While the importance of being reflexive is acknowledged within social science research, the difficulties, practicalities and methods of doing it are rarely addressed. Thus, the implications of current theoretical and philosophical discussions about reflexivity, epistemology and the construction of knowledge for empirical sociological research practice, specifically the analysis of qualitative data, remain underdeveloped. Drawing on our doctoral experiences, we reflect on the possibilities and limits of reflexivity during the interpretive stages of research.We explore how reflexivity can be operationalized and discuss reflexivity in terms of the personal, interpersonal, institutional, pragmatic, emotional, theoretical, epistemological and ontological influences on our research and data analysis processes. We argue that data analysis methods are not just neutral techniques.They reflect, and are imbued with, theoretical, epistemological and ontological assumptions -including conceptions of subjects and subjectivities, and understandings of how knowledge is constructed and produced. In suggesting how epistemological and ontological positionings can be translated into research practice, our article contributes to current debates aiming to bridge the gap between abstract epistemological discussions and the nitty-gritty of research practice. KEY WORDSdata analysis / epistemology / methodology / methods / ontology / qualitative research / reflexivity 413 Sociology

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This article grapples with the question of 'what can be known?' about research subjects and how we can come to know them. Set against a backdrop of theoretical tensions over the concept of subjectivity in feminist theory, our article makes a three-fold argument. First, we argue that theoretical impasses between critical and constructed subjects can be addressed through the evolving concept of a narrated subject. Second, we suggest that this concept needs to be further interrogated by asking what can be known about narrated subjects both inside and outside of narrative. Third, we argue that greater attention must be given to how narrated subjects can be operationalized within research methodology, and we suggest that an emerging interpretive approach, the Listening Guide, provides a multi-layered way of tapping into methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and ontological dimensions of the narrated subject.

Rooted in a qualitative research project with 70 stay-at-home fathers in Canada, this paper explores the ways that work and family interact for fathers who "trade cash for care." While fathers are at home, they also remain connected to traditionally masculine sources of identity such as paid work and they take on unpaid masculine self-provisioning work at home and community work that builds on traditional male interests. They thus carve out complex sets of relations between home, paid and unpaid work, community work, and their own sense of masculinity. Narratives from stay-at-home fathers speak volumes about the ways in which the long shadow of hegemonic masculinity hangs over them while also pointing to hints of resistance and change as fathers begin to critique concepts of "male time" and market capitalism approaches to work and care. The paper concludes by pointing to several theoretical contributions to research on fatherhood and masculinities as well as to policy implications that arise from this study on the social valuing of unpaid work.

This article addresses the question of why there are persistent gender differences in the responsibility for children. It argues that understanding continuing gender divisions of domestic responsibility, particularly in the first year of parenting, requires attending to issues of identity; commitment; embodiment; deeply rooted socialization or habitus; and normative community assumptions around gender, breadwinning, and caring. Rooted in three qualitative research studies conducted over the past eight years with more than two hundred Canadian fathers and forty mothers, the author argues for renewed thinking around issues of gender equality and gender differences and how these play out in domestic and community spaces in that first year of parenting. Bridging together time, space, and embodiment, the author also maintains that short-term potential differences in domestic responsibilities in parenting should not necessarily lead to long-term chronic inequities between women and men.