Interpretive Turn Research Articles

The Interpretive Turn in Modern Theory: A Turn for the Worse?

The Interpretive Turn in Modern Theory: A Turn for the Worse?

Philosophical ponderings on qualitative research methods in nursing.

This article focuses on the philosophical underpinnings of qualitative research methods. The historical context reflects an interpretive turn from envisioning nursing as a natural science to one of a human science. The phenomological paradigm is reflected upon in the questioning of perception, philosophy, nursing philosophy, paradigms, assumptions, and praxis. An invitation to embrace human understanding of experience, meaning of life worlds, the essences of experience, the attentive practice of thoughtfulness, and caring attunements is extended. The aims of discovery and qualitative research methods are presented within social, experiential, linguistic, and cultural contexts. In a fundamental sense, this paper is about the meaning and seriousness of human experience and nursing's efforts to study such experience faithfully, with reverence and wonderment.

“Then What Have I to do with Thee?”: On Identity, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Knowledge

Though I moved outside the system to a large extent, I was no less social a creature than any one of them, depending on the day-to-day gratifications of human interchange for my own emotional sustenance. I directly experienced the contagion of belief and feeling, since for me, to understand means to feel with, and in so doing to temporarily take inside a new set of reactions. To know the depth of someone's fear makes it impossible not to behave in terms of that fear; to know the people's definition of betrayal is to suffer in imagination their reaction to being betrayed. -Peggy Golde Women in the Field

Contingencies of Value

Contingencies of Value