Interpretivism (Qualitative)

Interpretivism can be defined as a fact or incidence that happens or appears in a way that is questionable. Therefore, the interpretivist paradigm focuses on understanding social phenomena from the researcher’s own perspective (Hussey & Hussey, 1997). The interpretivist paradigm, or as others name it in the literature: constructivist, constructivism or phenomenological, provides an understanding of how people interpret their world. What is more, in this paradigm researchers can incorporate (whether implicitly or explicitly) their ideas and perceptions regarding the phenomenon that is under investigation (Collis & Hussey, 2009; Gill & Johnson, 2002).

According to Easterby-Smith et al. (2008) and Collis and Hussey (2009), interpretivism (or phenomenology) is derived from the idea that social reality is part of the researcher with a subjective measurement. The main task of the interpretivist paradigm is to provide an explanation to the differences in constructions and meanings that people place upon their past experiences (Easterby-Smith et al., 2002). In contrast to the positivist paradigm, the interpretivist paradigm implies the phenomenological, qualitative and subjective approach (Collis & Hussey, 2009).

Gill and Johnson (2002) argue that this paradigm attempts to provide an understanding of how individuals make sense of their world, with a focus on human action being conceived as purposive and meaningful. Thus, the researcher is more concerned with understanding as well as explaining individuals’ experiences rather than concentrating on causal relationships or rules represented through external factors including fundamental rules (Easterby-Smith et al., 2002).

A brief description of the implications of the two paradigms is demonstrated below in

Table 5-1:

Table 5-1 Implications of the positivist and interpretivist paradigms

Positivism Interpretivism

The observer must be independent is part of what is being observed

Human interests should be irrelevant are the main drivers of sciences

Research progresses through

hypotheses and deductions gathering rich data from which ideas are induced

Concepts need to be defined so that they can be measured

should incorporate stakeholder perspectives

Units of analysis should be reduced to the simplest terms

may include the complexity of ‘whole’ situations

Generalisation through statistical probability theoretical abstraction

Sampling requires large numbers selected randomly

small numbers of cases chosen for specific reasons

Source: Easterby-Smith et al. (2008, p. 59)

A new paradigm called pragmatism has been identified by Collis and Hussey (2009) and Saunders et al. (2009). Based on this paradigm, pragmatists are not required to adopt a single system of philosophy when they are conducting research, which gives them the choice to use mixed methods, where the researcher should stop asking questions regarding reality and the laws of nature. Therefore, the research problem and the available approaches to understand this problem are more important than focusing on the appropriate paradigm to adopt for the research investigation.

The two previous main research paradigms have strengths and weaknesses, which can guide the researcher to identify and select the appropriate methodology as well as methods for his research (Amaratunga et al., 2002). Table 5-2 below is adopted from Amaratunga et al. (2002) to illustrate a summary of these distinctive features.

Table 5-2 Strengths and weaknesses of the positivism and interpretivism

Paradigm Strengths Weaknesses

Positivism (quantitative)

 The methods used can provide wide coverage of the range of situations

 They can be fast and economical

 Where statistics are aggregated from large samples, they may be of considerable relevance to policy decisions

 The methods used tend to be rather inflexible and artificial

 They are not effective in understanding processes or the significance that people attach to actions

 They are not very helpful in generating theories

 Because they focus on what is, or what has been recently, they make it hard for policy makers to infer what changes and action should take place in the future

Interpretivism (qualitative)

 Data-gathering is seen more as natural than artificial

 Has the ability to look at change processes over time

 Has the ability to understand people’s meaning

 Has the ability to adjust new issues and ideas as they emerge  Helpful in theory generation

 Collecting data could be tedious and require extra resources

 Analysing and interpreting data could be more difficult

 Difficulties in controlling pace, progress and the research end-points  Low credibility may be given to the

results by policy makers Source: adopted from Amaratunga et al. (2002, p. 20)

The researcher believes that social reality is independent and cannot incorporate (whether implicitly or explicitly) his ideas or perceptions regarding the phenomenon of corporate disclosure that is under investigation. Furthermore, as positivists explain causal relationships between variables that can help in developing theories from the findings, thus, the researcher adopts the positivist paradigm where the task of social research is to gather facts and measure how certain patterns occur. Therefore, the positivist paradigm is adopted using quantitative, objective and traditionalist methods. A quantitative approach is used to investigate corporate reporting practices and the determinants that could influence the extent of comprehensive disclosure in the annual reports of Libyan firms. Furthermore, key stakeholders’ perceptions are required to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the usefulness of corporate disclosure for users’ decision making purposes. Therefore, a questionnaire survey is an appropriate choice to examine the quality of information provided in Libyan firms’ annual reports, while content analysis using a disclosure index is employed to measure the quantity of information. In addition, and of direct relevance to this study, corporate disclosure practices in Libya are examined empirically using Libyan

firms’ annual reports allowing the researcher to be independent of what is being researched.

5.3Research Methodology

There are two research methodological approaches: the deductive approach and the inductive approach. The inductive approach is an empirical investigation underpinned by current practices which the researcher aims to generalise from, while the deductive approach is not related to existing practice as the researcher seeks to identify the research problem based on testing a theory (Saunders et al., 2007).