Interpretation as de-concealment: contributions of hermeneutic and phenomenological-existential thought for data analysis in qualitative research

Abstract This article intends to reflect about the analysis and interpretation of research data in the fields of education and psychology. It brings initially a reflection about the meaning of investigation and analysis in qualitative research, especially in the phenomenological-existential perspective of Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, once there is a fruitful dialogue between these thoughts, despite their specificity. We’ll present, as an example, an interventive research, so that we can illustrate the proposed reflection, carried out in an educational institution, specifically about teenagers at school, whose procedures of interpretation and analysis were constructed according to the proposed epistemological conceptions.