Examining Researchers' Pre-Understandings as a Part of the Reflexive Journey in Hermeneutic Research

This article considers one of the philosophical sources of reflexivity, the concept of pre-understandings as envisaged by the German philosopher, Hans Georg Gadamer. There are a number of empirical research studies employing a Gadamerian approach, and while some authors may describe methods of examining pre-understandings and applying findings reflexively to hermeneutic enquiry, there remains a general lack of sufficient detail given over to the how in relation to this process. Furthermore, Gadamer describes how the provoking of one's pre-understandings is required in order to make them realizable and this is rarely evident within authors' work. As part of a hermeneutic research project exploring health professionals' views of conscientious objection to abortion, we as a research team undertook a process of provoking our pre-understandings surrounding conscientious objection to abortion. This was undertaken by a preliminary discussion to examine our preunderstandings. A second discussion followed to examine if and how our pre-understandings had altered, and was conducted after the research team had read five transcribed interviews from a study on health care professionals' perspectives of conscientious objection to abortion. By reviewing our pre-understandings, we were able to begin to make conscious what was unconscious, widening some of our initial views, being more definitive in others and in some cases endorsing our original pre-understandings. Using a reflexive process, we assimilated these findings with our research project and used it to inform our data collection, analysis and interpretation, demonstrating the application of rigor to our hermeneutic study.