Evidence of Constructivism and Co-Constructivism in a Qualitative Research Interview: A Doctoral Pedagogy

Abstract

Within the interpretivist research paradigm, meaning is generated through constructivist processes, interactive dialogue, and the co-construction of knowledge between researcher and participant. However, qualitative interviewing practices in doctoral research often remain methodologically modernist and procedurally unidirectional, privileging the researcher's questions while silencing the interviewee's capacity to interrogate, challenge, or shape the knowledge-making process. When interviewees are not afforded dialogical opportunities to pose questions, interviews risk becoming extractive rather than interpretive encounters. Drawing on sustained doctoral supervision and facilitation experiences across South African public and private higher education institutions, this paper explores the extent to which qualitative interview practices operationalise core interpretivist principles. A qualitative document analysis was conducted on interview schedules, methodology chapters, and analysis chapters from 20 completed Master’s and Doctoral theses in Business Administration and Business Management. The analysis focused on identifying explicit and implicit evidence of interactive dialogue and co-construction of knowledge within examinable research artefacts. The findings reveal a persistent misalignment between claimed interpretivist positioning and actual research practice. While all students employed semi-structured interviews and articulated interpretivist or constructivist assumptions, none of the interview schedules explicitly enabled interviewees to pose questions or initiate dialogical exchanges. Furthermore, the methodology and analysis chapters rarely document moments where participants actively shaped meaning, corrected the researcher's interpretations, or influenced the analytic trajectories, despite such moments being central to co-constructed knowledge. Where interpretive corrections by interviewees occurred, these were typically untheorised and under-analysed, resulting in their exclusion from the formal methodological narrative. The paper concludes that many master's and doctoral qualitative interviews remain governed by modernist logics of control and standardisation, even when framed as interpretivist inquiries. This disjunction undermines the epistemological integrity of interpretivist research. The paper argues for a paradigmatic shift toward dialogical interview designs that explicitly legitimise participant questioning, reflexive interruptions, and negotiated meaning-making. Practically, the paper offers conceptual guidance for doctoral researchers on designing, documenting, and analysing interviews in ways that more authentically enact constructivism and co-creation of knowledge, thereby strengthening both methodological rigour and epistemic credibility in interpretivist doctoral research.