What research actually is · Lesson 3 of 3

Claim, evidence, fact, interpretation

Facts constrain interpretation; they rarely determine it. Ask which one you are being offered.

8 min read · Free — no account needed to read

Four words that get used interchangeably and mean quite different things. Keeping them apart is most of what reading research well consists of.

A claim is a statement that something is the case. "Sleep affects memory." On its own it carries no weight at all — anybody can make one.

Evidence is an observation offered in support of a claim. "In this trial, participants who slept eight hours recalled 23% more items than those who slept four." Evidence has a source, a method and a context, and every one of those can be examined.

A fact is an observation that is not seriously disputed: the participants slept those hours; the recall scores were those numbers. Facts are about what was observed.

Interpretation is what somebody says the facts mean. "Therefore sleep consolidates memory." Interpretation goes beyond the observation, and it is where reasonable researchers disagree most. Two people can accept identical facts and interpret them differently, and neither is lying.

The reason this matters: most arguments that feel like disputes about facts are disputes about interpretation, and most claims that feel well supported turn out to rest on one piece of evidence that everybody has been citing from each other.

See it happen

An article states: "Studies show that multitasking reduces productivity by 40%."

The read that arrives on its own

A specific number from studies — that sounds measured and credible, and you repeat it.

The same situation, with this idea

You separate the layers. The claim is "multitasking reduces productivity". The evidence is somebody's measurement, and you would want to know: whose, doing what task, switching how often, measured how. The fact might be that in one laboratory task, switching cost participants a measurable amount of time. The interpretation — that this generalises to a 40% drop in office work — is a large step that the original authors may never have taken.

After this, you can

read a sentence like that and immediately see which part is observation and which part is somebody's reading of it.

The takeaway

Facts constrain interpretation; they rarely determine it. Ask which one you are being offered.

Easy to take the wrong way

That interpretation is a weakness to be avoided. All research interprets — the discipline is making the interpretation visible and arguable, not pretending the numbers speak for themselves.

Try this

Take one sentence from something you have read this week and split it into claim, evidence, fact and interpretation. Some sentences will be missing several of those layers, and that is the finding.