German Philosophies of Qualitative Research

This chapter presents the phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies that have been immensely relevant for qualitative research. Phenomenology began with Husserl and was continued by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and it was developed into tools for qualitative inquiry by scholars such as Giorgi. Hermeneutics dates back to Scheiermacher and Dilthey, and it was in a sense merged with phenomenology by Heidegger and brought up to date by Gadamer in particular. Many qualitative methodologies employ strategies from phenomenology and hermeneutics, which can be condensed to the essential idea of making the obvious obvious. The difference between phenomenology and hermeneutics in their purer forms concerns the extent to which they view interpretation (rather than description) as a necessary component in making that which is implicit in an “obvious” way explicit.