phenomenology - initially especially in psychology (e.g. Giorgi and Moustakas), in nursing (e.g. Benner) and in education (e.g. van Manen).
phenomenological inquiry: a focus on exploring how human beings make sense of experience and how they transform experience into consciousness, both individually and as shared meaning.
Van Manen (1990, pp. 9-10) believes that “anything that presents itself to consciousness is potentially of interest to phenomenology”. Moustakas (1994, p.49) concurs: “Any phenomenon represents a suitable starting point for phenomenological reflection. The very appearance of something makes it a phenomenon.” The phenomenon that is the focus of inquiry may be an emotion (for example, loneliness, jealousy, or anger), a relationship, a marriage, or a job, a program, an organization, or a culture (Patton, 2002).
From the perspective of phenomenology, whether the object is real or imagined, empirically measurable or subjectively felt makes no difference at all. Giorgi (1994) states that the phenomenological approach admits to a reality independent of consciousness, but claims that knowledge of such reality only comes through consciousness of it, so it’s better to study the reality claims made by persons through their consciousness of it. The task here is to understand the reality claims (or nonreality claims) precisely as the research participants make them. In other words, it is the perceived reality that phenomenologists are interested in, and often
“distortions” are more vital than veridical perceptions. Thus, according to Giorgi (1994), if workers think that their organisation is paternalistic, or that bureaucracies are always rigid, it would be important to document those perceptions. The researcher’s phenomenological task, then, is not to specify in advance what reality is really like, but to describe the nature of reality as taken up and posited by the research participants. This frees the researcher to discover possible reality claims that may be outside of his or her a priori specifications.
According to van Manen (1990, p.10), from a phenomenological point of view, we are less interested in the factual status of particular instances: whether something happened, how often it tends to happen, or how the occurrence of an experience is related to the prevalence of other conditions or events. For example, phenomenology does not ask, “How do these children learn this particular material?” but it asks,
“What is the nature or essence of the experience of learning (so that I can now better understand what this particular learning experience is like for these children)?”
5.3.4 Lived experience
Phenomenology requires methodologically, carefully, and thoroughly capturing and describing how people experience a phenomenon – how they perceive it, describe it,
feel about it, judge it, remember it, make sense of it, and talk about it with others (Patton, 2002). To gather such data, requires subjects who have directly experienced the phenomenon of interest; that is they have “lived experience” as opposed to second-hand experience.
According to Patton (2002), the only way for us to really know what another person experiences is to experience the phenomenon as directly as possible for ourselves.
This leads to the importance of participant observation and in-depth interviewing.
5.3.5 Wholeness
According to Moustakas (1994), phenomenology is concerned with wholeness, with examining entities from many sides, angles, and perspectives until a unified vision of the essences of a phenomenon or experience is achieved.
5.3.6 Description
Phenomenology is committed to descriptions of experiences, not explanations or analyses. The operative word in phenomenological research is “describe” (Kruger, 1979, p.119). The researcher aims at describing as accurately as possible the phenomenon as it appears, rather than indulging in attempts to explain it within a pre- given framework. Descriptions retain, as close as possible, the original texture of things, their phenomenal qualities and material properties. Descriptions keep a phenomenon alive, illuminate its presence, accentuate its underlying meanings, enable the phenomenon to linger, retain its spirit, as near to its actual nature as possible. In description one seeks to present in vivid and accurate terms, in complete terms, what appears in consciousness and in direct seeing (Moustakas, 1994).
5.3.7 Essences of experience
Patton (2002) states that a dimension that differentiates a phenomenological approach is the assumption that there is an essence or essences to shared experience. These essences are the core meanings mutually understood through a phenomenon commonly experienced. The experiences of different people are bracketed, analysed, and compared to identify the essences of the phenomenon, for example, the essence of loneliness or the essence of being the parent of an ADHD child.
According to Patton (2002), the assumption of essence, like the ethnographer’s assumption that culture exists and is important, becomes the defining characteristic of a purely phenomenological study. Eichelberger (1989, p.6) states that phenomenologists are “rigorous in their analysis of the experience, so that basic
elements of the experience that are common to members of a specific society, or all human beings, can be identified”.
Patton (2002) believes that the assumption of essence is essential to understanding the philosophical basis of phenomenology, yet, he states, it is often misunderstood.
According to him, some researchers are misled into thinking that they are using a phenomenological perspective when they, for example, study four teachers and describe their four unique views. Patton states that a phenomenologist assumes a commonality in those human experiences, and must use rigorously the method of bracketing to search for those commonalities. According to Patton, results obtained from a phenomenological study can then be related to and integrated with those of other phenomenologists studying the same experience, or phenomenon.
Patton (2002, p.107) concludes that conducting a study with a phenomenological focus (i.e. getting at the essence of the experience of some phenomenon) is different from using phenomenology to philosophically justify the methods of qualitative inquiry as legitimate in social science research. He states that both contributions are important. But a phenomenological study (as opposed to a phenomenological perspective) is one that focuses on descriptions of what people experience and how it is that they experience what they experience. According to Patton (2002) one can employ a general phenomenological perspective to elucidate the importance of using methods that capture people’s experience of the world, without conducting a phenomenological study that focuses on the essence of shared experience.