authors of such research establish the bona fides of their manuscripts sooner
rather than later, to the benefit of the writing-reading-reviewing process.
This effort stems from my concern that as an epistemic community,
those of us who practice interpretive methods of various sorts have, with
rare exception, not done as good a job as we could, or should, in educating
others as to their entailments. Resulting manuscripts – including published
ones – have often not been as clear as they might in laying out what such
work entails, nor have methods textbooks, by and large, been of help in this
(Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2002). This lack of clarity, in turn, has led to a
mystification of interpretive research processes, on the one hand, and a
sense among those proficient in other forms of research, on the other, that
these methods have no system – that they are impressionistic, rather than
And so I write for a second sort of reader as well: potential reviewers
of such manuscripts who may be relatively unfamiliar with the kind of ‘rigor’
that is particular to interpretive methods’ systematicity. Perhaps because
research methods courses are typically taught without attention to
underlying ontological and epistemological presuppositions – Statistics I
courses, for example, tend to start right off with descriptive stats rather than
with a more philosophical treatment of the concept of probability and
Popperian (or other) arguments concerning the possibility of certain
0Because interpretive methods do not possess rigor in the ways that quantitative methods,
for instance, do, I put the term in quotation marks. See Yanow 2006 for an extended
discussion of the meanings of rigor in research methods.
Convention