Phenomenology as Qualitative Research

A Critical Analysis of Meaning Attribution

John Paley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317227618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Phenomenology originated as a novel way of doing philosophy early in the twentieth century. In the writings of Husserl and Heidegger, regarded as its founders, it was a non-empirical kind of philosophical enquiry. Although this tradition has continued in a variety of forms, 'phenomenology' is now also used to denote an empirical form of qualitative research (PQR), especially in health, psychology and education. However, the methods adopted by researchers in these disciplines have never been subject to detailed critical analysis; nor have the methods advocated by methodological writers who are regularly cited in the research literature.

This book examines these methods closely, offering a detailed analysis of worked-through examples in three influential textbooks by Giorgi, van Manen, and Smith, Flowers and Larkin. Paley argues that the methods described in these texts are radically under-specified, and suggests alternatives to PQR as an approach to qualitative research, particularly the use of interview data in the construction of models designed to explain phenomena rather than merely describe or interpret them. This book also analyses, and aims to develop, the implicit theory of 'meaning' found in PQR writings. The author establishes an account of 'meaning' as an inference marker, and explores the methodological implications of this view.

This book evaluates the methods used in phenomenology-as-qualitative-research, and formulates a more fully theorised alternative. It will appeal to researchers and students in the areas of health, nursing, psychology, education, public health, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy and logic.

1
Introduction

The undecided

Let’s face it, there are plenty of people who will not be persuaded by this book.

I’m referring to those who do phenomenology. Too much is invested in phenomenological research, too many careers depend on it, and too many papers – hundreds, thousands – have been published, for those who regard themselves as phenomenologists to conclude: ‘Maybe he’s got a point’. Nor should they. No research programme is dismantled just because there is evidence that contradicts the favoured theory, or arguments that subvert the preferred method. Read Kuhn, read Lakatos.¹ If a research programme can soldier on despite an ‘ocean of anomalies’ or ‘inconsistent foundations’ (Lakatos 1978), there is no reason why phenomenologists should pack up and go home merely because their methods are questioned by a single book. Phenomenology will not become an endangered species.

I have a different constituency in mind. The members of this group include the undecided, the waverers, the curious, the provisionally attracted, the secretly baffled, the at-a-loss. They are the ones who are unsure what the alternatives to phenomenology are, and who adopt it not because they are committed to its philosophy – or even have much understanding of it – but because they don’t know what else to do. They are the ones who like the general idea, but are wary of the Slough of Philosophical Despond they are expected to wade through. They are the ones who have been nudged along the phenomenological path by an enthusiastic colleague or an insistent supervisor, but who have not yet abandoned themselves to its arcane and hyphenated terminology. A large proportion of this group are postgraduate students.

My main aim is to give this constituency reasons for pausing before they go down the phenomenology route, and to argue that there is an alternative. More than that, it is to provide an indication of what this alternative looks like.

I will do a lot of showing. I will invite readers to look closely at examples of phenomenological analysis in both published studies and methodological texts. This will require a certain amount of patience on the reader’s part, and a determination not to let the eye skip and skim over the page, the visual skating act that is often a substitute for reading. Just stop for a moment, I will say, and see what analytical moves the author is making. Do not assume that her account of what she is doing can be trusted. Rather: look, then linger, then look again. By slowing the reading down, and taking the author’s official description of the analytical process with a pinch of salt, we can see what’s really going on.

I’ll also ask a lot of questions. The book is stuffed with them. Questions about the passages I invite the reader to examine. Questions about the implications of a particular view. Questions about the apparent inconsistencies in the author’s argument. Questions about what has not been said. Questions about how certain terms are used, and what they mean. Questions about why phenomenological writers usually do not explain these terms themselves. My hope is that readers will not merely think about these questions, and have a stab at answering them, but will see that they are of critical importance. Phenomenology is a tradition that discourages certain questions from being asked.² One aim of this book is to get those questions into circulation.

So I am trying to persuade the undecided, secretly baffled, at-a-loss constituency; and one of the ways I do that is by inviting them to look closely and ask awkward questions.

PP and PQR

Roughly speaking, there are two types of thing that are called ‘phenomenology’. I will refer to them as phenomenology-as-philosophy (PP) and phenomenology-as-qualitative-research (PQR).³ This book is exclusively about PQR.

Most of the researchers who do PQR assume there is a connection between PQR and PP, and that the methods of PQR are derived, somehow or other, from the work of PP authors such as Heidegger and Husserl. This may or may not be true. Personally, I think it isn’t true.⁴ But either way, I don’t believe the question is relevant to the examination of PQR I undertake in the book. For this reason, I will not talk much about the philosophical comings and goings (at least, not the Husserlian and Heideggerian comings and goings). In particular, I will not suggest that ‘phenomenology is both a philosophy and a research method’,⁵ or that you need to understand PP in order to do PQR.⁶

So ‘PQR’ refers to a certain form of qualitative research, which might, depending on the affiliations of the writer, be described as ‘descriptive phenomenology’, ‘Husserlian phenomenology’, ‘Heideggerian phenomenology’, ‘interpretive phenomenology’, ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’, or some similar label. It usually involves interviewing a small number of people, inviting them to talk about their experience of a particular phenomenon, and analysing the interview transcripts. Often, this analysis culminates in the elucidation of the ‘meaning’ of the phenomenon concerned. At other times it culminates in a series of themes that characterise the phenomenon, and that are illustrated by excerpts from the data.

An obvious question suggests itself at this point. Given this description of PQR, how precisely does it differ from other types of qualitative method? Other qualitative researchers rely on small samples, ask their respondents to talk about experience, refer to meaning, and identify themes. However, there is presumably something distinctive about PQR, something that differentiates it from these alternatives. What is it? I will call this the ‘distinctiveness’ question. I suggest a possible answer to it in Chapter 2.

