Interpretative Cultural Psychology: A Text-Scientific Perspective

Cultural psychology belongs to the interpretive, hermeneutic disciplines. It is concerned with the interpretation of symbols and reconstructs the meanings that people associate with certain things and events, with actions and various other phenomena in the material, social, cultural, and psychological world. For this purpose, it analyzes symbolic articulations of their life and action practice. Texts are the preferred data material of the cultural psychological perspective outlined in this chapter. They represent a psychosocial reality that is not directly accessible to research (representation function). Of particular importance are certain forms of language and types of text, such as narratives and metaphors. The chapter provides a theoretical and methodological justification for the text-hermeneutic perspective and illustrates it with a research example.