refers to approaches emphasizing the meaningful nature of people's participation in social and cultural life. The methods of natural science are seen as inappropriate for such investigation. Researchers working within this tradition analyse the meanings people confer upon their own and others' actions.

It is this fundamental difference that underpins the approach of researchers in the interpretive tradition and which leads them to use qualitative methodologies and methods. To enable them to enter the everyday social world, (a world where social reality is the product of the way in which individuals negotiate and construct meanings for actions, events and situations) to better understand, describe, make sense of, and develop into theories which are viewed as the socially constructed meanings employed by people in day to day life.

interpretivism refers to approaches in the social sciences that are interested in the meaning of human actions. This approach has placed considerable emphasis on understanding human behaviour from the actor's perspective. Interpretivists argue that positivist attempts to measure human behaviour are inadequate because they exclude the intersubjective and constructed nature of the social world.