Phenomenology

Introducing phenomenological research

By shah ali

Phenomenology is an umbrella term encompassing both a philosophical movement and a range of research approaches. The phenomenological movement was initiated by Husserl (1936/1970) as a radically new way of doing philosophy. Later theorists, such as Heidegger (1927/1962), have recast the phenomenological project, moving away from a philosophical discipline which focuses on consciousness and essences of phenomena towards elaborating existential and hermeneutic (interpretive) dimensions.

This paper outlines ways phenomenological philosophy is applied to research covering the following in turn:

• Foundational concepts for research

• Variants of phenomenology

• Gathering and analysing phenomenological data

• Evaluating the quality of phenomenological research

Foundational concepts for research

Applied to research, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: their nature and meanings. The focus is on the way things appear to us through experience or in our consciousness where the phenomenological researcher aims to provide a rich textured description of lived experience. The researcher’s project is, in the infamous words of Husserl (1936/1970), to ‘return to the things themselves’. The ‘things’ here refer to the world of experience as lived. “To return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962).

The life-world – Husserl’s (1936/1970) Lebenswelt – is a key concept and focus of investigation for phenomenology. The life-world comprises the world of objects around us as we perceive them and our experience of our self, body and relationships. It is the “locus of interaction between ourselves and our perceptual environments and the world of experienced horizons within which we meaningfully dwell together” (von Eckartsberg, 1998, cited in Garza, 2007, p.314). It can be defined as the world that is lived and...