Who this Community is for
This Community is for scholars working with qualitative and interpretive methodologies who are concerned with how research is designed, conducted, analysed, and interpreted. It welcomes PhD candidates, early-career researchers, and experienced scholars across disciplines who use, develop, or critically reflect on qualitative and interpretive methods in empirical research.
Community focus and ethos
The Qualitative and Interpretive Approaches Community is a vibrant and inclusive space within MethodsNET that brings together scholars working with qualitative and interpretive methodologies across disciplines, substantive topics, and career stages. It serves as a collaborative hub for exchanging experiences, sharing resources, and engaging in sustained reflection on the epistemic, methodological, and practical challenges shaping contemporary qualitative and interpretive research.
The Community advances qualitative research as methodological practice and plays a central role in shaping and coordinating the Community-led Qualitative and Interpretive Methods track at the MethodsNET Conference. It provides a dedicated space for in-depth reflection on research design choices, data generation, analytical strategies, interpretation, reflexivity, ethics, and researcher positionality, with sustained attention to the epistemological foundations of qualitative and interpretive inquiry.
Beyond the conference setting, the Community sustains engagement through webinars, problem-solving sessions, and shared resources focused on qualitative research design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and methodological innovation. These activities enable scholars to collectively address contemporary challenges, reflect on emerging tools and practices, and critically examine their implications for meaning-making and knowledge production.
Ultimately, the Qualitative and Interpretive Approaches Community aims to build lasting connections among diverse researchers, promote rigorous and reflexive methodological dialogue, and serve as an intellectual home for scholars committed to advancing qualitative and interpretive research within MethodsNET and beyond.
Topics relevant for submissions
- Presentation and discussion of qualitative or interpretive research designs for projects, papers, or PhD research, including work in progress, where the presentations describes and reflects on the methodological practice, such as research design, data collection, data analysis, or interpretation, and invites methodological questions, dilemmas, and feedback.
- Methodological frameworks emerging from qualitative and interpretive empirical studies, including reflections on their epistemological and paradigmatic foundations.
- Experiences with methodological challenges and practical solutions, including developing flexible coding strategies, ensuring analytical quality, transparency, and reflexivity, and presenting findings with clarity and interpretive depth.
- Qualitative data analysis in digital and computational contexts, including the use of Language Models and other digital tools, and their implications for meaning-making, interpretation, and methodological responsibility.
- New and emerging approaches in qualitative inquiry, including feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, creative and arts-based methods, practice as research, and visual research.
- Towards fairer and more reflexive research practices, including relational and care-centric methods, participatory and community-based research, research ethics, inclusive research design, and questions of power and responsibility in knowledge production.
- In-depth engagement with single methods, such as data gathering techniques, including focus groups and participant observation, coding strategies and data analysis approaches, including thematic, narrative, discourse, or other forms of interpretive analysis.
- Comparative and reflective examinations of two or more methods, including closely related approaches such as narrative and frame analysis, distinct approaches such as standardized and interpretive qualitative coding, and reflections across multiple projects, fields, or bodies of qualitative research.
- Approaches to combining and triangulating qualitative and interpretive methods, including methodological integration across data types, sources, and analytical perspectives.
- Methodological innovations, meta level reflections, or novel applications of qualitative and interpretive approaches that advance standards, reflexivity, and methodological debate.
Co-convenors
Anka Kekez
University of Zagreb
akekez@fpzg.hr
Lorena Ortiz Cabrero
UCLouvain
lorena.ortiz@uclouvain.be
Short bio
Lorena Ortiz Cabrero is a PhD candidate (FNRS Aspirante) at UCLouvain. Her research focuses on citizens’ policy preferences regarding federalism, for which she conducts an intergenerational, cross-country comparison that covers four regions in Belgium and Spain. She specialises in qualitative methods, with an emphasis on collective memory and socialisation processes which she started researching during her master’s at Maastricht University. Borrowing from this expertise and throughout her current project, she aims to bridge the field of regionalism studies with more sociological readings of identity construction and citizens’ policy perceptions and experiences. For this, she prioritises constitutive and multi-lingual research methods that are fully centred on citizens/participants and how they construe (federal) politics. She has taught undergraduate courses on (European) history, cultural studies, and advanced qualitative methods.
Tamara Pataki
VERBI Software GmbH & Central European University
tamara.pataki@maxqda.de
Ana Petek
University of Zagreb
ana.petek@fpzg.hr
Short bio
Ana Petek is a Professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, Department for Public Policy and Political Economy. Her research focuses on policy theory, comparative public policy, and disability and mental health policy. She has published widely in English and Croatian, addressing questions of policy design, the structuring of public policy objectives, and the normative foundations of contemporary governance.
Her methodological work focuses on qualitative methodology and systematic qualitative content analysis. She develops structured coding approaches for analysing policy documents and examining complex social phenomena, including social affiliation and the multidimensional nature of public policy processes. Her work connects conceptual innovation with empirically grounded research in comparative contexts.
She teaches courses on public policy and qualitative methodology, supporting students in developing analytically rigorous and methodologically transparent research designs. In addition to her academic work, she has served as an editor and editorial board member in several scientific journals and regularly reviews for international publications. Ana Petek is an active member of national and international professional associations in political science, public policy, and public administration.