A brief note on the hermeneutic circle: for Housing Studies students

A brief note on the hermeneutic circle: for Housing Studies students

 

Highlight 5 main ideas of the hermeneutic circle and then on the main steps of the circle, done in a straightforward way in the context of Housing Studies dissertation project study.

The hermeneutic circle is a way of understanding a topic by repeatedly moving between its small parts and the larger whole. In a Housing Studies dissertation, it means interpreting individual interviews, policies, or case details while continually checking them against the wider housing issue and research question.

Five main ideas

1.    Understanding comes from parts and whole together.
You cannot understand one interview extract, housing statistic, or policy clause fully without considering the wider context; equally, you understand the whole study better after examining its parts.

2.    The researcher’s prior knowledge matters.
Your background, assumptions, and existing knowledge of housing—such as beliefs about affordability, tenure, or government policy—shape how you first interpret the data. This is called a “pre-understanding.”

3.    Interpretation is ongoing, not one-off.
You revisit the data several times. Each reading may reveal new meanings, challenge earlier assumptions, and lead to a more developed interpretation.

4.    Different perspectives can be brought into dialogue.
The participant’s view, the researcher’s view, existing literature, and the housing context are compared and connected. Gadamer calls this a “fusion of horizons”: a new understanding emerges from bringing these viewpoints together.

5.    The aim is deeper interpretation, not simply proving a fixed hypothesis.
A hermeneutic approach is especially useful when studying people’s lived experiences, meanings, and social contexts—for example, how tenants experience insecure housing or how residents understand neighbourhood change.

Main steps in a Housing Studies dissertation

Step	What you do		Housing Studies example
Step		What you do		Housing Studies example
1. State your starting understanding		Identify your research question, assumptions, and prior knowledge about the housing issue.		“I assume that private renters in Hong Kong face affordability pressure, but I need to test and refine this through participants’ accounts.”
2. Read the whole first		Read interview transcripts, policy documents, or case materials as a whole to get an initial sense of the topic.		Read all tenant interviews once to understand the broad experience of renting.
3. Examine the parts		Code or closely analyse individual sentences, incidents, themes, or policy clauses.		Focus on a participant’s description of rent increases, overcrowding, or fear of eviction.
4. Return to the whole		Ask how each part changes your understanding of the overall issue; revise themes and interpretations.		Connect accounts of rent increases to the broader issue of housing insecurity and affordability.
5. Compare with literature and context		Bring in academic literature, housing policy, and the local social context to challenge and deepen your interpretation.		Compare participants’ experiences with literature on housing precarity, tenure security, and Hong Kong housing policy.
6. Reflect and revise		Check whether your own assumptions have changed; acknowledge alternative interpretations and limitations.		Recognise that “affordability” may mean not only rent levels but also insecurity, commuting, family obligations, and quality of life.
7. Present the interpretation		Explain the final themes, show how they developed, and justify your interpretation with evidence.		Present themes such as “financial pressure,” “housing insecurity,” and “trade-offs between location and space,” supported by interview extracts and literature.

Simple example

If your dissertation examines young renters’ experiences of housing affordability in Hong Kong, you might first read all interviews for a general impression. You then notice repeated mentions of long commutes, small flats, and unstable rents. Returning to the whole dataset, you may reinterpret “affordability” as more than monthly rent: it includes space, travel time, security, and quality of life. You then compare this interpretation with housing literature and revise your argument. This repeated movement between detailed evidence and the wider housing issue is the hermeneutic circle.