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Reader response theory suggests that texts do not come into existence until, at a specific moment in time, a person transacts with them. Each person creates a text, an image or a sound that is unique to them, and in these transactions meaning is made.

84 These meanings or personal 'truths', create a reality that is unique to each person. Just as these meanings or truths can be fleeting – in as much as, when the same reader interacts with the same text again or with another text, new meaning is made – so, too, can the realities that these meanings create be fleeting.

It is the very nature of reader response theory, therefore, to defer to a relativistic ontology that acknowledges that reality is different for everybody.

Furthermore, not only is reality different for every person but every person might be seen to create multiple different realities. These realities could be thought of as existing linearly, as in consecutively, each fresh reality usurping the old one

whenever a new transaction is made; or, all together, these multiple realities might be better imagined as one fluid reality wherein the iterative nature of transacting with texts and encounters with the world creates iterative fluid meanings.

An ontological extension of this idea is that, just as a reader creates texts, a reader, a person, 'creates' encounters with the world; from within our own

interpretive communities, our own interpretive strategies shape the world, create meaning, and so shape ourselves.

Ontologically reflective of Heidegger's (1927/1967) Dasein or Being-in-the-world, what our selves are, and the realities our selves create, depend upon one another to exist; interdependent, they create a fluid reality, a fluid way of existing in the world, that cannot be 'stepped outside of'. Hence, the self, the reality, the context that is one person's Dasein, cannot, from an ontological nor phenomenological point of view, be experienced by another reader, another self, who relies entirely upon their own Dasein to existentially 'be'.

In other words, Derrida says, "there is no outside-text" (1967/1997, 1997 p. 158): it is all context, and there exists no ontological or phenomenological position from which I, as a researcher, can use my own interpretive strategies (from within any of my own interpretive communities) to come to experience the world as the children who undertook the research with me did.

However, the nature of the research, that is, both the research question

How do primary school children engage with fictional representations of science and scientists?

85 and the research aims

i) how children feel about science and scientists

ii) whether children have any insight into why they feel this way and iii) how children engage with representations of science and scientists

through writing, reading and discussion of fictions about the same

speak to some form of phenomenological enquiry into the nature of the children's experiences in the world and their beliefs in connection with science and scientists, and these experiences and beliefs must be somehow investigated and

communicated to readers of the research.

From the research's qualitative standpoint, hermeneutic techniques are best employed to try to present the world as others, as the children, see it. In fact, hermeneutic techniques are 'ideal' for research founded upon the ideas of reader response theory and interpretive communities: 'interpretive communities' and 'interpretive strategies' are in and of themselves 'hermeneutic'.

Hence, when thinking about how children engage with representations of science and scientists, I employed interpretative techniques in order to, myself, create meaning and shape 'answers' with which to satisfy the research questions and aims (see Methodological Coherence; Data Collection and Data Analysis, and Thematic Analysis, below).

The theories of reader response and interpretive communities lend themselves well, too, to the epistemological basis of the research. They could, in fact, be considered to be one and the same; that is, the theories of reader response and interpretive communities are the epistemological basis of the research, as reader response theory in itself constitutes and advocates the creation of knowledge or ways of knowing – especially if one equates the making of meaning directly with the making of knowledge/ways of knowing. Also, the interpretative strategies that one uses to shape texts and encounters with the world, could themselves constitute actual 'ways' of knowing and how we come to create meaning/knowledge and

understanding.

From within one or many of a person's interpretive communities, she or he might call into being a text or an encounter and so make meaning by using sets of interpretive strategies significant to her or his respective communities. Depending

86 upon the efferent or aesthetic stance taken, efferent or aesthetic (or a mixture of both) meaning is called into being, as is the actual experience (efferent, aesthetic or a mixture) of that meaning.

Hence, besides being seen as a phenomenological occurrence or transaction, this creation of meaning can also be seen as an epistemological experience in as much as an active transaction has been achieved, meaning has being made and so new knowledge or ways of knowing have, too, been called into being and made sense of. Texts, events, encounters are made sense of epistemologically – in that knowledge/knowing is created and becomes part of one's fluid reality – and the same texts, events, encounters are simultaneously (simultaneous with the knowledge/knowing creation) sub/consciously processed and experienced phenomenologically, too.

By virtue of the nature of reader response theory and its fluidity with respect to the making of meaning, the re/creation of efferent and aesthetic knowledge and ways of knowing, and the shaping of our unique fluid realities, this research's ontological, phenomenological and epistemological foundations are hence intimately interwoven and, as such, constitute a congruous methodological base upon which to design the research.