Doing qualitative and interpretative research: reflecting principles and principled challenges

Abstract

Research in Political Science is increasingly based on qualitative and interpretative methods. Based on concrete experiences in a comprehensive qualitative interpretative study, this article discusses general challenges of interpretative methodologies and their application in Political Science. It fills a gap in the current methods literature by concretely explaining how the methodological presumptions of interpretative research are to be carried out in such a way that they lead to substantial findings, irrespective of the material, cases and method one choses. To do so, it is core to analyse not only the ‘what’, but also the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ in the material. A classical qualitative content analysis consists in analysing the ‘what’ in a text, a field, or a visual, that is, utterances, arguments, or concepts that are used in it. Beyond this, in a qualitative interpretative project, the second part of analysis targets the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of constructing meanings, narratives, arguments, topoi, or (mental) images. Analysing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ requires specific analytical and interpretative steps which are, however, barely discussed in the methods literature. Based on the experiences in a concrete research project, the article explains how to structure analytical steps for researching the ‘how’ and the ‘why’.