What is Interpretive Analysis?

In my book, Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit (25 March 2025), I introduce the new term ‘Interpretive Analysis’. This is why….

First, all qualitative research is interpretivist, in the broadest sense.

Interpretivist social science works to understand people’s experiences and feelings, and the meanings behind them, to help them to clarify and express them, to make sense of these for ourselves in the context of our own lives and experiences, and finally to interpret or make sense of them for others so that our readers can make sense of them in the context of their own experiences.

So, analysis involves interpretation.

Interpretive Analysis as sense-making begins as soon as data collection (or generation) begins. Qualitative research is iterative-inductive, constantly iterating between being inductive (open-minded, bottom-up, learning from the field) and deductive (testing out existing and new theories and concepts to see if they help clarify understandings), with an inductive approach retaining the upper hand.

It employs a spiral logic of understanding that moves forward and closes down while curling back on itself as it goes. This enables the voices of the participants to be heard and the insights we learn to be incorporated into our research, learning as we go.

The analysis starts with what you wanted to know – with your research questions. But these should be amended as you learn more (and perhaps realise you were asking the wrong things, in the wrong way, or were overlooking something important).

Then, if you are drawing on phenomenology, you will be listening to, and finding ways to represent, the voices of the participants. If you are (also) influenced by a hermeneutic understanding you may wish to consider the wider context of culture. It may be that you are also interested in what people do, as well as what they say, or even what they don’t say or do. You may want to think about what people say they might do in future, making predictions, in order that you can propose how things might be changed to try to achieve desired outcomes.

The ultimate goal of qualitative analysis is to reduce the mass of information into something meaningful, communicable and coherent.

We want to achieve useful understandings, to use theories and concepts lightly, sensitively, and carefully, to benefit from preconceived ideas and our own knowledge, to shine a light onto things, but never to impose external ideas in a deterministic way.

In a subsequent blog post I will outline the nine heuristics, or ways of thinking about the logic of, interpretative analysis.