Pakistani women and maternity care: raising muted voices

The paper explores the potentiality of an empowering research strategy to raise the muted voices of Pakistani women, with particular reference to experiences of maternity care. It focuses on research carried out with Pakistani women in Glasgow in 1991. It is argued that issues of power negotiation need to be addressed at all stages of the research process, including the framing of research questions, during data collection through interviews, and in the analysis and presentation of results. Women's comments on maternity care were very varied, some being very satisfied, many not so. Three particular cases illustrate variation at the individual level, and muting interpretations are considered. In conclusion, it is suggested that an empowering research strategy may indeed raise muted voices, but that it can also give researchers more power. And the issue of the response to muted voices, a key aspect of the concept of muting, remains.