical theological research and feminist research unite in that they approach particular situations with a hermeneutics of suspicion, believing that there are underlying factors that play vital roles in the creation of the given situation. There are studies done on the similarities between cultural and feminist studies. Both connect the social and political movements outside of the particular field of knowledge and to their critical stance vis-à-vis more established disciplines such as Sociology and English Literature.³²¹ An attempt, though unsophisticated, was made in this study to relate it to the wider social world so that the ‘positionality of knowing’³²² could be asserted in the place of the established ideas of ‘certain knowledge’, which was looked at with suspicion and considered to have needed to be challenged. Nevertheless, the foundational ‘consciousness-raising’ objective of feminist thinking and the focus on holistic learning that involves both cognitive and affective aspects were seen as integral to this research. Gorelick criticizes the affinity of many feminist researchers for interpretive social science. As interpretive social science becomes limited to the consciousness of those being studied and fails to reveal hidden structures, she recommends feminist researchers to adopt a more critical approach and to advocate social change more assertively.³²³ This study, therefore, safeguarded its objective by a balanced combination of critical and interpretive methods, which is preferred as a potential solution to some of the extremist and perplexing moves of feminist approaches as the following discussion proposes. The reasons for not titling the overall approach ‘feminist’ are also outlined below.
There is no one kind of feminist research and therefore any attempt to define feminist research is complex. Feminist scholars are hard at work in all traditional disciplines yet the debates over epistemologies still go on. According to Wadsworth, who studied the ‘participatory action research and its basics,’³²⁴
Feminist research is research which is carried out by women who identify as feminists, and which has a particular purpose for knowing (a ‘why’), particular kinds of questions, topics and issues to be known about (a ‘what’), and an identifiable method of knowing (a ‘how’), which distinctly draw on women’s experience of living in a world in which women are subordinate to men.³²⁵
Wadsworth continues on what helps a research to be identified as a feminist research, referring to Stanley and Wise, ‘The most central and common belief shared by all feminists, whatever our ‘type’ is the presupposition that women are oppressed. It is from this common acceptance that there is indeed a problem, that there is something amiss in the treatment of women in society that feminism arises.’³²⁶ Though the basis is by and large the same, researchers vary much in their approaches in addressing their research problems. Following are three major feminist epistemologies, their strengths and intrinsic practical concerns, with the evaluation of how the current research reckons each of them.

4.3 Feminist Epistemologies

Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and the explanation of what we claim to know. The nature of feminist methodology in social sciences has been an ongoing heated debate. In The Science Question in Feminism,³²⁷ Sandra Harding, the American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory and epistemology, critiques three approaches: 1) feminist empiricism, which sees the problem as lying only in bad science; 2) the feminist standpoint approach, which privileges the perspective of women in revealing masculine bias in science; and 3) the post-modern approach, which disputes basic scientific assumptions about objectivity and truth.  Harding’s taxonomy is each progressively more radical in their epistemological commitments. While feminist empiricists accepted positivist principles of value-neutral inquiry and criticized actual scientific practice for failing to live up to these ideals, feminist standpoint theorists suggested that knowledge must necessarily be ‘socially-situated’ and perspectival, and they argued that some perspectives, such as the perspective of feminists, were epistemically privileged. Postmodernists, however, questioned whether any particular perspective could be said to be privileged over any other, leading them down the path of relativism. As feminist epistemology has evolved, Harding’s taxonomy has become less useful. For example the “sophisticated” feminist empiricisms of Helen Longino (who advocated a strong form of social epistemology³²⁸ called critical contextual empiricism) and Lynn Nelson³²⁹ are a far cry from Harding’s characterization of feminist empiricism, and it has become more difficult to pigeon-hole recent works in these three categories. Nevertheless, one often sees reference to them, even in the current literature.³³⁰

Feminist epistemologists adopt a wide variety of approaches, and although they share a common interest in the connection between gender and knowing, and a common commitment to ending the oppression of women, they differ dramatically in the particular epistemological commitments they hold.³³¹
Feminist epistemologies face the extremist pulls either from the individualistic position or from the sharp sexist division. Harding argues for a perspective that includes anti-racism and anti-classism, along with anti-sexism.³³² She persuasively argues that there is no single feminist method;³³³ doing science as a feminist requires that one be willing to adopt various methods, depending on the question under investigation. The following section looks at each of the epistemologies and discerns to what level it is applied to the research problem in hand.

