Interpretive Methodologies and Methods: Introduction and Overview

Interpretive (-qualitative) approaches in the social sciences position meaning as a fundamental element of social (inter-) action, reflecting late 20th century developments in the philosophy of (social) science.  Since the late 1970s, pushing back against the so-called behavioral(ist) revolution, political and other social scientists have increasingly turned, once again, to generating data through one or more of three methods—observing, with whatever degree of participation; talking to people, which includes formal interviews as a subset; and the identification and close ‘reading’, literal and/or figurative, of research-relevant documents and visual materials—retaining the word (or visual) form of those data for analysis, rather than translating them into numbers for statistical analysis.  When done in keeping with ideas from phenomenology, hermeneutics, and/or related ways of seeing and knowing, these have become known as interpretive research methods. This short course will give an overview of the background out of which interpretive analytic approaches developed, pointing to what methods are included in these approaches.