If not the philosophical comings and goings, then … what? I am interested in how PQR is actually done. So I’ll be looking at published examples of PQR, and at the methodological texts cited in the literature. There will be occasional PP asides, but they will usually be restricted to the notes.

Synopsis

There are two main parts of the book. In the first, I review the work of established PQR methodologists: Amedeo Giorgi, Max van Manen, and the trio of Jonathan Smith, Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin.⁷ The focus is mainly on the worked-through examples found in their books. In particular, I am interested in the way in which these authors illuminate, unearth, or elucidate ‘the meaning of the phenomenon’ in the texts they analyse. It turns out, first, that none of these writers is particularly clear about how this is done; and, second, that the major assumption that they all make about meaning does not appear to be true, even in their own examples. Call this the critical part of the book.

The second part is more constructive. A sizeable chunk of it consists of an analysis of meaning. It is an odd fact that, despite the importance of meaning in PQR studies (and in qualitative methods generally), the concept is rarely discussed in the literature. Questions like the following are not asked: What kind of thing is a meaning? What kind of thing is the ‘meaning of a phenomenon’? What kind of thing is the ‘meaning of an experience’? How is meaning ‘attached’ to experience? How is a ‘meaning’ identified? What practical value does knowing the ‘meaning’ of something have?

So this book does something PQR authors have not tried to do. It provides an explanation of what meaning is.⁸

Having done that, it discusses the methodological implications. This is the positive part of the book. It makes some suggestions about what an alternative approach to interview-based qualitative methods can achieve, and provides an extended example.

I should add, as a matter of reassurance, that I will not be diving into the theoretical differences between the various philosophical heavyweights: Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and so on. From the point of view of this book, none of that matters. My aim is to encourage the reader to ask questions about the methods described by PQR authors, and to be wary of any answers that are not absolutely clear. The convolutions of phenomenological philosophy can only be a distraction in pursuit of this goal.

In slightly more detail …

Chapter 2 begins with the ‘distinctiveness’ question. Given that, at first sight, PQR looks like any other type of qualitative research, what is distinctive about it? Is there something that distinguishes PQR from other qualitative genres? My answer is that, in principle, there is. The distinctive feature is an approach to analysis that I will call meaning attribution, in which meaning is assigned both to individual units of data, and subsequently to the phenomenon as a whole. Part of the chapter is devoted to explaining this.

However, the situation is complicated by three inconvenient facts. First, many PQR studies lose sight of this distinctive feature of phenomenology, and become what I call ‘hybrids’: reverting (at least in part) to more generic methods of data analysis. Second, the process of meaning attribution is, for a number of reasons (including hybridisation), largely invisible. We do not know much about how it is carried out in practice because most PQR studies are, at best, sketchy about the details. Third, the concept of meaning attribution gives rise to a series of tricky questions, which the literature does not really answer (or which it answers inconsistently). The chapter briefly considers some of these questions.

There is, however, one aspect of meaning attribution that PQR methodologists seem to be agreed on. Meaning is attributed on the basis of the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. All three of the methodological works I will be examining insist that an ‘analysis attempts to understand the meaning of the description based solely on what is present in the data’ (Giorgi); that ‘interpretation must be “based on a reading from within the text itself”’ (Smith, Flowers and Larkin 2009; from here abbreviated as SFL). In other words, it is illegitimate to make use of ‘external’ theory.

I call this the axiom of resident meaning. Whatever meaning is, it is somehow resident in the data being analysed, or the text being interpreted. It might also be hidden – this is why we need a phenomenologist to find it – but it is nevertheless ‘contained’ in the data/text.⁹ The meaning attributed to a unit of data, or to the phenomenon itself, is not derived from an external source and projected on to the text. Rather, it is distilled from the text itself.

The chapter ends with the question that this discussion poses: how exactly is meaning distilled from a text? By what method is it extracted? How is it removed from its hiding place and brought out into the open? Given that PQR researchers hardly ever describe meaning attribution in any detail – although the procedure is obviously pivotal – the answer to this question is by no means obvious.

Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to answer the ‘How is it done?’ question by examining the way in which the authors of two methods texts (Giorgi, van Manen) do the distilling, describing, illuminating, extracting, elucidating, unearthing, or uncovering.

The structure of these chapters is, perhaps, a bit unusual. Both texts include worked-through examples, intended to illustrate how the recommended method is put into practice. So, in each case, I subject the examples to close scrutiny, considering them on a line-by-line basis in order to determine what can be learned from them. The kind of question I ask is: If Giorgi performs a ‘meaning transformation’, or if van Manen produces a ‘thematic formulation’ … how did they get from this to that? By what process or procedure did they travel from the text to its meaning? By what criteria can we evaluate this journey? By what criteria can we say that the proposed move from text-to-meaning is justified (or not)? How do we know if the retrieval of meaning has been done well or poorly?

Chapters 3 and 4 are long, but I hope readers will resist the temptation to skip or skim. Actually, that doesn’t just apply to this book. It also applies to the methodological texts I will be examining. Skim those, and you will not notice the glitches. You won’t spot the tensions and possible contradictions. For example: if (on one page) van Manen says that experience is pre-reflective and pre-verbal, but if (on another page) he says that experience is ‘soaked through with language’, you will not notice the apparent discrepancy. As a result, you won’t wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the undecided
• 2 Meaning attribution in phenomenology
• 3 Amedeo Giorgi: jealousy
• 4 Max van Manen: being left or abandoned
• 5 The linguistics of meaning
• 6 Smith, Flowers, Larkin: the HIV interview
• 7 Meaning, models and mechanisms
• Index