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Phenomenology

In: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

Edited by: Lisa M. Given

Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

Chapter Title: "Phenomenology"

Pub. Date: 2012

Access Date: August 4, 2020

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412941631

Online ISBN: 9781412963909

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909

Print pages: 615-619

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the

online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909

Phenomenology is the reflective study of prereflective or lived experience. To say it somewhat differently, a

main characteristic of the phenomenological tradition is that it is the study of the lifeworld as we immediately

experience it, prereflectively, rather than as we conceptualize, theorize, categorize, or reflect on it.

Phenomenology is now commonly considered to be one of the alternative qualitative research methodologies

to which researchers can turn. But phenomenology is also a term that can carry quite different meanings

depending on theoretical and practical contexts.

Originally, phenomenology was the name for the major movement in philosophy and the humanities in

continental Europe in the 20th century. More recently, the term has acquired a broader meaning as

phenomenology has been developed as a human science that is employed in professional disciplines

such as education, health science, clinical psychology, and law. Phenomenological research is the study of

lived or experiential meaning and attempts to describe and interpret these meanings in the ways that they

emerge and are shaped by consciousness, language, our cognitive and noncognitive sensibilities, and by our

preunderstandings and presuppositions. Phenomenology may explore the unique meanings of any human

experience or phenomenon. For example, it may study what it is like to have a conversation, how students

experience difficulty in learning something, how pain is experienced in childbirth, what it is like to experience

obsessive compulsions, how young people begin to experience secrecy and inwardness, and so forth.

This entry describes the emergence of traditions and contexts, some key concepts of phenomenology, and

methods of phenomenology as a human science.

The Emergence of Traditions and their Contexts

Within the large sweep of phenomenological philosophy, a variety of phenomenological schools and traditions

may be distinguished, such as transcendental, existential, hermeneutic, linguistic, and ethical

phenomenology. Often these traditions are strongly associated with renowned phenomenological scholars.

Transcendental phenomenology may be identified with the pathbreaking work of Edmund Husserl and his

interpreters. Some basic terms of transcendental phenomenology are intentionality, eidetic reduction, and

constitution of meaning. For Husserl, phenomenology is the rigorous, human science of all conceivable

transcendental phenomena. It describes the way that knowledge comes into being in consciousness and

clarifies the assumptions upon which all human understandings are grounded.

Existential phenomenology is often associated with Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de

Beauvoir. Some basic terms of existential phenomenology are modes of being, ontology, and lifeworld. In

his last work, The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl had already turned phenomenological analysis

from the transcendental ego and consciousness to the prereflective lifeworld of everyday experience. Martin

Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty radicalized this turn toward the existential world as we live and

experience it. With Heidegger, this turn became an ontological rather than an epistemological project. Instead

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of asking how the being of things are constituted as intentional objects in consciousness, Heidegger asked

how the being of beings shows itself as a revealing of being itself.

Hermeneutic phenomenology is linked especially with Hans-Georg Gadamer and with Paul Ricoeur. Some

basic terms of hermeneutic phenomenology are interpretation, textual meaning, dialogue, preunderstanding,

and tradition. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when its method is taken to be interpretive (rather

than purely descriptive as in transcendental phenomenology). But the contrast between descriptive and

interpretive phenomenology is sometimes oversimplified by researchers in the professional disciplines.

Heidegger argued that all description is always already interpretation. Every form of human understanding is

interpretive.

Linguistic phenomenology includes the French poststructuralist work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida,

and Michel Foucault, even though the latter denied that he was a phenomenologist. Basic terms of linguistic

phenomenology are textual autonomy, signification, intertextuality, deconstruction, the outside, discourse,

and space of the text. The work of Foucault on the nature of language and discourse contributes to certain

explorations of the relation between understanding, culture, historicality, identity, and human life. But it is

especially in the work of Derrida and colleagues such as Hélène Cixous, where we can speak of a radical

linguistic phenomenology.

Ethical phenomenology is exemplified in the work of Max Scheler, but later with the thinking of Emmanuel

Levinas and his translator Alphonso Lingis. Basic terms of ethical phenomenology are otherness,

responsibility, I-Thou, the face, and (non)relationality. Ethical phenomenology received its first impetus

especially by Max Scheler in his study The Nature of Sympathy. For Levinas, the Husserlian focus on

the essence of things and Heidegger's preoccupation with the modalities of being in the world all are

manifestations of the primacy of being, self, or mineness in traditional philosophical phenomenology. For a

truly profound understanding of human reality one must not only ask for the meaning of being or presence,

but also for the meaning of what is otherwise than being: alterity or the infinite. Levinas finds the

phenomenological power of this question in the encounter with the face of the other.