1. 
   Empiricist Epistemology
   

First, its focus is on sexism and androcentrism as social biases, constructed by male-stream epistemology. Harding discusses the ways in which a feminist perspective can contribute to producing better scientific knowledge about the world. Feminist empiricism considers that these social biases are only correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry. Secondly, these prejudices enter social research while identifying what problems are to be researched in data collection. Empiricist method that reckons social scientific enquiry as androcentric, also calls for the strict application of scientific enquiry strictly. Feminist empiricism subverts traditional empiricism and annihilates its claim to objectivity, saying that the male-stream empirical methods are deeply sexist. The third focus is on ‘women’s experiences’. This epistemology removes the blinkers and biases of social knowledge to produce more accurate accounts of the world.³³⁴ Feminist scholars have expressed serious concerns over the extreme objectivity advocated by quantitative researchers; not necessarily of the data but of the way of using and interpreting data. Statistical data can provide context for research, help develop and test theory and analysis of such material can be backed up, if necessary, with complex qualitative questions. There are those who advocated the use of a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures.

Fonow and Cook[³³⁵] and Kelly are amongst those who have suggested that in some instances carefully designed questionnaires can facilitate rather than damage the ‘ease’ of disclosure, and prove beneficial to both researcher and researched.³³⁶
Qualitative methods such as personal interviews and focus groups are deemed significant sources to explore women’s experiences in the current research by which the empiricist focus is incorporated.
The view that women’s experiences are different than men’s is against the positivist approach but empiricism presents a controversial point by upholding scientific inquiry. Feminist post modernists criticize the empiricists³³⁷ for presuming the existence of an individual, trans-historical subject of knowledge outside of social determination. Empiricists are also criticized for naively holding that the science will correct the errors and biases in its theories about women and other subordinated groups all by itself, without the aid of feminist values or insights. It is also criticized for overlooking the vital role of feminist political activity in particular, the development of oppositional consciousness, as a superior source of hypotheses and evidence for challenging sexist and androcentric theories. Influenced by radical feminism, psychoanalytic feminism and Marxism at the close of 1980s, feminist standpoint was introduced as a better solution for the epistemological issues.

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   4.3.2 Standpoint Epistemology
   

This epistemology focused on women’s experiences and the epistemic privilege women could have out of their experiences. But there are the complexities of the relationship between experience, knowledge and reality. Women can claim epistemic privilege as they have the actual knowledge of their marginal status and of the oppressing group.

Feminist standpoint argues that men’s dominating position in social life results in partial and perverse understandings (they can’t see from women’s positions), whereas women’s subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and less perverse understandings of the world.³³⁸
However, the criticisms of this are not a few. The first criticism is on the difficulty to ‘theorize women’s experiences’. The controversy blossomed at the realization that it is not easy to theorize women’s experiences as each woman’s story would be different than that of the other. It questions the credibility of this position. Longino argues that standpoint theory cannot provide a noncircular basis for deciding which standpoints have epistemic privilege³³⁹ and introduces her ‘contextual empiricism’.³⁴⁰ There is sharp criticism of the viability of this standpoint position as Lugones and Spelman³⁴¹ assessed it,
women cannot even have privileged access to understanding their own oppression, since this takes different forms for different women, depending on their race, sexual orientation, and so forth. This critique has been forcefully developed by feminist postmodernists, who question the very possibility of a unified standpoint of women, and see, behind the assertion of a universal woman’s viewpoint, only the perspective of relatively privileged white women.³⁴²
Secondly each woman’s experience is different with the variety of roles she holds. There were confusions as feminists argued women’s daily experiences are mixed up with their roles and responsibilities while men’s experience is different. However, the problem is that no solid conclusion on this position could be reached through untheorized ‘women’s experiences’. But the sharp criticism that questioned the credibility of this method arose by suggesting that one woman’s story may be just as true or false as another. Its position of objectivity is deemed unattainable as individual experiences cannot easily be theorized.³⁴³ Therefore, with the notions of strong objectivity came the feminist post-modernist approach. Both the ‘empiricist’ and the ‘standpoint’ views are challenged by the more radical post-modern position.
Therefore, although women’s experiences are crucial in the current research, it is held that women’s experiences do not stand apart from their social, cultural and economic situations where men’s role and standpoint are decisive in the interpretation of the data. Therefore, there is no unsighted affinity to women’s experiences in the current research because the context demands that it should involve and benefit women, men and institutional structures in theological education.

