Interpreting and theorizing research interviews

Kathryn Roulston and Melissa Freeman

Chapter 13 in Handbook of Interpretive Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 2025, pp 199-210 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Scholars have written about the practicalities of conducting interviews for at least a century. Nevertheless, when publishing findings of studies using interviews, researchers frequently pay little attention to the implications of the epistemological and theoretical assumptions underlying their use of interview data and what interviewees’ accounts are taken to mean. Quite simply, numerous reports of interview research findings are assumed to reflect participants’ experiences and beliefs and to directly account for what goes on in “reality.” As such, these reports leave unaccounted the interpretive processes involved in meaning-making, along with the theoretical assumptions upon which claims are based. This chapter highlights concepts from hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ethnomethodology and their influence on interpretive practices used in the interpretation of research interviews. Scholars working within an interpretivist perspective might use these to formulate analytical questions that contribute findings that add nuanced interpretations of complex phenomena.

Keywords: Qualitative interviews; Interpretive paradigm; Data analysis; Hermeneutics; Phenomenology; Ethnomethodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803926384
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