20 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
One can delineate four interpretive moments over the course of a research project.^34 Assume
that we are interested in understanding an event. With a contemporaneous event, initial interpre-
tations are made by persons actually present and observing it, even, perhaps, actively participat-
ing in it. This could as well be the researcher, acting as participant-observer, as a member of the
community-society-polity-organization under study. In an initial experiential interpretation, the
researcher casts herself, implicitly, in an “as if” role—as if she is standing in for the situational
member, drawing on their shared humanity as a point of reference, while also drawing on her own
stranger-ness, which enables her to see and make explicit what for others is common sense. As
noted above, she will want to corroborate, refute, or revise that initial, provisional sense making
through conversations (interviews) with situational members and/or through further (participant-)
observation and/or documentary evidence produced by situational members.
If, on the other hand, the researcher’s initial interpretation of the event develops from material
conveyed to him by a member—that is, the researcher was not present, whether for reasons of
schedule, timing, or access—he will also want to talk to other situational members who were
there, so as to access their reports about the event, including their interpretations of it. In this
situation as well, the researcher is likely to want to read materials, should they exist and be obtain-
able, pertaining to the event produced by various other actors in it—contemporaneous newspaper
accounts, radio or television program transcripts, diaries and the like, agency memos or corre-
spondence or annual reports, and so on—for similar corroborative purposes. The further removed
the event is from the present time, the closer the research moves to historical analysis, resting
exclusively on documentary sources if participants are no longer living or otherwise unable to
render firsthand reports, however clouded by the passage of time.
Any one of these circumstances presents a second interpretive moment, in which the re-
searcher seeks to make sense of material that is secondary with respect to her firsthand experi-
ence of the event. This is what Schütz, Geertz, and others (e.g., Mark Bevir and Patrick Jackson
in this volume) mean in characterizing human sense making as interpretations of interpreta-
tions, a double hermeneutic (in Giddens’s term [1984]). The time and space dimensions of this
doubling are captured in what Schütz (1967) called first- and second-order interpretations; meth-
ods textbooks refer to the duality as emic-etic;^35 Geertz (1983, 57) termed them “experience-
near” and “experience-distant.”
Two additional interpretive moments become clear in looking beyond research-site interac-
tions at the research process as a whole. A third comes in the analysis and writing up of accessed
and generated data. As noted above, writing itself has increasingly come to be seen as a way of
world making, as words are carefully and rhetorically-logically chosen and both data and analysis
are shaped into a logical, persuasive account. This perception emphasizes the extent to which
writing is, itself, a method—a method of analysis and of discovery, as the researcher combs
through observational and interview notes and sees ever newer things.^36
The fourth interpretive moment is brought into focus by “reader-response theory” from liter-
ary studies. This approach to textual analysis took issue with earlier theories as to the locus of
textual meaning. These earlier theories had been based on two usually unspoken assumptions
fundamental to early communications theories: that meaning is determinate; and that meanings
are made and set only by their “senders” (in the systems language of much communications
theory) or creators. This led critics to search for meaning in the author’s intent (in which case it
was the reader’s job to ferret out the meaning intended by the author, leading to explorations in
authorial biographies, contemporaneous histories, and so forth). Contesting this came the argu-
ment that meaning resided in the text itself—the author was “dead” (which meant the reader’s job
was to analyze the text’s rhetorical or poetic devices: metaphors, rhyme scheme, rhythm, and so