People continually reflect on themselves and their worlds, and they are continually called upon to give accounts of themselves. People have hopes, fears, reasons, intentions, and values, and they may experience times of satisfaction, confusion, and demoralization. The premise of this book is that researchers ought to and can study these matters. In this book, we give readers the conceptual framework and practical tools to do so.

We have written this book for students and researchers who are new to qualitative research. We have been doing qualitative research for more than two decades. Each of us has taught courses on qualitative research for many years and supervised such research in a variety of contexts. We have taught psychology students, medical students, students in interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, and social science researchers new to this type of research. We have also jointly conducted seminars on research methods in several countries and for scholars from many backgrounds. And we have written about theories and practices of gender research (Magnusson and Marecek, 2012). This book draws on all of these experiences as teachers, supervisors, and researchers. Our hope is that readers of this book will become adept and judicious practitioners of the research methods that we present.

Introducing interpretative research

Before we proceed, we pause to introduce a key term. For the types of research methods you will learn here, the term qualitative research is the term most commonly used. However, we use the term interpretative research. We have chosen this term because it is both more precise and more descriptive. Interpretation is at the heart of the research methods we describe in this book. The goal of these methods is to understand – that is, to interpret – the meanings that people ascribe to events and actions, how they make these meanings their own, and how they negotiate these meanings in interactions with other people. The term interpretative research thus forthrightly proclaims the central purpose of the research as well as the central activity of the researcher.