What does bracketing research mean?

Now that we have an understanding for the different ways through which we can interpret the social world, we can acknowledge how people may address their interpretations in scientific knowledge in different ways. Whatever the research approach, however, the concept of bracketing can be utilized. Think about written text and how brackets or parentheses set aside additional meaning in a sentence (like this!). A writer uses parentheses to separate words or phrases from the core of the sentence to emphasize the presence of nuances or to allow the reader to separate meaning from the main clause. The concept of bracketing in the qualitative research process works in a similar fashion. In discourse analysis, interpretations of qualitative interviewing depend significantly on who is interpreting the data. Imagine that a group of people are analyzing the same set of interviews with elementary school teachers. How would a fellow teacher interpret the interview data, and how would their interpretations differ from that of a parent or a school principal? Whatever the researcher decides when bracketing interviews, it's important for the researcher to consciously take stock of the factors that inform their analysis of the interview data. Once identified, these factors can then be addressed in the research, either by acknowledging their relation to the collected data or by isolating them from the data altogether.