03 · What You Need to Know
Why Qualitative Research Cannot Be Reduced to One Paradigm
The Interpretivist and Constructivist Association Is Real
There is a good reason qualitative research is so frequently associated with interpretivism and constructivism.
Qualitative inquiry is often used when researchers want to understand people's experiences, interpretations, relationships, social practices, language, identities, or contextual meanings. Interviews, observations, focus groups, documents, and other qualitative evidence can preserve forms of complexity that would be difficult to represent through predetermined numerical variables alone.
Interpretivism fits many such questions because it treats understanding people's meanings as central to social inquiry. Constructivism similarly fits research concerned with how meanings or knowledge are constructed through experience, interaction, social relationships, and historical contexts.
For a study asking how novice teachers construct their professional identities, for example, these philosophical commitments may fit naturally.
The mistake is not recognizing this affinity. The mistake is treating it as a requirement.
Qualitative Is a Type of Inquiry, Not a Complete Philosophy
The term "qualitative" tells you something about the nature of the evidence and usually about how the research approaches a phenomenon. It does not, by itself, provide a complete ontology or epistemology.
Qualitative research
A broad family of approaches using nonnumerical or meaning-rich evidence to investigate phenomena such as experience, process, context, language, interaction, practices, and social life.
Research paradigm
A broader philosophical framework concerning assumptions about reality, knowledge, inquiry, values, and the relationship between researchers and what they investigate.
Mertens explicitly cautions against treating quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods themselves as paradigms. These labels describe forms of methodological practice rather than complete sets of ontological and epistemological commitments.
This distinction is essential because the same qualitative technique can serve very different purposes under different philosophical assumptions.
An Interview Does Not Come With an Epistemology Attached
Imagine that three researchers interview patients about a rehabilitation program.
The first researcher wants to identify recurring barriers to adherence and treats interview responses as evidence that can improve a provisional explanatory account.
The second wants to understand how patients interpret recovery and how those meanings shape their experiences.
The third wants to identify mechanisms through which the program generates different outcomes under different circumstances.
All three may conduct interviews.
The first could work within a postpositivist orientation. The second might be interpretivist or constructivist. The third could be critical realist.
The method does not settle the philosophical question. This is why the same research method can be used under different paradigms.
Qualitative Research Can Be Postpositivist
This possibility often surprises researchers who have learned the equation qualitative = interpretivist.
Postpositivism assumes that an external reality exists while recognizing that researchers' observations and knowledge of it are imperfect and fallible. Qualitative evidence can contribute to investigating that reality without requiring the researcher to assume that reality itself is constructed through participant interpretation.
Postpositivist qualitative research has been discussed explicitly in health and professional research. Methodological accounts note that qualitative techniques can be compatible with postpositivist assumptions and that qualitative inquiry should not be treated as a single monolithic paradigm.
For example, researchers investigating why patients fail to follow a treatment protocol might interview participants to identify previously unrecognized barriers. Participants' accounts provide fallible evidence about a phenomenon the researchers believe exists independently of those accounts.
That epistemological position differs from a constructivist study in which the construction of meaning itself is central to the phenomenon.
Qualitative Research Can Be Pragmatic
Pragmatism provides an especially clear challenge to rigid paradigm-method pairings.
David Morgan argues that although paradigms and methods can have affinities, there is no deterministic connection requiring qualitative methods to belong to constructivism, quantitative methods to postpositivism, or mixed methods to pragmatism. Pragmatism can inform qualitative, quantitative, or mixed research.
A pragmatic qualitative study might conduct interviews because the research problem requires understanding how a policy operates in practice. The interviews are chosen because they provide useful evidence for the inquiry, not because the researcher has first committed to a constructivist ontology.
The study remains qualitative. Its philosophical justification is pragmatic.
Qualitative Research Can Be Critical Realist
Critical realism is another important example.
Critical realists distinguish reality from our fallible knowledge of it and seek explanations involving underlying structures, causal powers, and generative mechanisms.
Qualitative evidence can be extremely useful for this purpose. Interviews may reveal processes through which mechanisms operate. Observations can show how organizational structures are enacted. Documents may provide evidence about institutional rules or historical conditions.
But participants' interpretations are not necessarily treated as the final account of causation. Someone may accurately describe what they experienced while being mistaken about why the outcome occurred.
The researcher therefore interprets participant accounts alongside theory and other evidence to develop and evaluate explanations of underlying mechanisms.
Qualitative Research Can Be Transformative or Critical
A transformative or critical research paradigm can also make extensive use of qualitative methods.
Interviews, participatory methods, observations, narratives, and community-based approaches can reveal experiences excluded from institutional datasets and allow researchers to investigate power, marginalization, identity, discrimination, and social structures.
What makes such research transformative is not merely that it uses qualitative evidence. The paradigm is reflected in how the problem is framed, whose knowledge is privileged, how power is addressed, how communities participate, and how the research relates to justice or social change.
An interview study about a marginalized population is therefore not automatically transformative, just as it is not automatically interpretivist.
Qualitative Research Can Even Operate Under Positivist Assumptions
This claim needs careful qualification, but the possibility has been defended explicitly in methodological literature.
