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.

本文考虑了自反性的哲学渊源之一，这是德国哲学家汉斯·格奥尔格·加达默尔（Hans Georg Gadamer）所设想的“预先理解”的概念。有许多采用伽达默尔方法的实证研究，尽管有些作者可能描述了检查先验知识并将其发现应用于解释学研究的方法，但总体上仍然缺乏关于“如何”关系的足够细节。这个过程。此外，伽达默尔还描述了如何要求“激发”一个人的预见性，以使其能够实现，这在作者的工作中很少见。作为解释学研究项目的一部分，该研究旨在探索卫生专业人员出于良心拒服人工流产的观点，作为研究小组，我们进行了“挑衅”我们对基于良心拒绝人工流产的理解。这是通过初步讨论进行的，以检验我们的认识。随后进行了第二次讨论，以检查我们的认识是否发生改变以及如何改变，并且是在研究小组阅读了五份转录后的采访后进行的，这些采访来自对医疗保健专业人员出于良心拒服兵役的观点进行的研究。通过回顾我们的认识，我们能够开始意识到什么是无意识的，扩大了我们的一些初步观点，在其他方面更具权威性，并且在某些情况下认可了我们最初的认识。通过反思性过程，我们将这些发现与我们的研究项目相结合，并用其为我们的数据收集，分析和解释提供了依据，