Abstract:
Hermeneutics is primarily concerned with human understanding: how it is possible for us to understand the meaning of a text. The word ‘text’ is interpreted broadly in contemporary hermeneutics and refers to written text, speech and any kind of human communication (which may be non-verbal). Hermeneutics can be described as both an underlying philosophy and as a specific way of analysing qualitative data (Bleicher, 1980). As a philosophical approach to human understanding, it provides one of the philosophical groundings for interpretivism (Klein and Myers, 1999). As a mode of analysis, it provides a set of concepts for analysing qualitative data in qualitative research projects.