Understanding

Understanding is comprehending an entity; achieving a grasp of the essence of another or of an experience; empathizing or sympathizing with another individual, group, or culture; or knowing what something is about or what something is like. Understanding is predetermined by a belief that experience is embodied with meaning, significance, and characteristics, that there is something to be understood.

The act of understanding allows us to perceive, distinguish, and make sense of the nature of being-in-world. It also encourages us to know the consequences of things and of actions and reactions to varying entities. The more one understands something, the greater one's awareness becomes of the embeddedness, the implied order, and the interconnectedness of human phenomena and experience. Through understanding, we come to discern patterns of language, sounds, forms, symbols, behavior, action and reactions, themes as characteristics, and the essence intrinsic to individuals and their experience.

Within the realm of qualitative research, unlike the natural science approach, understanding an entity makes no claims of generalizability and instead focuses on the subjective nature of the particular. Understanding from the qualitative perspective is at first paradoxical, as a researcher is asked to suspend his or her prior understanding of behavior or experience, sometimes called bracketing or unknowing. From the perspective of qualitative research the very characteristics of understanding need to be seen for how they might interfere with the research goal, which is in some form to understand. Some of these characteristics that could influence clarity come from the realization that when one attempts to understand something one already has presuppositions, prejudices, biases, and his or her own experiences and perceptions, existing traditions, history culture, and constructions of reality. Researchers are not blank slates. They are representatives of their own understandings.

Understanding, within the qualitative research paradigm, is a project of discovery with the potential of emancipation from the distorting aspects of prejudices, bias, presuppositions, and traditions. This process of understanding phenomena is very powerful and requires self-knowledge, introspection, and circumspection. Presuppositions, like perceptions, are critical whether one is the researcher or the participant because individuals see these points of view as truth.

Individuals understand the world through constructing it with their own values, beliefs, and attitudes originating from the context and contingencies of their lives. There is a prejudgment to understanding of an entity based on many things, among them the historical, experiential moment in time. So researchers have already presupposed when they seek to understand.

The understanding of individuals, groups, cultures, and experience that originates from contingencies of a different temporal, historical, and cultural context in which individuals no longer reside, nor are a part of, often results in finite boundaries, bereft of meaning, and essentially limited in usefulness. Such acontextual understanding can contribute to poor professional practice, injustice, inequality, oppression, and much misunderstanding in the temporal moment.

Suspending one's understandings of phenomena to the extent possible allows one to engage in an authentic encounter open to discovery and different possibilities [Page 904]and to engage in the truth of another's understanding. The various interpretations of reality in a very multi-storied world, however, are essential to understand if social and political policies, professional practices, and the emergence of different theories and approaches are to be free of bias and prejudice, appropriate to the individual or group, and effective and successful.

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