This document provides an overview of the interpretive research paradigm, including its key assumptions, origins, methods, and evolution. It discusses interpretivism's focus on understanding meaning and interpretation through socially constructed realities. The document outlines interpretivism's ontology of multiple subjective realities and epistemology of dynamic, context-dependent meanings. It also summarizes common interpretive research methods like interviews and observations. Finally, it notes some challenges of interpretive research and criteria for evaluating interpretive studies.

1. Interpretive Paradigm
Vicky Fauteux & Savithiri Ratnapalan
CTL 1018 Winter 2017

2. Aim/Objectives
• To share our interpretation of interpretive research with regards to
• Paradigms and assumptions
• Origins and what it means
• Growth over the years and scope
• How is it conducted
• Purposes, uses and limitations

3. Paradigms
Views that will affect research questions, strategy, data collection,
analysis methods and evaluation of research.
It is also a set of assumptions shared within a research community
•Positivism
•Interpretivist (constructivist)
•Critical research

4. Paradigm properties
• Ontology: Nature of reality
– Fundamental beliefs about the empirical world we conduct research on.
• Epistemology: the relationship between the researcher and the reality
– the reasoning process by which researchers perform research.

5. To Recap Positivist research
Ontologically: Our world is ordered and regular, not random. There exist
universal laws that can be studied and understood.
Epistemologically: We can investigate the world objectively through
experiments.
• The scientific method trying to discover regular laws/ patterns in our universe.
• Principles: valid, reliable, objective (no bias) and generalizable

6. The scientific method cycle(Positivism)
• Formulate theory about some observed aspect of the world.
• Derive hypothesis.
• Test hypothesis objectively.
• Observe results.
• Confirm or refute hypothesis.
• Accept, modify or reject theory.

7. Interpretive Research
Understanding + meaning-making,
However, the kind of understanding being sought is determined by the
researchers depending on their assumptions and methods
‘No facts, only interpretations’ – Nietzschean
(Bhattacharya, 2008, p. 3)

8. Issues with Positivism
Positivism Interpretivism

9. Ontology(nature of reality) in Interpretivism
No direct access to real world
No single external reality
• People constructs their own reality based on “subjective principles
peculiar to that person” (Sipe & Constable, 1996, p. 158)
• All knowledge is socially constructed (Denzin, 2008, p. 315)

10. Epistemology in Interpretivism
• Reality understood through ‘perceived’ knowledge
• Research focuses on the specific and concrete(not on generalizability)
• Seeking to understand specific context
• The researcher thinks critically, historically and biographically (Denzin,
2002)

11. Interpretisivm
• Aim: understanding interpretation
• Theory-Practice relationship: From practice to theory- inductive
• Researcher’s role: May be outsider or participant, usually does not try
to influence
• Researcher participant relationship: Cooperation, still you
• Reflection: What, How (and sometimes Why)

12. What do studies using interpretative theories
examine?
• Interpretive studies examine how problematic, turning-point experiences are
organized, perceived, constructed, and given meaning by interacting individuals.
Note : Interpretivism as a qualitative research paradigm ( methodological - a way to do
an inquiry) and interpretive theories (social theories – a way of conceptualizing and
theorizing social power, not necessarily empirical studies with data etc. are different
concepts.

13. Early studies in naturalistic settings evolved to…
Researcher’s meanings
(+ ‘understanding’) Co-created meaning
Local meanings/
Emancipatory knowledge

14. Paradigm shifts simplified
• Positivist criticism
– Research is removed from reality
– The existence of multiple realities
– Meaning being socially constructed
– The claims of validity, objectivity and generalizability
• Interpretive paradigm with its emphasis on individuals, meaning and
understanding developed and naturalistic inquiry developed within it
• Interpretative paradigm ended up being a collection of everything that was
not positivist and other paradigms such as constructivism, critical,
feminism and post structuralism developed from it.

15. Decolonization & the evolution of interpretative research
Ethnomethodoly
Interpretive paradigms have expanded and have shifted from colonizing post-positivist
theories.
Other paradigms such as ‘critical’ ‘feminism’ ‘post-structural’ paradigms developed from
the interpretive paradigms.
Phenomenolog
y
Positivist & post-
positivist models
Constructivist–
interpretive models

16. Interpretative Research Communities
Cultural Studies
Queer Studies,
Indigenous Research Studies,
 Ethnic Studies,
Marxist Studies

17. Interpretive research
1. Multiple subjective realities: There is no one truth.
2. Dynamic, socially constructed meaning: meaning is made and
changes with context
3. Researcher not neutral.
4. Study involves people in their natural social settings
5. Qualitative data : narratives, songs , metaphors, images, stories.
6. Multiple interpretations: researchers offer more than one
explanation.

18. THE STEPS TO INTERPRETATION
1. Framing the research question
2. Deconstructing and analyzing critically prior conceptions of the phenomenon
3. Capturing the phenomenon, including locating and situating it in the natural world and
obtaining multiple instances of it
4. Bracketing the phenomenon, or reducing it to its essential elements & cutting it loose
from the natural world so that its essential structures & features may be uncovered
5. Constructing the phenomenon, or putting the phenomenon back together in terms of
its essential parts, pieces, and structures
6. Contextualizing the phenomenon, or relocating the phenomenon back in the natural
social world
“The Interpretive Process,” in Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism (2nd ed., pp. 70–84). Sage Publications, Inc.

19. Framing the research question
Steps in framing the question
1. Locating, within his or her own personal history, the problematic
biographical experience to be studied
2. Discovering how this problem, as a private trouble, is or is becoming a
public issue that affects multiple lives, institutions, and social groups
3. Locating the institutional formations or sites where persons with these
troubles do things together
4. Beginning to ask not why but how it is that these experiences occur
5. Attempting to formulate the research question into a single statement

20. Qualitative methods that can be used in
interpretative studies : an overview (adapted from Creswell 1998)

21. Methods used in interpretative research
Depend on disciplines, the objective of the study or research question
• Ethnographic Methods
• Classic Traditional Interviews
• Case Studies
• Focus Groups
• Observational Studies Apart From Ethnographies,
• Action research
• Analyses Of Cultural Records, Archival Documents, Artifacts, Visual Materials,
Multimedia Texts, Or Personal Experiences.
It is advisable for researchers to use as many of as possible and triangulate data

22. Interpretive Criteria
• Interpretive materials are evaluated in terms of the following criteria:
1. Do they illuminate the phenomenon as lived experience?
2. Are they based on thickly contextualized materials?
3. Are they historically and relationally grounded?
4. Are they processual and interactional?
5. Do they engulf what is known about the phenomenon?
6. Do they incorporate prior understandings of the phenomenon?
7. Do they cohere and produce understanding?
8. Are they unfinished?

23. Challenges to interpretative research
Although all research conducted in the interpretative paradigm cannot
be grouped together, researchers should consider and work around
some of the following potential challenges
• Time consuming to design the study, collect data and analysis
• May be expensive (time, money and emotional costs)
• Challenges to obtaining ethics approval
• Challenges to obtaining funding and publication ( getting better now)

24. 24
So make convey the following in interpretative research studies ( or any
qualitative research)
• Artful design & explanation/reason for every design choice
• Creativity in use of methods & techniques
•Many approaches ,Scope varies widely
•Different assumptions: what we can know & how we can know
•No single gold standard
•Research question will drive choice of methods
• Reflexivity
• Elegant expression
• Strategic disarmament

25. Thank You!
We hope you find this presentation useful.
Please feel free to send us your comments or questions
What is your interpretation of this picture?
Savithiri &Vicky