The Schwartz-Shea and Yanow
Dissertation Fellowship for Interpretive Research
in the Department of Political Science

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This Fellowship honors the long-term collaboration of Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow and celebrates students’ adoption of interpretive methodologies in dissertation projects. Its purpose is to support one or more Political Science students through an endowed Fellowship whose dissertation project employs interpretive methodologies and their associated methods in the conduct of empirical research. Interpretive methodologies presuppose a constructivist ontology and an interpretivist epistemology, seeking holistic scientific explanations of political phenomena which focus on the meaning-making of persons and collectives (e.g., organizations) involved in those phenomena. Given these methodological presuppositions, qualifying methods include: participant-observational and/or ethnographic methods, conversational and ordinary language interviewing, and narrative, discourse and textual approaches, among others. (For more detail, see below.)

To assess whether a project meets the Fellowship criteria, the Chair of the Department of Political Science or their designee, assesses the applicant’s approved dissertation proposal. Projects that would not qualify for the Fellowship include those using: quantitative-statistical methods; positivist qualitative methods; philosophical or political-theoretical research without a strong interpretive empirical component.

Additional detail on Interpretive Methodologies and Methods

History: The linage of interpretivist research traditions can be traced to the mid- to late 19th-century, building on phenomenology and hermeneutics (see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2020). These traditions are used across the social sciences and offer insights not available through other research approaches. Their presence in academic training strengthens the ideal and practice of methodological pluralism, which broadens and deepens the social knowledge available to humanity.

Philosophy of science: Philosophical presuppositions about ontology (the reality status of the phenomenon under study) and epistemology (how we know what we know) underlie all scientific work. Interpretive methodological approaches presuppose a constructivist ontology and an interpretivist (inter-subjectivist) epistemology, seeking holistic scientific explanations of political phenomena which focus on the meaning-making and potentially multiple and even conflicting meanings entailed in those phenomena. Unlike other methodological approaches, interpretivism eschews variables thinking (the a priori carving up of the world by scientists), instead focusing on the meaning making of actors in context, considering that meaning making as central to understanding and explanation in the social sciences.

The methodology-methods linkage: In this empirical tradition, methodology is akin to “applied” philosophy, and “methods” are understood not as “neutral tools” but as ways of enacting methodological-philosophical commitments. Given the philosophical presuppositions spelled out above, typical methods include: participant-observational and/or ethnographic methods, conversational and ordinary language interviewing, and narrative, discourse and textual approaches, among others. Some methods, however, can be used in keeping with a variety of methodological approaches, such that it is important to check philosophical presuppositions for their congruence with a meaning-focused hermeneutic phenomenology (or phenomenological hermeneutics). Interpretivist interviewing, for example, sees researcher identity not as a contaminant but as a resource, using reflexivity about researcher identity and positionality to understand interview evidence as co-produced by researcher and researched (rather than seeking “objectivity”).

Neither quantitative-statistical research nor positivist-qualitative research fit the methodological presuppositions of interpretive research as these are based on variables thinking

References:

Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine, and Yanow, Dvora. 2020. “Interpretivism.” SAGE Research Methods Foundations, eds. Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Alexandru Cernat, Joseph W. Sakshaug, and Richard A. Williams. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036915455