Interpretation Boundaries
Hello Qualitative Mind,
You probably know by now that most of my teaching through Quali Q is done outside of an academic institution. Yet, I try as much as possible to foster connections and work opportunities within universities, especially the University of Alberta where I spent so many years of my life {and which I feel super attached to}. Whenever I receive an invitation for a guest lecture my default answer is, “Yes! Tell me what you need from me.”
Last month I taught “Reflexivity and Positionality in Qualitative Research” to a group of graduate students (thanks, Melissa, for the opportunity), and during my presentation I shared with them an example from work I had done with another graduate student. That example triggered a super interesting and valuable question.
I told graduate students in the class about an instance where my client/mentee and I were going through one interview transcript (I had sat in on the interview), and we both realized that towards the end of the interview the participant made a comment about her friend that seemed to be a lot deeper than we initially thought.
The participant was sharing a story about her friend and her friend’s mother, but it seemed to us that our participants was also talking about her friend’s perceptions about the research topic (sorry…I can’t give details here), and how it made her feel.
When we, as a research team, started talking about what was going on there, we came up with a few interpretations about our participant’s story. We thought our participant was actually talking about something much deeper that touched on judgement, prejudice and moral values.
However, in that process of interpreting what the participant said we discussed that, as researchers, we had to be careful with the meanings we were ascribing to the participant’s words. Her story was absolutely interesting, and in my opinion had a place in the discussion.
However, I felt that we shouldn’t include those interpretations in our results because we couldn’t actually put those interpretations in our participant’s mouth. As interviewers, we didn't probe during the interview and missed the opportunity there.
I shared this exact example in class and then one of the students unmuted her Zoom microphone and asked, “Why wouldn't you make sure that those interpretations you had were reflected in your results? Wouldn't that be important? And wouldn't it be, in a way, going against trying to build a thick description if you removed that from your results?”
What an incredibly interesting sequence of questions!
I responded to the student that it depended on the qualitative methods being used.
What is your paradigm?
What is your methodology?
What are your methods?
For the particular study I drew the example from, we were conducting qualitative description and using semi-structured interviews to collect qualitative data. Participants were contacted and interviewed once, and we didn’t repeat interviews with any of them. Additionally, the study was rooted in a pragmatic paradigm.
With that in mind, I didn’t see it as appropriate to include researchers’ implicit interpretations in the results. We could, and probably should, include them at some point in the discussion while keeping it in mind that we didn’t give that participant (or any of the participants) a chance to clarify what they meant.
If we were doing phenomenology, grounded theory or involving participants in member checking, things would be different! We’d have an opportunity to go back to the specific participant and say, “We heard this story from you and it sounded like you felt judged by your friend’s actions. What do you think?” And that would have given the participant a chance to reflect on what was previously said and be part of the interpretation.
In my example, I cautioned my mentee about what to do with our interpretation. But, if it was another study design or another paradigm, we probably would have had a chance to probe, ask more questions at a later encounter, and clarify what was behind a seemingly casual story.
It’s possible that further probing and clarification would give us more details and facilitate the ideal “thick description” we want to write based on qualitative data.
Talk soon,
Maira