Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23 (1999), 423430. Printed in the United States of AmFrica THE VIEW FROM DOWN HERE feminist Cradua te Students Consider Innovative Methodologies

In this article, graduate students and one faculty member respond to the innovative methods presented in this issue. We identify three theoretical and methodological tensions that shape our interest in and willingness to work with these methods. The first questions whether the strengths of doing qualitative research outweigh the limitations. The second involves feminist research ideals and how attainable they are. The third explores epistemological tensions between qualitative and quantitative research. Although intrigued by the data these methods generated and by their underlying epistemology, we question the status of certain qualitative research in psychology. We contend that the criteria by which qualitative research is evaluated must be made more explicitly before quantitatively trained researchers will incorporate these methods into their own work. Implicit in most current feminist research is the assumption that feminist methods are qualitative and go beyond the traditional research designs available in psychol-ogy. Indeed, the articles presented in these issues represent a range of innovativ