Interpretive Research

Hermeneutics

According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutics (literally the study of interpretation with its historical roots in biblical interpretations) recognizes that our being and doing are intimately connected. This is the way we are fundamentally, and philosophical hermeneutics focuses in different ways on the relationship between the predisposed self-understanding of the interpreter and the “active character” of everything that addresses this understanding.

Ethnography and Interpretation

Clifford Geertz criticized what he called the “casual references” to the Verstehen approach or emic analysis and emphasized the need to acknowledge that [Page 465]it is interpretation, rather than an exact understanding, that qualitative researchers can hope for. At bottom, according to Geertz, anthropological research and representation is only interpretive—and second- or thirdhand at that—given that the firsthand “understanding” or “interpretation” really lies with the “subject” such as the individual, group, or community being studied.

Qualitative Methods and the Interpretive Turn

Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln discussed the tension in qualitative research between the interpretive and postpositivist sensibilities. In interpretive research, meaning is disclosed, discovered, and experienced. The emphasis is on sensemaking, description, and detail. For the antinaturalistic interpretive researcher, human action constitutes subjective interpretations of meanings. Therefore, meaning-making is underscored as the primary goal of interpretive research in the understanding of social phenomena.

Traditional Ethnography, the Chicago School, and Decolonizing Research

Over time, interpretive theories have shifted from colonizing postpositivist theories toward emancipatory theories such as feminism. Traditional interpretive research saw colonizers (missionaries included) and White male anthropologists interpreting the “native” through the study of “other” cultures. By the end of the 19th century, the Chicago School emphasized the development of an interpretive methodology that focused on narrative life histories allowing the researcher to tell the subject's story. Although this was a huge shift from earlier paradigms methodologically (for the first time, life stories were told as spoken by ordinary people and were accepted as scholarship), this project was still implicated in a racist one. The underlying suggestion was that first colonizers and then White male scholars provided the natives and people of color across the world with history and research. A large part of scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities was geared in aiding this process. Feminist writer bell hooks, in her reading of the cover of Stephen Tyler's book Writing Culture, illustrated the intersection of race and gender in these othering Orientalist studies of culture and meanings.

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