Interpretive Document Analysis — Qualitative Reading of Texts and Records

Interpretive document analysis is a qualitative method that systematically examines written, visual, or digital documents to construct meaning from them within their social, historical, and institutional contexts. Rather than simply counting content categories, it reads documents as social artefacts — asking not only what a document says, but what it does, who produced it, for what purpose, and what assumptions it encodes. The approach draws on hermeneutic and interpretive traditions to move between individual passages and the broader context in which they were created.