This dissertation research plan proposes an ethnography of a support group for women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The research support group will be created under the supervision of a trained therapist who specializes in the treatment of women survivors of child sexual abuse in Bloomington, Indiana. As a folklorist drawing upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural and medical anthropology/folklore, the researcher will be using the narratives that survivors tell about their abuse experience as the entering point for this phenomenological ethnography that will look into the ways women formulate and negotiate meaning and transformation for themselves as they express their traumatic experience in narrative, dialogue, and discussion in the created group. By utilizing the methodology of """"""""reciprocal ethnography"""""""" (Lawless, 1993), the researcher will allow the women collaborators to shape both the presentation of their narratives and capture the polyvocality of text-making in the ethnographic situation. Combining a clinical technique (the support group) with an anthropoligcal one (the ethnography), the researcher will be able to explore the ways in which these abuse narratives reveal the long-term developmental effects of childhood sexual abuse and become an effective tool in helping the teller to resolve and transform her trauma (Gallagher & Dodds, 1985; Ganzarain & Buchele, 1988,; Herman, 1992).
