"This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment." ... Eugene Taylor (Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America)
Range Phenomenology (An application)
A research strategy provides the overall direction of the research. Deciding between theoretical or empirical research is an important decision in research strategy. Theoretical research requires intensive textual investigation while empirical research requires primary data collection and use of secondary data. Theoretical research is more intellectually demanding and the risk of failure is greater than empirical work. In empirical research, there are two research orientations: positivistic and phenomenological.
Phenomenology has origins in social sciences, especially in Psychology, where it has developed into a recognized branch of the discipline.
Phenomenon
A phenomenon, plural phenomena or phenomenons, is any observable occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In scientific usage, a phenomenon is any event that is observable, however commonplace it might be, even if it requires the use of instrumentation to observe, record, or compile data concerning it. For example, in physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, or spacetime, such as Isaac Newton's observations of the moon's orbit and of gravity, or Galileo Galilei's observations of the motion of a pendulum (Wikipedia).
History of Phenomenology
According to Linda Finlay, Phenomenology is an umbrella term encompassing both a philosophical movement and a range of research approaches. The father of phenomenology frequently is cited as Edmund Husserl. Husserl was a German philosopher as well as a mathematician. The phenomenological movement was initiated by Husserl (1936/1970) as a radically new way of doing philosophy. The works of Husserl, as well as those of Martin Heidegger, are cited in many nursing studies as the framework for the research approach and methods. Even though both philosophers are considered phenomenologists, their approaches to research and understanding life experiences differ. 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.
Some considered Brentano as the founder of phenomenology. He initiated the idea of intentionality. Intentionality means that consciousness or embodiment inherently relates to objects. Consciousness is consciousness of objects. Brentano attempted to overcome the logical positivist notion that objects and sensation are real, and consciousness is totally reducible to objectivity.
Husserl (1913/1931) originally identified several variants of 'bracketing'. Applied to research, these involve:
- The epoche of the natural sciences
- The phenomenological psychological reduction
- Husserl's transcendental phenomenological reduction
Phenomenology, per se, is a branch of philosophy. Phenomenology is one of many types of qualitative research that examines the lived experiences of humans. Phenomenological researchers hope to gain understanding of the essential "truths" (ie, essences) of the lived experience. Examples of phenomenological research include exploring the lived experiences of women undergoing breast biopsy or the lived experiences of family members waiting for a loved one undergoing major surgery. The term phenomenology often is used without a clear understanding of its meaning. Phenomenology has been described as a philosophy, methodology, and method.
The central premise is that the researcher should be concerned to understand phenomena in depth and that this understanding should result from attempting to find tentative answers to questions such as 'What?' 'Why?' and 'How?'
Phenomenology contends that such understanding is essential and will not come from answering the questions 'How many?' or 'How much?'
Phenomenology assumes that knowledge can be gained by concentrating on phenomena experienced by people.
Phenomenology as a research perspective can be studied in terms of several domains of inquiry:
1. We may distinguish various traditions or orientations such as transcendental, existential, hermeneutic, historical, ethical, and language phenomenologies;
2. Phenomenological inquiry probes and draws from different sources of meaning;
3. Phenomenological inquiry can be understood in terms of the philosophical or methodological attitudes associated with the reduction and the vocation;
4. The more procedural dimensions of phenomenological inquiry can be explored in terms of empirical methods and reflective methods;
5. Ultimately phenomenological inquiry cannot be separated from the practice of writing.
6. Phenomenological inquiry can be studied in terms of its practical consequences for human living.
Applications of Phenomenology
Artificial Intelligence(AI) and cognitive science(COGSCI). During the last decade, A few cognitive scientists have been actively pursuing the goal of reconciliating COGSCI, whether empirically or foundationally, with some of the insights procured by phenomenology; on the other, many cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind who think of themselves as, respectively, mainstream and analytic, and have no or little acquaintance with, and often little sympathy for, phenomenology, have been actively pursuing research programs geared toward some of the key issues identified by phenomenological critics of early AI/ COGSCI.
Phenomenology and Genetic Engineering
Genetic engineering now offers the enticing prospect of primary control of things in a dependable, reliable and potentially absolute way. Just as the laboratory has removed the contingencies as much as possible in the test tube, genetically engineered crops remove chance from the treated organism itself. Consequently, genetic engineering means greater control over the environment, nature.
Phenomenology and Ergonomics
Both ergonomics and phenomenology look at human-made environments as reflecting culture and not as just cognitive, scientific, or merely objective fields of study and work. Moreover, both ergonomics and phenomenology consider the human as part of the object. Thus, ergonomics notes that we ought avoid simply catering to the person's every desire and want, and phenomenology rejects solipsism's view that the individual is the sole reality.
Phenomenology and Safety
Engineers abide by and study professional ethics, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration monitors dangerous in the workplace according to federal law. Phenomenology, however, does not become part of a professional ethics issue except in the case of the ethics of teaching. It may seem that in phenomenology, the subject-object discontinuity or dichotomy is only an academic rather than a technically ethical matter as in engineering. To say that objects are disconnected from and do not reflect subjectivity is not an ethical matter.
