Interpretivism: for and against culture

In the schema presented in the Introduction, the first column is headed ‘Epistemology’. Objectivism, which we have related to positivism and post-positivism, and constructionism, which we dealt with in the last chapter, are examples of epistemological positions encountered within the field of social research. As stated already, we shall encounter examples of a more subjectivist epistemology when we come to postmodernism. Now, however, we are returning to our second column, already visited in our discussion of positivism, and will concern ourselves with further theoretical perspectives embedded within research methodologies.

‘Theoretical perspective’ is being taken here to mean the philosophical stance lying behind a methodology. The theoretical perspective provides a context for the process involved and a basis for its logic and its criteria. Another way to put it is to say that, whenever one examines a particular methodology, one discovers a complexus of assumptions buried within it. It is these assumptions that constitute one’s theoretical perspective and they largely have to do with the world that the methodology envisages. Different ways of viewing the world shape different ways of researching the world.

The theoretical perspective considered in this chapter—interpretivism —emerged in contradistinction to positivism in attempts to understand and explain human and social reality. As Thomas Schwandt puts it (1994, p. 125), ‘interpretivism was conceived in reaction to the effort to develop a natural science of the social. Its foil was largely logical empiricist methodology and the bid to apply that framework to human inquiry’.

A positivist approach would follow the methods of the natural sciences and, by way of allegedly value-free, detached observation, seek to identify universal features of humanhood, society and history that offer explanation and hence control and predictability. The interpretivist approach, to the contrary, looks for culturally derived and historically situated interpretations of the social life-world.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.