Abstract
The kinds of specialised questions that tend to be generated in educational contexts are intimately connected to professional practices, with the aim of understanding the complexities of social, discursive and textual practices within those contexts. This chapter presents an analysis of a range of difficult-to-categorise qualitative work that spans grounded theory, through post-structural analysis to structural linguistics, and which the authors in this section have used to address such complex and contextualised questions. What draws the work together is the notion of interpretation. The social, linguistic and psychological phenomena which form the heart of these questions raises challenges for researchers as they develop interpretive analyses that honours agency, multiplicity and difference. This chapter showcases and analyses the approaches of nine researchers as they undertake this kind of interpretive work. In the process, it also highlights the evolution of research methods, as new ‘emerging’ and continuously expanding forms of educational research driven by an ever-increasing range of educational problems, contexts, and interpretive tools to understand them.
The literature regarding the process ‘ordinary’ researchers engage in as they struggle to make sense of qualitative data is sparse (Kendall 1999, p. 749).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Archer, M. S. (2000). Being human: The problem of agency. Cambridge, U.K., New York: Cambridge University Press.
Biesta, G. (2007). Why ‘what works’ won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: From evidence-based education to value-based education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(5), 491–503.
Biesta, G. (2015). On the two cultures of educational research, and how we might move ahead: Reconsidering the ontology, axiology and praxeology of education. European Educational Research Journal, 14(1), 11–22.
Blumer, H. (1986). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, United States: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words. Palo Alto, United States: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1992). The logic of practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Clarke, A. E. (2005). Situational analysis: Grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications Inc.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2011). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Giddens, A. (1976). New rules of sociological method: a positive critique of interpretative sociologies. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradictions in social analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glass, G. V. (2016). One hundred years of research prudent aspirations. Educational Researcher, 45(2), 69–72.
Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York and London: Routledge.
Kendall, J. (1999). Axial coding and the grounded theory controversy. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 21(6), 743–757.
Kvale, S. (2008). Qualitative inquiry between scientific evidentialism, ethical subjectivism and the free market. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1, 5–18.
Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy within/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge.
Lather, P. (2004). This is your father’s paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(1), 15–34.
Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. New York and London: Routledge.
Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1961). Notes on the history of quantification in sociology-trends, sources and problems. Isis, 52(2), 277–333.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, M. (Ed.). (2013). Social theory and education research: Understanding Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida. New York: Routledge.
Neilsen, L. (1994). A stone in my shoe: Teaching literacy in times of change. Winnipeg: Peguis.
Parsons, T. (1950). The social system. New York: Basic Books.
Saint Pierre, E. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward ‘post inquiry.’ Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2). Retrieved from http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/521.
Wrong, D. H. (1961). The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomas, A., Corbett, M. (2018). Ways of Working in the Interpretive Tradition. In: Kember, D., Corbett, M. (eds) Structuring the Thesis. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0511-5_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0511-5_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0510-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0511-5
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)