Doing Feminist Participatory Action Research: The Case of a Social Movement Aiming at Higher Wages for Early Childhood Education Teachers

This methods case is based on my article published in Gender, Work & Organization in 2021, discussing a social movement on early childhood education teachers’ wages in Finland and my personal involvement in it. In 2018, a news story revealed that three cities in the Finnish capital area had made an agreement to not raise the wages of early childhood education teachers while in a situation of severe, persistent labor shortage. Early childhood education is a feminized, low-paid field of the public sector. This news story resulted in the emergence of a social movement. What is unusual and particularly interesting in this research are the methods used. The main element of the study, and also of this methods case, is my personal involvement in the social movement, as a feminist academic activist. I labeled the approach feminist participatory action research, which is characterized by participating, collaborating, and actively aiming to change the studied issue, while also doing research on it. This study was done with a distinct feminist orientation, denoting the explicit feminist change agenda of higher wages for the field in question. These methods were used in combination with more typical research methods—namely, semistructured interviews and thematic analysis of media material. This methods case study focuses on the feminist participatory action research and gives examples of how to do research in active collaboration with the participant and be actively engaged with the focus of the study.