Interpretive Research Design ─ Concepts and Processes

Research design is fundamental to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. In many social science disciplines, however, scholars working in an interpretive-qualitative tradition get little guidance on this aspect of research from the positivist-centered training they receive. This book is an authoritative examination of the concepts and processes underlying the design of an interpretive research project. Such an approach to design starts with the recognition that researchers are inevitably embedded in the intersubjective social processes of the worlds they study.
In focusing on researchers’ theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methods choices in designing research projects, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow set the stage for other volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. They also engage some very practical issues, such as ethics reviews and the structure of research proposals. This concise guide explores where research questions come from, criteria for evaluating research designs, how interpretive researchers engage with "world-making," context, systematicity and flexibility, reflexivity and positionality, and such contemporary issues as data archiving and the researcher’s body in the field.

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea is Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. Dvora Yanow is Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and in the Communication Science Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, at Wageningen University. Together they are co-editors of Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn and created and run the "Methods Café" at both the American Political Science Association and Western Political Science Association annual meetings.

1. Research design: Why do we need it? 2. Ways of knowing: The logic of inquiry of interpretive research 3. Starting from meaning: Contextuality and its implications 4. Access, research relationships, researcher roles, positionality, and design flexibility 5. The character of evidence; mapping for exposure and intertextuality 6. "Truth claims" and trustworthiness: Anticipating evaluations of interpretive research; researcher sense-making in an abductive logic of inquiry 7. Design in context: From the human side of research to writing the research manuscript 8. Speaking across epistemic communities