ABSTRACT
A narrative methodology which attends to the temporal dynamics in the actor’s subjective experience is a specific application of two major hermeneutical principles. The major hermeneutical principles are: the focus on text or discourse as the linguistic objectification of the internal, subjective state of a collectivity, and the interpretation of text in terms of the part-whole relationship - the ‘hermeneutical circle’. The realm of meaningful experience has its objectively comprehensive expression in text, which is largely but not exclusively in linguistic form. While the part-whole relationship can be retained in the idea of genre, a static conception of genre is unable to put into light the temporal dynamics in the part-whole relationship. The question of validity in interpretive methodology hinges on three issues, namely the credibility of the source of evidence, the degree of correspondence between the researcher’s interpretation and the subjects’ experience, and the admissibility of evidence.