If qualitative evidence is treated as observational material used to identify or test claims about an independently existing phenomenon, with strong emphasis on standardized procedures, researcher independence, and systematic coding, the research can display positivist assumptions even though the raw evidence is textual rather than numerical.
The important distinction is between the form of the data and the epistemological status researchers assign to them.
This does not mean most qualitative research is positivist. It means "qualitative" cannot logically function as a synonym for "interpretivist."
Different Paradigms Can Use the Same Interview Differently
| Paradigm |
Possible role of an interview |
What the researcher may emphasize |
| Postpositivism |
Generate fallible evidence about experiences, processes, or explanatory factors. |
Systematic inquiry, competing explanations, credibility, and provisional conclusions. |
| Interpretivism |
Understand how participants interpret experiences and social worlds. |
Meaning, context, interpretation, and researcher reflexivity. |
| Constructivism |
Investigate how meanings or understandings are constructed. |
Multiple meanings, social interaction, context, and co-construction of knowledge. |
| Pragmatism |
Obtain the form of evidence needed to address a research problem. |
Inquiry, purpose, consequences, and the contribution of evidence to resolving the problem. |
| Critical realism |
Provide evidence about events, contexts, processes, and possible mechanisms. |
Generative explanation, structures, mechanisms, context, and fallible interpretation. |
| Transformative / critical |
Center marginalized perspectives and investigate power or structural inequality. |
Power, justice, representation, participation, and social consequences. |
The table does not imply that every study fits neatly into one row. It demonstrates why identifying a method is not enough to identify a paradigm.
Methodology Matters More Than the Generic Label "Qualitative"
Qualitative research contains many methodologies and traditions, including ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, case study approaches, discourse-oriented methodologies, qualitative description, and others.
These approaches do not necessarily share identical philosophical foundations.
Even within one named methodology, different versions may rest on different assumptions. Grounded theory, for example, has developed through distinct methodological traditions rather than one philosophically uniform approach.
Methodological literature therefore advises researchers to align the belief system underlying the research with the research question and qualitative approach rather than treating qualitative inquiry as one homogeneous paradigm.
Interpretivism and Constructivism Are Not Even Identical to Each Other
The familiar qualitative-paradigm shortcut becomes even more problematic when interpretivism and constructivism are treated as interchangeable.
They overlap substantially, but constructivism and interpretivism are not universally the same thing.
Interpretivism typically emphasizes understanding and interpreting meaningful social experience. Constructivism emphasizes how meanings or knowledge are constructed through experience and interaction. Some methodological traditions combine them, while others preserve meaningful distinctions.
If qualitative research does not even map onto one uniform version of these closely related paradigms, assigning all qualitative inquiry to a single philosophical category becomes especially difficult to defend.
Your Analytical Goal Helps Reveal the Paradigm
Suppose two researchers analyze the same set of interview transcripts about teachers' adoption of AI.
One seeks to understand how teachers construct the meaning of professional responsibility around AI. Another seeks to identify causal mechanisms explaining why institutional support changes adoption behavior.
The textual evidence is identical.
The analytical questions are not.
The first could be constructivist or interpretivist. The second might be critical realist.
This illustrates why paradigm identification requires attention to what the researcher is trying to accomplish with the evidence, not merely how the evidence was collected.
Participant Accounts Do Not Have to Be Treated the Same Way
Paradigms also differ in what participants' accounts are assumed to represent.
An interpretivist researcher may treat participants' interpretations as central objects of inquiry because understanding those meanings is the research purpose.
A critical realist may regard the same accounts as important evidence about experience while distinguishing participants' beliefs from the underlying mechanisms that generated events.
A transformative researcher may examine not only what participants say but also whose accounts are institutionally recognized, how power shapes what can safely be said, and whether dominant categories silence particular experiences.
The interview transcript therefore does not have one predetermined epistemological status.
Qualitative Does Not Mean "Subjective" in One Uniform Sense
Another reason researchers automatically assign qualitative studies to interpretivism is the assumption that qualitative research is subjective.
That term can hide several different issues.
Participants may report subjective experiences. Researchers may exercise interpretive judgment. Some methodologies explicitly acknowledge co-construction of knowledge. Other qualitative approaches attempt to constrain researcher influence through structured coding, multiple analysts, negative-case analysis, audit procedures, or other strategies.
These differences should be examined rather than collapsed into "qualitative = subjective."
Paradigm Choice Should Follow the Research Logic
If your research question asks how people make sense of an experience, interpretivism may fit naturally.
If it asks how meanings are constructed through social interaction, constructivism may be appropriate.
If it asks what mechanisms generate an outcome, critical realism may fit better.
If qualitative evidence is being selected because it provides what a practical inquiry needs, pragmatism may be defensible.
If power, marginalization, and social justice organize the inquiry, a transformative or critical paradigm may be more appropriate.
The qualitative label alone settles none of these questions.
Watch Out
Do not justify interpretivism by writing only, "This study is qualitative; therefore, it uses the interpretivist paradigm." Explain why the paradigm's assumptions about meaning, knowledge, context, and researcher involvement fit the particular research question and methodology.
