"intersubjective" defined

Intersubjective | Mike McDonald | March 22nd, 2003

Can anyone give me an easy-to-understand definition of "intersubjective"?

What is meant when it is said that the desired outcome of qualitative research is an "intersubjective" understanding of a particular situation. Would I be correct in thinking that the word "subjective" could be substituted without substantially changing the meaning?

Mike McDonald

Re: Intersubjective | Francesca Michalski | March 22nd, 2003

Mike, my immediate reaction is that 'intersubjective' means a subjective view from several angles. For example, recording and analysing a classroom situation and then getting the perspectives of the students and the teacher involved too.

Francesca

Re: Intersubjective | John Bartrick | March 23rd, 2003

Hi all,

I'll echo Francesca's comments on "a subjective view from different angles."

Without having any relevant literature at hand, I'd guess terms like "triangulation" come into this definition. Francesca also mentions the idea of multiple perspective. I find this metaphor from geography(?)/engineering(?) very powerful, whereby research is compared to the way the position of an object can only be verified when seen from at least three different positions.

Mike has touched on a point here which is significant to a lot of the research required on the MSc program (as I see it from my perspective!). That is, the slippery nature of knowledge or "fact." As teachers and researchers we must be prepared to see our perspective as only one part in the puzzle.

I'll stop here before I get out of my depth.

John

Re: Intersubjective | Raymond Sheehan | March 24th, 2003

I agree with John's and Francesca's take on this term. I suppose that in 'traditional' quantitative research, 'subjective' could be a dismissive word, used to undermine the valididity and reliability of the research methods. Conversely, 'objective' implied a 'scientific' approach to data-gathering, analysis...

'Intersubjective' may recognize that much social activity (and surely research is often a social activity), including discourse, is jointly constructed of different 'subjectivities'-- for example the researcher telling her own research story interacting with (and filtering?) the stories of others.

I found the latest edition of Silverman "Interpreting Qualitative Data" very useful for outlining the relative merits and demerits of qual. and quant. research while reaching the wholly sensible conclusion that one is not inherently superior to the other, but the approach and methods etc that you will choose all depend on your research question.

Raymond

 

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