4. 
   Post-modernist Epistemology
   

Feminist postmodernism emphasizes the multiplicity of identities (not just gender, but also race, class, sexuality, nation, etcetera) and also rejects a separation between subject (observing person/scientist) and object (nature).³⁴⁴ There is also the idea that all knowledge is ‘partial’ and ‘situated’ – that is, we cannot see the world from a ‘god’s-eye view.’³⁴⁵ Its profound skepticism makes it argue against the ‘standpoint theory’ as well. This is a position that views all sources of knowledge as partial.³⁴⁶ It is built on the claim that gender is socially or discursively constructed and ideas begin with language and systems of thought. It stands against the Standpoint theory’s project of identifying a single epistemically privileged perspective, believing that this is fundamentally flawed and an unjustified assertion of power in the name of an unattainable objectivity.³⁴⁷ The perspective shifting between these feminist positions are challenging. Feminist post-modernism envisions our epistemic situation as characterized by a permanent plurality of perspectives, none of which can claim objectivity- that is, transcendence of situatedness to a ‘view from nowhere’, by which it is sometimes characterized as a fully relativist position.³⁴⁸

Both key features of feminist postmodernism — the rejection of ‘woman’ as a category of analysis, and the infinite fragmentation of perspectives — are controversial within feminist theory….. Carried to its logical conclusion, feminist postmodernism dissolves all groups, thereby reproducing the individualism of the Enlightenment epistemology it claims to repudiate. And the idea of mobile positioning may simply reproduce the objectivism and ideas of autonomy that postmodernists claim to reject, only now in the guise of ‘the view from everywhere’ rather than ‘the view from nowhere’ (Bordo-1990).³⁴⁹ Critics argue that feminists would do better if they forthrightly appropriated ideals of human rights and autonomy, rather than embracing “the death of the subject” in the fragmentation of the self (Benhabib³⁵⁰ 1995).”³⁵¹
Although the perspectival alterability of post modernists is challenging, the epistemology has gained broad application in current scholarship.
Here feminists do not believe in ‘one true story’ as they think all knowledge is partial.³⁵² Post modernism is something of an oxymoron and it advocates a profound scepticism towards universalizing claims of nature, experiences and everything. In doing so, it argues against a ‘feminist standpoint’ also. Research appears to be a hard job, when caught up in the extreme perspectives. Feminist scholarship began from a general disagreement with the sexist, androcentric epistemology, went on then to say that epistemology should be based exclusively on women’s experience to claim objectivity and is now urging that single experiences cannot be trusted since knowledge is partial. This raises the need to return to the ‘innocent knowledge’³⁵³ as a necessary precondition to increase the general sum of human emancipation.³⁵⁴ In fact, the feminist view of an experience-based epistemology generally sounds meaningful but the classical feminist perspective that culturally generated gendered assumptions play a part in the production of knowledge challenges the possibility of having a feminist epistemology that is fully objective.³⁵⁵
The enormous popularity of feminism in recent years has provoked considerable opposition along with its helpful developments towards transformation.³⁵⁶ There has also been a shift towards gender studies rather than feminist studies.³⁵⁷ The case is no different in feminist theology. “‘Gender studies’ is an important tool for feminist theology insofar as it unveils the complexities of the learning experience in human development.”³⁵⁸ However, the current research gives focal emphasis to collect data to provide what Flax terms as the ‘innocent knowledge’ rather than relying solely upon any of the feminist epistemological focuses. As this research has empathy with the social and cultural contexts, its approach is assumed to be fundamentally inclusive, yet by considering the experiences of women.

