Interpretive Research Design

1

WHEREFORE RESEARCH DESIGNS?

FIGURE 1.1     What is this?Photo credit: Merlijn van Hulst.

What is this? How does it work? And how will you figure that out?

Whatever it is—we will get to that later—it is represented here through a photograph. That means that you are restricted to observing it with your eyes (assuming you are sighted, another issue to take up later, in Chapter 7) as you seek to make sense of it. It is analogous, in this sense, to a word, a phrase or a visual image you might encounter during field research, whether in historical documents you have accessed in an archive or in contemporary research-relevant documents made available ...