Phenomenology of Practice

Since the mid-1990s, phenomenology has been widely imported into the practical, applied, or professional

disciplines such as the health sciences, education, clinical psychology, and pedagogical disciplines. Within

these professional fields, phenomenology has a somewhat different history than most other qualitative

research approaches. For example, action research developed from within the field of sociology and had a

distinct and critical–political social agenda; ethnography emerged as a distinct anthropological field research

method. In North America, phenomenology seeped into the professional fields in part via ethnomethodology,

ethnography, interpretive sociology, and other such social science streams and in part through pockets

of interest such as humanistic psychology, the work of existential psychology, and educational studies

and pedagogy. Phenomenological inquiries have become attractive because they offer an alternative to

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managerial, instrumental, and technological ways of understanding knowledge, and they lead to more

ethically and experientially sensitive epistemologies and ontologies of practice.

Before there was any significant interest in phenomenology in North America, a unique experiment had

taken place in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and France. For example, the University

of Utrecht School can be considered a genuinely original contribution to the international discussion about

phenomenology in the professions. It consisted of an assortment of phenomenologically oriented

psychologists, educators, pedagogues, pediatricians, sociologists, criminologists, jurists, psychiatrists, and

other medical doctors who formed a more or less close association of like-minded academic and professional

practitioners. Scholars such as the psychiatrist J. H van den Berg wrote among other things about the

changing nature of childhood; the pedagogue-philosopher O. F. F. Bollnow wrote on the pedagogical

atmosphere; M. J. Langeveld established the field of phenomenological pedagogy; the medical doctor F. J.

J. Buytendijk produced numerous studies on topics such as pain, human movement, touch, and obsessive

compulsiveness.

The practical phenomenological psychology of Amadeo Georgi and Clark E. Moustakas was inspired by the

Dutch school. In education, phenomenology was introduced through the writings of Maxine Greene and Max

van Manen and in the health sciences through the works of Patricia Benner and Kay Toombs, and so on.

In recent years, further developments in phenomenological methodology, as originally inspired by continental

scholars, are found in all the major professional disciplines. These phenomenological methods share a

concern with the concrete particulars of everyday life, but they are now more sensitive to subjective and

intersubjective roots of meaning, to the complexity of relations between language and experience, to the

cultural and gendered contexts of interpretive meaning, and to the textual dimensions of phenomenological

writing and reflection. The growing interest in the relevance of such phenomenological methodologies for

research and the knowledge base of professional practices attests to the vitality of concerns with reflective

interpretation and experiencing sensitive understanding.

Concepts of Phenomenology

It has been said that a proper understanding of phenomenology can be gained only through doing it.

Phenomenological understanding needs to be practiced as method, and identified as a style of thinking—a

manner of orienting to experience as we live through it.

Within the discipline of philosophy, phenomenology is practiced through the methods of the reduction. And as

a human science, phenomenology has imported an additional variety of empirical data gathering techniques

and reflective methods. It explores ways of doing research that remain focused on and sensitive to the

concrete, subjective, and prereflective dimensions of the lifeworld.

Different phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida agree that

phenomenological understanding is achieved through language. A good phenomenological text can make us

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suddenly “see” something in a manner that enriches our understanding of everyday life experience and may

transform our practices. But phenomenological reflection also runs up against the limits of language. The

production of insight must proceed through the creation of a research text that speaks to our cognitive and

noncognitive sensibilities. Thus, phenomenological understanding is distinctly existential, emotive, enactive,

embodied, situational, and nontheoretic. A powerful phenomenological text thrives on a certain irrevocable

tension between what is unique and what is shared, between particular and transcendent meaning, between

what can be thought and what remains unthought, and between the reflective and the prereflective spheres

of the lifeworld.

Lived Experience

The term lived experience derives from the German erlebnis—experience as we live through it and recognize

it as a particular type of experience. It could be argued that human experience is the main epistemological

basis for many other qualitative research traditions, but the concept of lived experience possesses special

methodological significance for phenomenology. The notion of lived experience, as used in the works of

Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and like-minded phenomenologists, announces the intent to explore directly the

original or prereflective dimensions of human existence.

Our language can be seen as an immense linguistic map that names the possibilities of human lived

experiences. The value of phenomenology is that it prioritizes and investigates how the human being

experiences the world: how the patient experiences illness, how the teacher experiences the pedagogical

encounter, how the student experiences a moment of success or failure, and how we experience novel ways

of interacting with others and the world through computer mediated devices, social network technologies,

new media, and so forth. Every lived experience (phenomenon) can become a topic for phenomenological

inquiry. The phenomenological attitude keeps us reflectively attentive to the ways human beings live through

experiences in the immediacy of the present that is only recoverable as an elusive past.

