Interpretive Research Design

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DESIGNING FOR TRUSTWORTHINESS

Knowledge Claims and Evaluations of Interpretive Research

Doubt concerning the trustworthiness of research claims is fundamental to understandings of science. Plans for subjecting these claims to doubt or to “testing,” a hallmark of science, are commonly built into research designs. But these practices are enacted in dramatically different ways in interpretive and positivist approaches. Much of the extant literature on research design assumes a front-loaded, standardized research process based on positivist conceptions of knowledge and positivist standards of evaluating knowledge claims and the research process that has produced them. These are at odds with the iterative, phenomenological–hermeneutic sense-making ...