Interpreting Results

General Principles and Assumptions

In qualitative research, one's object is to learn the thoughts and feelings behind the actions of participants. In other words, a researcher endeavors to grasp the perspectives of a participant in order to appreciate how the participant's actions and feelings can be understood as being reasonable and coherent. Such an interpretive undertaking requires attention to whole-part relationships in order to discern the meaning of particular experiences for participants. The particular experience of interest to a researcher must be understood as part of the larger whole of the person's or organization/institution's life. A researcher must have an understanding of the whole in order to perceive the role or significance of the part.

To provide opportunities for depth of data collection and analysis, case study research often entails working with as few as three or four participants in case studies of individuals. A researcher may interact with and/or observe a participant over time if the participant's experience of a current activity is being studied. Alternatively, a researcher may wish to learn about how participants have experienced events that have already occurred. In this case, there are typically as many meetings or interviews as are needed to establish a relationship and create opportunities for participants to recall, share, and reflect on the experiences of interest. Because experience can be communicated only through story, it is important for interviews to include questions that invite anec-dotes or stories. Ideally, a researcher will also use the interview opportunities to learn about the context of the experiences of interest. Context refers to both the specific sites in which experiences occurred and to a more holistic appreciation of how participants experience themselves or their lives more generally. Such contextual backdrops are important for informing interpretation of participants' specific comments or stories regarding the experience of interest to the researcher.

Although qualitative researchers often wish to develop insights that can be expressed abstractly, they must begin by developing a storied understanding of the experiences they wish to theorize. It is through the process of working from all transcripts and field notes to write narrative analyses that a researcher's own storied understanding of participants' experiences crystallizes. Narrative analyses are explanatory stories crafted through the gathering and analysis of events and happenings to form a plot. Stories show cause and effect [Page 485]and human motivation, and they teach the reader how to feel about what happens in the story. The narratively written case studies, already a result of much analysis and interpretive work, are then analyzed for patterns, themes, or insights that can be expressed abstractly. In reporting on the research the narratively written case studies render the abstractly stated findings persuasive and can afford the study such attributes as verisimilitude, praxis, ethic of care, and multivoiced texts.

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