15 Chapter 12 Interpretive Research
The last chapter introduced interpretive research, or more specifically, interpretive case research. This chapter will explore other kinds of interpretive research. Recall that positivist or deductive methods, such as laboratory experiments and survey research, are those that are specifically intended for theory (or hypotheses) testing, while interpretive or inductive methods, such as action research and ethnography, are intended for theory building. Unlike a positivist method, where the researcher starts with a theory and tests theoretical postulates using empirical data, in interpretive methods, the researcher starts with data and tries to derive a theory about the phenomenon of interest from the observed data.
The term “interpretive research” is often used loosely and synonymously with “qualitative research”, although the two concepts are quite different. Interpretive research is a research paradigm (see Chapter 3) that is based on the assumption that social reality is not singular or objective, but is rather shaped by human experiences and social contexts (ontology), and is therefore best studied within its socio-historic context by reconciling the subjective interpretations of its various participants (epistemology). Because interpretive researchers view social reality as being embedded within and impossible to abstract from their social settings, they “interpret” the reality though a “sense-making” process rather than a hypothesis testing process. This is in contrast to the positivist or functionalist paradigm that assumes that the reality is relatively independent of the context, can be abstracted from their contexts, and studied in a decomposable functional manner using objective techniques such as standardized measures. Whether a researcher should pursue interpretive or positivist research depends on paradigmatic considerations about the nature of the phenomenon under consideration and the best way to study it.
However, qualitative versus quantitative research refers to empirical or data -oriented considerations about the type of data to collect and how to analyze them. Qualitative research relies mostly on non-numeric data, such as interviews and observations, in contrast to quantitative research which employs numeric data such as scores and metrics. Hence, qualitative research is not amenable to statistical procedures such as regression analysis, but is coded using techniques like content analysis. Sometimes, coded qualitative data is tabulated quantitatively as frequencies of codes, but this data is not statistically analyzed. Many puritan interpretive researchers reject this coding approach as a futile effort to seek consensus or objectivity in a social phenomenon which is essentially subjective.
Although interpretive research tends to rely heavily on qualitative data, quantitative data may add more precision and clearer understanding of the phenomenon of interest than qualitative data. For example