The whales beneath the surface: the muddled story of doing research with poor mothers in a developing country.

In this article I attempt to show how research ideals of social change and usefulness can lead to "research paralysis." I also argue that if there is sufficient reflexivity about the research process itself, paralysis is not inevitable, and useful knowledge can indeed be generated. I substantiate this by illustrating how the same interview data can be analyzed on multiple levels, rendering it useful in different ways in different contexts. I thus argue that reflexivity is essential in the Community Psychologist's struggle for usefulness: it is in reflecting on the complexity of the research task (the demands of different contexts and different communities) that the Community Psychologist can engage strategically and productively with the possibilities and the limits of her usefulness. The data that are the focus of this article were generated in a long-term qualitative research project focusing on low-income, Black mothers from a semirural community in South Africa.