Abstract

The present paper intent to support the usefulness of some theoretical-methodological qualitative perspectives for the study of women’s health studies. This is a contribution to women’s function recognition in health systems as traditional health providers, communitary organizers and an invaluable help in familiar health care. Paper emphasized the importance of recognizing their needs in regard of planning and addressing health attention programs. Studies about menopause and midwifes are mentioned in this paper. They are proposals for knowing women’s meanings about those processes from their experience and knowledge. The aim is to discuss and to reflect about theoretical-methodological perspectives used in women and public health research. We try to go beyond to qualitative versus quantitative research dialectic. We emphasized the necessity of finding research strategies that improve that opposition. Two research experiences are described showing qualitative research used in women studies. One of them is about social representation of menospause and the other example is about traditional midwifes training program. Both show advantages of this methodology in social problems study. For studying social problems it is necessary a multidisciplinary perspective based in different methodological approaches. This is necessary to know, evaluate and solve those problems. This paper refers mainly to qualitative research, but also talk about methodological joint action advantages in regard of multicausal health process of women