Verstehen

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Many case studies do not stop at the description level or even at the representation level of a unit of analysis. Instead, they take an additional step and seek to shed light around the “how” and “why” aspects of the case study. This additional step may include designing an explanation or an understanding.

The controversy between the scholars involved in generating understanding and those defending explanation has a long history dating back to the 19th-century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. To sharpen their differences, note that explanation is an abstract, outsider, law-based kind of knowledge. It tends to reduce the studied phenomenon to the set of major variables impacting it. On the contrary, understanding tends to open up (com-prehend means “take together”) the phenomenon with all its horizons and gain knowledge from a participatory, first-person, humanly felt perspective. For Dilthey, there were two kinds of knowledge. The first, best suited for the natural sciences, was based on laws and spatiotemporal relationships. It sought explanation from the outside. Thus, knowledge for the human sciences (in Dilthey's words, spiritual sciences) was perceived as a knowledge that was too abstract and as a result detracted from important elements of human participants, such as their living and feeling nature as well as the notion that they belong to the very world whose study in which they were involved. As a result, Dilthey advocated for a second kind of knowledge, which he referred to as verstehen. Verstehen would be the full realization of this conception of “understanding.”

Many research traditions have claimed to aim for what Dilthey has described as “understanding.” The following paragraphs describe three main examples of the efforts of such traditions. They represent three ideal types of the meaning of understanding: (1) radical sociology based on the scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu, (2) interpretive sociology based on the ideas put forth by Max Weber, and (3) the hermeneutic tradition.

For the radical sociology of Bourdieu, understanding means spotting the objective conditions [Page 964](the class origin, the sociological forces tensing the field to which the individual belongs, his or her route) that is producing the individual's discourse. For example, the subjective discourse of high school girls can only be understood as the result of the objective structures of both their own social and school spaces. In this conception, understanding requires the researcher to read the social structure through the interviews and to objectivize personal confidences into structural causes.

In the interpretive sociology of Weber, “understanding” lies in the connection between the subjectively lived meaning experienced by individuals and the big sociological and historical evolutions. An example of this is seen in Weber's effort to connect the values and fears of Calvinist individuals to the development of capitalism. In this approach, the researcher tries to see and feel like a local but then steps back to contemplate the whole process from the outside. These inside–outside and local–global connections make the approach very convincing.

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