For years cultural knowledge has been likened to grammar. People learn it automatically as they grow up, and can deftly use the rules inherent in it. However, though they presumably have models in their heads about many things, they often can no more describe these models than they can the rules of grammar. As D'Andrade writes:
"Most informants do not have an organized view of the entire model. They use the model but they cannot produce a reasonable description of the model" (D'Andrade 1987:114)
In his chapter he goes on to describe how he was able to listen to undergraduates talk about the human mind and then make explicit their unconscious model. This is one example of the interpretation of qualitative data. The literature below contains many others. They come mainly from the "interpretivist" and "cognitivist" camps of American cultural anthropology. This literature shows how different investigators reconstruct the meaning of informants' actions and discourse into either a meaningful account, or a "model" which is taken to have some level of psychological reality for the informants from whom data was collected.
References:
Agar, M. H., & Hobbs, J. R. (1985). How to Grow Schemata out of Interviews. In J. W. D. Dougherty (Ed.), Directions in Cognitive Anthropology (pp. 413-431). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
D'Andrade, R. (1987). A Folk Model of the Mind. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (pp. 112-148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D'Andrade, R. (1991). The Identification of Schemas in Naturalistic Data. In M. J. Horowitz (Ed.), Person Schemas and Maladaptive Interpersonal Patterns . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Good, B., & Good, M. J. D. (1980). The Meaning of Symptoms: A Cultural Hermeneutic Model for Clinical Practice. In L. Eisenberg & A. Kleinman (Eds.), The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine . Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.
Kleinman, A. (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books.
Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Werner, O., & Schoepfle, G. M. (1987). Systematic Fieldwork. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.