Phenomenology is interested in recovering the living moment of the now—even before we put language to it

or describe it in words. Or to say this differently, phenomenology tries to show how our words, concepts, and

theories always shape (distort) and give structure to our experiences as we live them. But the living moment

of the present is always already absent in our effort to return to it. For example, it is one thing to get lost in

a novel, but it is another to retrospectively capture what happened to us, just now, as we slipped into this

textual space and began to dwell in the story. Similarly, we may identify and rate with empirical descriptors the

nature and intensity of various forms of pain, but the actual moment of being struck by pain or the lingering

discomfort of suffering pain somehow seem to be beyond words as we try to retrospectively appropriate the

experience. These experiences can be described, but ultimately the meaning of the primal experience is

beyond propositional discourse.

Lifeworld

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The lifeworld is the pregiven world, the existent world as we find ourselves in it. Husserl described the

lifeworld as the “world of immediate experience,” the world as “already there,” the world as experienced in the

“natural, primordial attitude.” He distinguished between our theoretical attitude to life, as borrowed from the

Greeks, and our natural pretheoretical attitude to life on which all science and theorizing is based and from

which all theorizing is ultimately derived. Husserl employs the term natural for what is original and naive, prior

to critical or theoretical reflection.

Each lifeworld shows certain pervading structures or styles that can be explored phenomenologically. Alfred

Schutz and Thomas Luckmann elaborated this notion in a sociological direction in their book Structures of

the Life-world. We could examine how the lifeworld of the child has different experiential qualities from the

lifeworld of the adult. Each of us may be seen to inhabit different lifeworlds at different times of the day, such

as the lived world of work and the lived world of home. Moreover, lifeworlds intersect and are partly nested

within each other. Heidegger gave to the idea of lifeworld an even more worldly, existential thrust by speaking

of phenomenology as the study of being, the study of our modes-of-being or ways-of-being-in-the-world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of “form of life” and “language games” can be understood as a more linguistic

approach to the idea of lifeworld.

The Reduction

It is impossible to understand transcendental phenomenological method without understanding the meaning

and significance of the reduction. Reduction is the technical term that describes the phenomenological device

of bracketing (époché) that permits us to discover the experiential surge of the lifeworld. The aim of the

reduction is to reachieve a direct and primal contact with the world as we experience it rather than as we

conceptualize it. But the discovery of the prereflective lifeworld through the technique of the reduction always

transcends the lifeworld—when we bracket lived experience, we experience meaning. The reduction is meant

to bring the aspects of meaning that belong to the phenomena of our lifeworld into nearness. In particular it

aims to bring into focus the uniqueness of the phenomenon to which we are oriented.

The method of human science is never simply a matter of procedure, whether simple procedures or advanced

procedures. Rather the reduction refers to a certain thoughtfulness. To come to an understanding of the

unique meaning and significance of something we need to reflect on it by practicing a careful attentiveness.

The term reduction is somewhat misleading since reduction—the ambition to make reflection emulate the

unreflective life of consciousness—is ironically a protest against reductionism. So how then is reflection

supposed to emulate lived experience? Of course, the emulator is language, and the process of emulating is

performed through writing, and the intent of writing is to produce textual portrayals that resonate the kinds of

meanings that we seem to recognize in prereflective experience.

There exist many philosophical investigations and explications of the reduction that can make this topic

complex and confusing. That is not surprising in view of the fact that the project of phenomenology can be

understood in a variety of ways. Here several levels of reduction may be distinguished for their methodological

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usefulness: wonder or heuristic reduction, openness or hermeneutic reduction, concreteness or

phenomenological reduction, universality in contingency or eidetic reduction, and flexible rationality or

methodological reduction. Each of these dimensions of the reduction needs to be practiced as if in concert.

Human Science Methods

The reduction is the method central to the phenomenological study of the lifeworld; however, in the work of

more ontologically oriented phenomenologists, the reduction does not bracket the phenomenon away from

the world, but rather it restores the contextual and always already existing meaningfulness of the world.

As phenomenology was adopted by various disciplines associated with professional practices, empirical and

reflective methods were imported that are derived from the humanities and the social sciences. Empirical

methods such as interviewing, observation, eliciting written descriptions, and borrowing from literary and

artistic sources are now used to gather experiential material. These data are best collected in the form of

descriptions of lived-through moments, experiential anecdotal accounts, remembered stories of particular

experiences, narrative fragments, and fictional experiences. Thus, phenomenological experiential accounts

should not be confused with opinions, interpretations, views, or explanations of certain phenomena.

