ABSTRACT

Identifying which data pieces are important, grouping and sorting them into patterns, and considering relationships between the pieces and patterns are all aspects of the complex inductive reasoning process through which you move closer to something that could constitute findings. In interpretive description, that which we consider “findings” is not simply reporting the first credible set of patterns that emerges from your sorting procedure. Rather, findings reflect an interpretive maneuver within which you consider what the pieces might mean, individually and in relation to one another, what various processes, structures, or schemes might illuminate about those relationships, and what order and sequence of presentation might most effectively lead the eventual reader toward a kind of knowing that was not possible prior to your study. In effect, you allow the reader to “know” something new about the phenomenon by virtue of the manner in which your rendering has both structured and sequenced it.