210 ANALYZING DATA
also shares with other chapters an orientation we remarked on earlier in the book—that when
interpretive philosophical ideas are brought into the contexts of empirical research in communi-
ties, organizations, governments, and other aspects of human life, they must, and do, perforce
engage questions of power. At the very least, the critical reflexivity of these scholars into their
own location as researchers and writers—whether from an explicitly feminist standpoint perspec-
tive or from a more diffuse critical ethnographic one—engages the relationship between knowl-
edge and power that lies at the heart of critical theoretical work (see, e.g., Foucault 1970).
Pamela Brandwein’s and Ronald Schmidt, Sr.’s, chapters (12 and 17) illustrate a central fea-
ture of interpretive analyses in policy contexts. From the point of view that the social sciences
yield an interpretation of their subject matter rather than an exact replica of it, there is no single,
correct solution to a policy problem any more than there is a single correct perception of what that
problem is. Interpretive approaches, with their focus on the multiplicity of meaning, shift policy-
relevant analysis rather strongly to the framing of problem statements, rather than treating these
as given. This point has been touched on in the social problems literature in sociology (see, e.g.,
Best 1995) and, to some extent, in the constructionist literature in political science (e.g., Schneider
and Ingram 2005). These two chapters are suggestive of other directions in which these approaches
might develop, both substantively and methodologically.
In identifying authors working in these several modes, we encountered the communities of
practice problem described in the book introduction (note 13, pp. xxv–xxvi) with respect to the
use of “constructivism” in various epistemic communities. In the international relations com-
munity within political science, for example, some constructivist scholars are more realist in
their ontological approaches, others are more interpretive, and there is contestation over the
use of constructivist versus constructionist along these lines. Similarly, within both the social
problems community in sociology and the public policy community in political science, some
treatments of “social constructions” objectify them in a realist fashion, dislodging them from
the context of processes that phenomenologists saw as central. Psychology also has its own
versions of this debate (see Hacking 1999 on the construction of ideas about things, rather than
the things themselves; and note 13 on pages xxv–xxvi). Given that our understanding of social
constructionism/constructivism is informed by Schütz’s writings and those of his students (e.g.,
Berger and Luckmann 1966), we call on scholars in the interpretive research community—as
Milliken (1999) calls on the international relations community—to engage in “more serious
reflection” not only on how to do discourse studies (her charge), but also on what they mean
when they do constructionist or constructivist research and how their interpretations of this
work are similar to or divergent from what Schütz, Husserl, and others meant when they de-
scribed social constructionist processes. The difficulty we all face in doing such work lies in
the fact that analysis treats the observable half-lives of processes that are most difficult to catch
while they are unfolding. Yet it can be done, and we urge our colleagues to continue to engage
the struggle to do so.WHAT IS NOT HEREThere is such a wide variety of interpretive methods in use across the social sciences that we could
not possibly include examples of all of them here and still retain a book of manageable size and
cost. We have tried to include examples of approaches that are not readily available in other
methodological collections. The analytic processes of semiotics, ethnomethodology, symbolic
interaction, dramaturgy (the application of Kenneth Burke’s theories [1969 (1945), 1989]), meta-
phor analysis, category analysis, and myth analysis, for example, all interesting topics, are available