This book began with three aims: first, the simple telling of a story about a research project; second, a reflexive articulation of the process of undertaking research; and, third, addressing questions to do with the status and gendering of sociological knowledge itself. Like the imposition of a division between qualitative and quantitative methodology, the separability of the three aims is theoretical rather than practical. Few stories can be simply told. Because it concerns a research enterprise that straddles the two knowledge domains of the social and the medical, the story of this one inhabits the double hermeneutics of its ideological space. It moves backwards and forwards from one domain to the other, uncomfortable with each but unable to let go of either in the effort to create its own original merging of the two. In this, the book's narrative resembles the fate of women under patriarchy – living their own lives but as men see them, and forging, if they are lucky and/or sufficiently determined, an existence which is their own novel (qualitative) creation rather than mere mechanistic (quantitative) survival. As Kate Millett said, now many years ago, the challenge is to create ‘a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit’ (Millett 1969: 363).

So Social Support and Motherhood has told a story, but/and in a self-conscious way. Addressing the third aim, of exploring traditional assumptions about knowledge, has been implicit throughout most of the text, perhaps even uneasily so, in a disjunctive leapfrogging between the different textual modes of description and analysis; and between the central conundrum of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the generation and presentation of research data.