MY MODEL OF TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION AN ADAPTATION OF CONCEPTS FROM HERMENEUTIC ANALYSIS IN INTERPRETIVE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Back in our secondary school days, our literature teacher taught us that when we read a passage in literary work, we should ask these basic questions: WHO SAID THIS? TO WHOM? ON WHAT OCCASION? These basic questions I must confess have been instrumental to my understanding of literary works. However, these basic questions do not lead us to a deeper meaning of the text which is why an advanced method of textual analysis is needed – Hermeneutics.
When we read the Bible or other secular literary works: like academic publications in journals or some literature, our goal is usually to understand the meaning of the text, which is the intention of the original writer. Granted that once published a text assumes a life of its own ( autonomization) and exists independent of the author’s original audience and historical context ( Distanciation), the goal of every reader is to understand the meaning of the text which is hitherto alien and to make it his or her own ( appropriation) This enables the reader to understand the text or the problem addressed better by creating a new meaning ( enactment ) which will finally lead to a socially constructed world or reality in which the text manifests ( social construction)
All these can be achieved following the Hermeneutic approach. Hermeneutics originated as a science of interpretation among biblical scholars, but today it is a widely used and accepted method of analysis used in interpretive qualitative studies to analyze qualitative data. The Hermeneutic cycle is an iterative cycle that tries to make meaning of the textual data by understanding the connection between the parts and the whole. Hermeneutics can also be applied beyond textual analysis in qualitative research.
In this new model that I created, I adapted the original concepts of the hermeneutic method and added some other new concepts such as reflection and practical/contextual application. The reasoning is that understanding the deeper meaning of a text leads us to reflection and some positive practical action beyond a conceptually socially constructed reality that the text manifests.
I hope to expand this model in the future to help contemporary biblical scholars, researchers, preachers, and readers to take advantage of this iterative cycle to understand the meaning behind the surface.
The video below gives you a step-by-step explanation of each step of the model
