Unlike the positivism, interpretivism does not gain the knowledge by only observing the object (detached).  Human interpretations become essential in understanding the world. Thus, this kind of approach is always using an in-depth interview and employ lesser sample than the empiricism does. While positivism tries to generalize everything and relate it to universal law, the interpretivism focus on how people interpret the world differently based on the condition and try to understand a context.

According to Interpretivist, the aim of social inquiry should be to enhance our understanding of the social world’s meaning as opposed to producing a causal explanation of social phenomena (Gorton, 2010). Interpretivists use the second-order observation; they observe the condition and the which observation takes place, then discover that states and the which observation takes place different among people. They are not interested in, tourism itself, but they want to understand how different people understand tourism. And also interpretivism do not predict people or the world, because they have multiple conflicts and meaning. (Fuchs, 2009).