Chapter 4: Meaning: What Are the Guidelines for Making-Meaning, Ensuring Voice, Relevance, and Authenticity?

Meaning is a complicated topic to consider with philosophical and methodological bases and implications. While it has often been said that the research questions drive methodology, that simply cannot be the case. The choice of method must be determined with an eye to philosophical integrity (i.e., researcher internal consistency)—it is a researcher’s epistemological, ontological, axiological, and so on, assumptions which set the stage and the parameters for all inquiry. This means that the starting step for any inquiry is to recognize and carefully consider the philosophical choices which have been made and ensure that the methods chosen are consistent with those choices.