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.

Interpretivism is a school of thought in contemporary jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. In the English speaking world, interpretivism is usually identified with Ronald Dworkin's theses on the nature of law, which is sometimes seen as a third way between natural law and legal positivism.

Interpretivism in the social sciences refers to a method, or group of methods, that holds that the social sciences ought to be concerned, not simply with quantifying what actually happens in social phenomena, but in providing an interpretation of events and phenomena in terms of how the people involved understand their own experience. It's earliest prominent proponent was German sociologist Max Weber.