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   4.4 The Interpretive, Critical Social Science Approach
   

Within qualitative methods in social research this study preferred the critical, interpretive method. The Interpretive Social Science method is traced to the writings of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) who held the idea of ‘verstehen’³⁵⁹ (empathic understanding) in social research to know how people feel inside, how they create meaning, and how their personal reasons or motivations can be used to understand them.³⁶⁰ This method was chosen mainly to let the study take a practical approach, a detailed search to discover the embedded meaning of the situation. But the gathering of large quantities of data through a number of methods used by some interpretive researchers in phenomenological method was not favoured in this study. Through select methods, the research attempted to explore the ways men and women see and perceive the social realities of women’s lives. Since a mere description³⁶¹ was not enough to address the critical elements underlying, the interpretive approach was combined with a critical social approach.

Critical Social Science is traced back to Karl Marx (1818- 1883), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and other social thinkers. They criticized other approaches for their defence of the status quo and extreme subjectivity, passivity and relativism. The Critical Approach emphasized the need for a value position and action-orientation to help people improve their lives. It is “a critical process of inquiry that goes beyond surface illusions to uncover the real structures in the material world in order to help people change conditions and build a better world for themselves.”³⁶² This study holds that social reality has multiple layers and that there are deep structures behind the immediately observable surfaces. Since the case of women in theological education was assumed to have social and ecclesiastical structures that influence and control it, what seemed most appropriate for the current research task was a combination of these two methods.
Combining the interpretive and critical approaches: Due to the exploratory and analytical nature of the topic and with the focus on presenting from scratch the most exact and elaborate picture of the situation of women, this study followed the interpretive social science approach, which was often censured by the critical social scientists as being passive, not action-oriented and too subjective and relativist. The interpretive approach is often criticized for focusing only on the exploration and descriptive tasks and not taking any value position or any action to change the situation of the people concerned. According to Orlikowski and Baroudi “The interpretive research approach towards the relationship between theory and practice is that the researcher can never assume a value-neutral stance, and is always implicated in the phenomena being studied.”³⁶³ Lincoln and Guba write,
All research is interpretive; it is guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be understood and studied. Some beliefs may be taken for granted, invisible, only assumed, whereas others are highly problematic and controversial. Each interpretive paradigm makes particular demands on the researcher, including the questions he/she asks and the interpretations the researcher brings to them.³⁶⁴
By combining interpretive and critical method, the study disapproved of passivity and aimed to provide concrete action-oriented recommendations to help seminaries and the women constituency. Walsham claimed that the interpretive and critical methods could be effectively combined in a study.