Phenomenological inquiry cannot be formalized into a series of technical procedures. However, a variety of

data gathering activities may be identified that can help in doing phenomenological inquiry. These activities

fall into two types: empirical and reflective methods.

Empirical Methods

Our personal life experiences are immediately accessible to us in a way that no one else's are. However,

the phenomenologist does not want to trouble the reader with purely private, autobiographical facticities of

his or her life. In drawing up personal descriptions of lived experiences, the phenomenologist knows that the

patterns of meaning of one's own experiences are also the possible experiences of others and therefore may

be recognizable by others. By conducting a personal description of a lived experience, the researcher aims

to describe a phenomenon as much as possible in concrete and lived-through terms. In other words, the

focus is on the direct description of a particular situation or event as it is lived through without offering causal

explanations or interpretive generalizations.

In the various strands and disciplines in the social and human sciences, the interview serves differing

purposes. For example, ethnographic interviews study cultural practices and meanings. Survey or opinion

interviews study the ways people perceive or feel about certain issues, their beliefs, views, and so forth.

In the context of phenomenological research there are, broadly speaking, two types of interview: The

phenomenological interview is used as a means for exploring and gathering experiential material. The

hermeneutic interview is used to explore interpretive meaning aspects of lived experience material.

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Sometimes, the best way to enter a person's lifeworld is to participate in it. For example, to gain access to the

experience of young children, it may be important to play with them and follow them into their play spaces.

Participatory and close observation generates different forms of experiential material than is obtained through

written or interview approaches. Observational method may require that one be a participant and an observer

at the same time, maintaining an orientation of reflectivity while guarding against the more manipulative and

artificial attitude that a reflective attitude tends to insert in a social situation and relation.

Fictional literature, such as novels and short stories, is sometimes an excellent source for experiential

material. The phenomenological value of a novel, for example, is determined by what may be called the

perceptiveness and the intuitive sensitivity of the author. Phenomena such as love, grief, illness, faith,

success, fear, death, hope, struggle, or loss are the stuff of which novels are made. Through an experientially

powerful novel, then, one is given the chance of living through an experience that provides the opportunity of

gaining insight into certain aspects of the human condition.

Reflective Methods

Whereas empirical methods aim to explore the range and varieties of prereflective experiential material that

is appropriate for the phenomenon under study, reflective methods aim to interpret the aspects of meaning or

meaningfulness that are associated with this phenomenon and that assist with the reduction.

Phenomenological reflection aims to perceive the meanings of human experiences; and in a sense, it is

something everyone does constantly in everyday life. For example, when we meet a friend, we do not just

perceive a man or a woman. We see a person who differs from other men and women precisely in that respect

that makes us relate and talk to this person as a friend.

But what is much more difficult is to come to a reflective determination and explication of what a friend is.

This determination and explication of meaning then is the more difficult task of phenomenological reflection.

A perhaps more notorious illustration of this difficulty concerns the experience of time. What could be more

easily grasped than time? We regulate our lives by time. We carry the time around on our wrist. We divide

the day into morning, afternoon, evening, and nighttime. We reflect on past time and anticipate the time to

come. We even talk about the time going by, sometimes quickly and at other times more slowly. And yet when

someone asks us, “What is time anyway?” we are quickly at our wit's end to describe it. What is it that goes by

fast or slowly when we say that the time is elapsing? How does our sense of time change as we become more

continuously and immediately accessible to each other through mobile devices and the internet? So there is

a difference between our prereflective lived understanding of the meaning of time and a self-reflective grasp

of the phenomenological structure of the lived meaning of time. To get at the latter is a reflective and often

laborious task, involving a process of reflectively appropriating, of clarifying, and of making explicit thematic

aspects of meaning of the lived experience.

Our lived experiences and the structures of meanings (themes) in terms of which these lived experiences

can be described and interpreted constitute the immense complexity of the lifeworld. Existential themes that

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may prove especially helpful as guides for reflection in the research process include lived space (spatiality),

lived body (corporeality), lived time (temporality), and lived human relation (relationality or communality).

We can always ask about any experience the fundamental questions that correspond to such lifeworld

existentials. Therefore, spatiality, corporeality, temporality, relationality, and alterity are productive categories

for the process of phenomenological questioning, reflecting, and writing.

Catherine Adams & and Max van Manen

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909.n317