I elected to adopt the hermeneutic style of van Manen (1990), because this interpretive style achieves a more nuanced type of analysis and plumbs the levels of complexity more successfully than other descriptive styles of phenomenological analysis (Giorgi, 2000). In addition, aspects of the more recently developed Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA, J A Smith & Osborn, 2009), typically used in psychology, have been adopted to develop a narrative flow in the analysis. This emphasis allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of historical factors that shaped the progress of the law curriculum over an extended implementation of ten years, which constitutes the period under review.
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The style of IPA also allows for offering an “insider’s” perspective and “giving voice” to the concerns of the participants, with the intention of understanding their claims by “making sense” of them from a psychological perspective (Larkin, Watts, & Clifton, 2006). The analysis provides for the contextualisation of individual voices within the interpretation of the data, which was appropriate considering the articulate opinions and the “high status”
positions of both sets of Law Deans who were interviewed. Distinctive features of the IPA stance or perspective are “a highly intensive” and detailed, ideographic analysis of the (verbatim) accounts produced by a comparatively small sample of participants, that balances experiential claims against more overtly interpretive analysis (Larkin et al., 2006, p.
103) It aims to move beyond a “first-order analysis” which would collect and represent the voices of participants, “to explore, understand and communicate” an overtly interpretive analysis that is a second-order account, locating the initial “description” in relation to a
“wider, social, cultural and perhaps even theoretical, context” (Larkin et al., 2006, pp. 103- 104). The objective of the interpretation is to provide a “critical and conceptual commentary on the participants’ personal ‘sense-making’ activities” (J A Smith & Osborn, 2009).
As the first step in the analysis, I immersed myself in the data by reading through each transcript several times to obtain an overall sense of the verbatim transcripts. Thereafter I highlighted key phrases or statements that pertained to the phenomenon in each transcript with different colour pens. These statements or phrases were then copied and pasted into a new document, with a record of the speaker’s (participant’s) initials after each extract, so that I knew the source of each quotation. After reading through these lists of significant statements and phrases, I began to inductively develop a sense of common or familiar themes that appeared to be linked across several transcripts. Guba (1978, p. 53) refers to these as “recurring regularities” This discovery of themes from empirical data is similar to the grounded theorists concept of open coding (Ryan & Bernard, 2003, p. 88).
These themes were then grouped together and a descriptor was developed, such as:
”political influences”, “theory and skills debate”, “negotiation process”, “academics being silenced”. These themes have variously been named: “categories” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967);
“codes” (Miles & Huberman, 1994); “labels” (Dey, 1993, p. 96); “segments” (Tesch, 1990) and “units” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985); but the essential meaning for me is that they are
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themes, which are then “grouped together under a more abstract, higher order concept called a category” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 61). Within each theme, a further process of contrasting the views of each participant to identify similarities and differences of expression and viewpoint took place several times, to reveal the more subtle distinctions that comprised the parts of each theme.
This dialectic movement within the themes from one part to another, and moving back and forth between the parts (extracts) and the whole (transcripts), and from one transcript to the set of transcripts continued cyclically for a considerable length of time. Creswell (2007) notes that in this process special attention is given to not only what was experienced, but also how it was experienced, and “taken-for-granted” assumptions are explored, which conveys exactly the type of questioning curiosity that is engaged in as the mental process of shifting and dawning realisations, from one transcript to the other, from themed extracts to the whole, is carried out.
After returning to the transcripts and reading each one over again several times, and reading the pages of themes listed over and over, certain categories or clusters of themes became evident, which enabled me to group the excerpts under descriptive headings such as: “Policy as Politically Symbolic”, “Political Factors: The Equity Imperative: Towards a Uniform Qualification”; “The Socio-Economic Imperative: South Africa as a Global Player”;
“Process Matters: Tensions between the Legal Profession and Legal Academics”;
“Gamesmanship: The ‘tug-o-war’ game that never was”, etc. These categories were then considered against the framework of the theoretical constructs, against the literature review and the research questions to develop theoretical insights, alignments and coherence across the study and to deepen my understanding of the phenomenon.
The headings became a framework to begin the descriptive outline of the interpretive analysis, fleshed out and illustrated with extracts from the transcripts. Creswell (2007, p. 61) refers to this collection of significant statements and themes which describe what the participants experienced as the textural description. The structural or imaginative variation description is also made up of these statements, explaining the context and setting that influenced how the participants experienced the phenomenon. After completing the first descriptive aspects of the write-up, a second more detailed iteration, back to the literature
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and theoretical framework, facilitated the emergence of a more theoretically-based interpretation to “relate themes to each other in some kind of story line” (Willig, 2007). This is termed the essential, invariant structure (or essence) and is constituted by the combination of the earlier descriptions.
Van Manen described phenomenological analysis as primarily a writing exercise to distil meaning, writing to compose a story that “captures the important elements of the lived experience” (1990). The practice of writing cannot be separated from phenomenological research because “it is in the act of reading and writing that insights emerge” (M Van Manen, 2006, p. 715); Van Manen emphasises how in the process of writing up, “data are gained and interpreted”, producing knowledge in the form of text. The texts describe and analyse phenomena as well as evoking understandings “that otherwise lie beyond (their) reach”.
By the end of the story the reader should feel that she has vicariously experienced the phenomenon under study and should be able to envision herself (or someone else who has been through that experience) coming to similar conclusions about what it means (Starks & Brown Trinidad, 2007, p. 1376).
In order to achieve this effectively, I followed Willig’s (2007, p. 217) style of reintroducing the participants’ emotions and voices into the description, instead of allowing the “thematic dimension dominate the expressive dimension” (M Van Manen, 1997). This type of written interpretation that “evokes and intensifies embedded meaning” is what has been aimed at in the analysis of the two phenomenological data sets in the study (Willig, 2007, p. 217).
Cohen et al. (2007) describe how Ball (1990) and Bowe et al. (1992) use a significant amount of verbatim data because their participants were “powerful” and “justice needed to be done to the exact words they used”. This is the same motivation that I would argue for the quantity of direct quotations that I have used from the transcripts of the Task Group members and the current Law Deans.
Phenomenologists often draw on data from different narrators to create a “blended story”, allowing the reader to feel what it would be like to have the experience (Starks & Brown Trinidad, 2007, p. 1377). By combining the data from the Task Group and interweaving it with the data from the current Law Deans, I have attempted to achieve a multi-faceted narrative interpretation that is layered and reflects the complexities of the experience of
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curriculum change and implementation in what could be termed “Voices of Deans Past and Present” (chapter5.
4.13 Phenomenographic methodology: variation in experiences of