B 203: Qualitative Research Techniques

Interpretivism• Symbolic Interaction•Hermeneutics

Growth of Interpretivism

• “The age of purative value-free social science appears to be over. Accordingly, . . . any discussion of this process must become political, personal, and experiential” (Denzin 1994)

• collection and interpretation of qualitative data on humans are inherently subjective.

• the result is not an objective report of the truth of the matter.

What is Interpretation?

• “an art; it is not formulaic or mechanical. It can be learned, like any form of storytelling only through doing. . . . Fieldworkers can neither make sense of nor understand what has been learned until they sit down and write the interpretive text, telling the story first to themselves, and then to their significant others, and then to the public”

Focus

• an interpretive or phenomenologically based text would emphasize socially constructed realities, local generalizations, interpretive resources, stocks of knowledge intersubjectivity, practical reasoning, and ordinary talk

Features• There are multiple perspectives, or ways of knowing about

the world, and both artists and scientists can contribute to our knowledge of the world

• Human knowledge is constructed, not discovered.• The forms (e.g., scholarly paper, narrative, play, poem,

painting) humans use to communicate their understanding influence what they can say.

• Effective use of any form requires intelligence.• Selecting a particular form influences not only what we can

say about the world but also what we as researchers see.• Using multiple methods of research makes our studies

“more complete and informative (Eisner 1997, p. 8).

Four Ways of Defining Interpretive Understanding

• Empathic Understanding• Phenomenological Sociology (Indexicality and

Reflexivity)• Language Games• Philosophical Hermeneutics

Dimensions of Understanding

• Interpretivism encompasses two dimensions of understanding-– “The name of a complex process by which all of us

in our everyday life interpret the meaning of our own actions and those of others whom we interact”

– “A method peculiar to the social sciences, a process by which social scientist seeks to understand the primary process”

Interpretivism

• Symbolic Interaction• Hermeneutics• Phenomenology

Symbolic Interactionism

• “Symbolic interactionism” focuses on the connection between symbols (i.e., shared meanings) and i n t e r a c t i o n s (i.e., verbal and nonverbal actions and communications)

• It essentially is a frame of reference for understanding how humans, in concert with one another, create symbolic worlds and how these worlds, in turn, shape human behavior

Premises…

• Symbolic Interactionism rests on three primary premises.

• Human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them,

• Such meanings arise out of the interaction of the individual with others

• an interpretive process is used by the person in each instance in which he must deal with things in his environment.

Key Aspects• Humans have capacity for thought.• Thought is shaped by social interaction.• Through interaction, people learn symbols and

meanings that allow them to think.• Meanings and symbols allow for human action.• People can interpret a situation and modify

their action or interaction.• People can create own meanings.• Groups and societies are made up of patterns of

action and interaction.

Hermeneutics• The study of how we understand the communications, actions and

products of other human beings – especially those of past times or other cultures

• Dilthey is the most important nineteenth century theorist of ‘understanding’.

• He believed there was a need for a philosophical psychology, or hermeneutics, which would ground the methodology of the social and historical sciences

• He portrayed it as a psychological process whereby historians project themselves imaginatively into the lives of people in the past, ‘re-creating’ their experience, so as to capture the meanings embodied in texts and artefacts.

• His later account portrayed it as cultural interpretation, rather than as a subjective process

Gadamer’s Rejection

• “what is unknown can never be simply grasped or reproduced, since any interpretation necessarily draws on the particular socio-historical resources available to the interpreter”

• Treated it instead as a fundamental aspect of human-being-in-the world.

• From this point of view, it does not differ from lay forms of understanding; nor does it have the procedural, fixed character of a ‘method’

Gadamer’s View

• “Interpretation is always necessarily a matter of dialogue. What is involved is the interpreter beginning from assumptions that are a product of his or her own socio-cultural location, while at the same time opening these up to challenge in the course of interpretation”

Basic Features

• Hermeneutics focuses primarily on the meaning of qualitative data

• The purpose of using hermeneutics is to aid human understanding

• A ‘text-analogue’ is anything that can be treated as a text, such as an organization or a culture

• The hermeneutic task consists in understanding what a particular text means and helps a researcher to produce a story that is believable

Relevance• In qualitative research studies about business and

management, the ‘text’ is what people say and do• Interviews, documents and field notes record the

views of the actors and describe certain events, etc.• This material needs to be ordered, explained and

interpreted in order to ‘make sense’ of the situation• The ordering is done according to the researcher’s

theoretical position and by comparing one text with another

• The researcher’s understanding of the whole has to be continually revised in view of the reinterpretation of the parts