³⁶⁵ We will now estimate the potential conceptual underpinnings of this approach and sketch how this empirical research is linked with other approaches in research. An exclusively women-centred approach could result in separation and fragmentation of theological training in contexts that are essentially male-oriented, while transformation and mutual benefit advances as the study provides a holistic picture with attitudes of both women and men and institutional structures. Therefore, the approach here is to use scholarship not to separate women angrily from the male oriented society, rather to find ways and means to infiltrate effectively into it by relating to it, criticising whenever necessary, empowering women, focusing on women’s experiences, observations and contributions. The radical thinking does not agree that this is attainable without structural changes, political involvements, and a separatist approach to the rest of the society and its oppressive structure. Any study concerning gender should be sensitive to the variety of issues that concern women, men and the complexities of relationship between both. Myrtle Hill says that some have pointed “to the necessity of sometimes focusing on men and masculinity in order to examine issues relating to women’s experience fully.”³⁶⁶ This study, therefore, finds the critical interpretive social research method as the most appropriate one for the subject in hand. Its underpinnings according to Walsham³⁶⁷ are phenomenology, ethno-methodology and hermeneutics.³⁶⁸ A brief account of each of these will make the research underpinnings clearer.
Phenomenological methods are particularly effective at bringing to the fore the experiences and perceptions of individuals from their own perspectives, and therefore at challenging structural or normative assumptions. Adding an interpretive dimension to phenomenological research, enabling it to be used as the basis for practical theory, allows it to inform, support or challenge policy and action. ³⁶⁹
Phenomenology³⁷⁰ is about gathering ‘deep’ information and perceptions through inductive, qualitative methods. Although phenomenology’s emphasis on the hermeneutics of participants’ perspectives too is considered vital, the current research neither gathers a large amount of messy data nor does it follow the complex analysis as usually done by a phenomenologist. The fact that phenomenological approaches are good at surfacing deep issues and making voices heard is causal in its incorporation in the current research. “Ethno-methodology (literally, ‘the study of people’s methods’) is a sociological discipline and paradigm which focuses on the ways in which people make sense of the world and display their understandings of it, thus producing the social order in which we live.”³⁷¹
Ethnomethodology is…founded by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the early 1960s. The main ideas behind it are set out in his book ‘Studies in Ethno methodology’ (1967). Ethno Methodology simply means the study of the ways in which people make sense of their social world.³⁷²
The one respect in which this approach differs from other sociological approaches is that while they all assume that the patterns of behaviour and interaction in society are regular and orderly, “ethno-methodologists start out with the assumption that social order is illusory. They believe that social life merely appears to be orderly, which in reality is potentially chaotic. For them social order is constructed in the minds of social actors as society confronts the individual as a series of sense impressions and experiences which she or he must somehow organize into a coherent pattern.”³⁷³
A favoured technique among ethno-methodologists is to disrupt temporarily the world which people take for granted and see how they react. The point of this is to expose background assumptions that have been accepted as reality for a long time…. It could be said that the human capacity to produce order out of chaos is the only worthwhile capacity in the eyes of ethno-methodologist.³⁷⁴
Ethno-methodological approach³⁷⁵ is integrated in the current data gathering, especially to get the feel of people’s real experience that they themselves are sometimes not consciously aware of. Hermeneutical method is in wide currency in theology and social research.³⁷⁶ Lindseth and Norberg describe a phenomenological hermeneutical method for researching lived experience as introduced by Paul Recoeur,³⁷⁷ the French philosopher, who worked on relating phenomenology and hermeneutics.³⁷⁸ This was used for interpreting interview texts inspired by the theory of interpretation he presented.

These methodological corroborations are adopted in most feminist studies and therefore the incorporation of them could offer further credibility to this study. Therefore, to summarize, this is essentially a critical interpretive social research that endorses a number of feminist educational concerns such as consciousness-raising, transformation of absolute male-orientation and of the learning environment. The study moved from experiences to ask analytical questions such as, ‘How can these experiences be explained?’ and ‘How could the situation be improved for women?’ The study used a combination of methods to attain its research aims. It gathered data from women and men, both individually and collectively and also from educational institutions and their leadership. There was the recognition that the meaning women give to their experiences may be different and therefore crucial in research while at the same time it was recognized that the underlying issues in women’s training can only be brought to light when the attitudes of men and women and the inherent values within structures are assessed against the social and cultural situations people are in.

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   4.5 Limitations of the Study
   

4.5.1 The Contextual Limitation - Kerala
The study had numerous limiting factors including that of limiting to the geographical area Kerala, a South Indian State. India’s vastness with twenty eight states and seven union territories and its astoundingly diverse cultural set up did not permit the researcher to make this research a general one. There are significant social, political, religious and cultural contrasts in India and therefore the situation of women in theological education varies much from place to place mainly according to the culture of the locality and the church’s standpoint on women’s role. Functional style of organizations too differs between town and village settings and therefore, Kerala is not portrayed as representing India in the topic under investigation. Having been based in Kerala as a theological educator, I have chosen this place as a unique case for this research. The study also acknowledges that the majority of students in the sample institutions belonged to middle/lower class settings.
4.5.2 Seminaries
The term ‘Seminary’ has specific meaning. “The name ‘seminary’ (from the Latin ‘seminarium),’ meaning ‘seed-plot’- was accepted by the Roman Catholic church at the Council of Trent, 16^th century as the designation for settings where candidates for the priesthood could be nourished and formed in their vocations apart from distracting ‘worldly’ influences.”³⁷⁹ Kerala at present is witnessing the mushrooming of such training centers with a variety of titles such as Bible Schools, Bible Institutes, Bible Colleges, theological research centers and Bible Seminaries. It was difficult to discern by title the type of training and courses offered in these institutions. There were ‘schools’ that offered higher degrees and ‘seminaries’ that did not offer them. The sample included the seminaries with long standing history and reputation, selected from a range of denominational affiliations, offered degree programmes, institutions that could well represent the rest of the population, approved by either a church denomination or an accrediting agency. For uniformity and convenience in reading, the sample institutions are mostly referred to as ‘seminaries’ and occasionally ‘theological institutions’ in this report.
4.5.3 Women Students
There is a possible question on the avoidance of men students and women faculty as the central spotlight of the study. Regarding the first category, it was apparent that men being the target group of the theological training, initially gained from whichever changes were introduced or benefits offered. Regarding the latter, there are women on faculty of theological seminaries in Kerala but most of them are working in the same organizations or churches where their husbands are employed. Their problems usually are more of a personal nature and could be handled by themselves or their own environments unless they raise issues of common concern. But the growing number of women students joining theological seminaries, their formation in the seminary and their future in society and the church raise crucial issues that are not yet been addressed by the community. My own background as a member of faculty in a theological institution in Kerala for thirteen years, and as the one who has come across the challenges posed by the attitudes of the society and church towards women, makes this study all the more challenging and asserts that it is the women student constituency that requires immediate attention.

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   4.6 Sources and Tools of Data Generation
   

4.6.1 Personal Interviews

The data generation sources were women students (past and present), Principals or Academic Deans and men students. Interviews³⁸⁰ were considered essential in the study as they permitted the research to be sensitive to the context and get a feel of the actual situation which may be different than what was generally known. The research used a set of pre-determined, focused questions, expecting all respondents in each category to reply to all the same questions. Each interview gathered the demographic details-only what deemed significant for interpretation- and all the remaining were open-ended questions. To maintain the control of direction of the interview, questions as well as their sequence were pre-determined. Each open-ended question had a focus on the various aspects of the study as deriving from the basic knowledge of the situation. Questions were prepared with maximum possible neutrality so that researcher’s hypothesis would not control or influence the respondents.

4.6.2 Focus Groups
Focus groups³⁸¹ seemed to be an effective tool in the social scenario of Kerala where as a group, people tend to be more confident and develop less concerns on the data they provide the researcher with. This has been widely used and appreciated by social researchers as a valid tool for data gathering. In a focus group “Ideas and issues tend to shape themselves as people speak and the subjects start to form an understanding as participants debate certain points.”³⁸² This let the respondents have a better confidence in their responses and hence the method ensured open responses. In the socially relevant and least discussed topic of women in theological education, a focus group was able to provide large amount of data to interpret the attitudes, feelings and experiences of people. According to Moore, “Focus groups force people to consider how they feel about issues in the light of other people’s feelings.”³⁸³ The research initially envisaged two focus groups-one with the theologically trained women in Kerala who could look to the past and compare it with the present scenario and also critically explain and evaluate the status of women in theological education. The latter was women students, currently on roll in sample institutions. This was decided after the pilot study, which revealed that all sample institutions do not have women students for the conduct of personal interviews and the study needed profound data on how women experienced and perceived their life during their theological education.

4.7 Sampling Pattern and Selection of Institutions