Range Phenomenology
For many years the scientific, range and phenomenology, and research market has seen major advancements in thermal imaging systems to help identify, measure, and track the heat signatures/energy signatures of various sources, both friendly and foe. Infrared imaging technology offers a way to measure temperatures of objects that do not easily lend themselves to physical contact.
Phenomenology as 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.
Pure phenomenological research seeks essentially to describe rather than explain, and to start from a perspective free from hypotheses or preconceptions
Research Method:
The goal of qualitative phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a phenomenon. As this is a qualitative analysis of narrative data, methods to analyze its data must be quite different from more traditional or quantitative methods of research.
Data collection:
Any way the participant can describe their lived phenomenal experience can be used to gather data in a phenomenological study.
Data analysis:
The first principle of analysis of phenomenological data is to use an emergent strategy, to allow the method of analysis to follow the nature of the data itself. Only those elements that can't be changed without losing the meaning of the narrative contribute to the theme.
Presentation of your results:
The standard APA style lab report can be used to present the results of your phenomenological study.
In the Results section of the report, present your findings, that is, the themes of the descriptions of the participants' experience. Label & define your theme, with examples of narratives that illustrate your theme. You may wish to directly quote from the narratives for each theme to illustrate it.
In the Discussion section, relate to theories presented in the Introduction, or develop your discussion from the themes you have found. As your goal in phenomenological research is to describe your participants' lived experience, in this section, you can expand on the themes & relate them to similar experiences you have found discussed or described by your sources.
Phenomenology: A field guide (A Field Guide for the Qualitative Student)
An excellent summary to help the new researcher get started. Data analysis for a typical phenomenological study is represented in the list of phases below:
Phase : Activity
Data managing: Create and organize files for data
Reading, memoing: Read through text, make margin notes, form initial codes
Describing: Describe the meaning of the experience for the researcher
Classifying: Find and list statements of meaning
Interpreting
Develop a textual description: "What happened?"
Develop a structural description: "How was the phenomenon experienced?"
Develop an overall description of the experience, the "essence"
Representing, visualizing: Present narration of the "essence" of the experience; use tables or figures of statements and meaning units
Conclusion
The concept of research often can be intimidating when one examines qualitative methods, such as phenomenology. If it is qualitative, review the specific philosophical underpinnings. If the underlying philosophy is phenomenology, ask if the researcher used bracketing as part of the method. Ask yourself whether a researcher truly can bracket life experiences.
Variants of phenomenology
1. Reflective Lifeworld Approach.
2. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)
3. Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA)
4. Heuristic approach adopted by Moustakas (1990)
5. Relational research approaches
6. Dialogal research approach
All the variants of phenomenology above share a similar focus on describing lived experience and recognising the significance of our embodied, intersubjective lifeworld.
Essential Qualities
The essential qualities of phenomenological research are: a focus on the wholeness of the experience rather than the parts, a search for meaning and essence, a subjective relationship with the object (i.e. research problem), regarding human experience in order to develop an experiential sensibility and understanding the intrinsic relationship between subject and object. To extend perception into consciousness and furthering our objective gaze with subjective sensibilities.
Phenomenology as a research method in education tries to "ward off any tendency toward constructing a predetermined set of fixed procedures, techniques and concepts that would rule-govern the research project". While there is not a set of fixed procedures, hermeneutic phenomenological research in the human sciences has six research activities:
(1) turning to a phenomenon which seriously interests us and commits us to the world;
(2) investigating experience as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it;
(3) reflecting on the essential themes which characterize the phenomenon;
(4) describing the phenomenon through the art of writing and rewriting;
(5) manipulating a strong and oriented pedagogical relation to the phenomenon;
(6) balancing the research context by considering parts and whole.
Seven Widely Accepted Features of the Phenomenological Approach
Phenomenologists conduct research in ways that share most of the following positive and negative features.
1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking;
2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also called objectivism and positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance;
3. Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition and some also evaluation and action.
4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known;
5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called "encountering" as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon "objects as they are encountered" (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is);
6. Phenomenologists tend to recognize the role of description in universal, a priori, or "eidetic" terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and
7. Phenomenologists tend to debate whether or not what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epochê and reduction is useful or even possible.
Phenomenology and Genetic Engineering
Genetic engineering now offers the enticing prospect of primary control of things in a dependable, reliable and potentially absolute way. Just as the laboratory has removed the contingencies as much as possible in the test tube, genetically engineered crops remove chance from the treated organism itself. Consequently, genetic engineering means greater control over the environment, nature.
Phenomenology and Ergonomics
Both ergonomics and phenomenology look at human-made environments as reflecting culture and not as just cognitive, scientific, or merely objective fields of study and work. Moreover, both ergonomics and phenomenology consider the human as part of the object. Thus, ergonomics notes that we ought avoid simply catering to the person's every desire and want, and phenomenology rejects solipsism's view that the individual is the sole reality.
Phenomenology and Safety
Engineers abide by and study professional ethics, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration monitors dangerous in the workplace according to federal law. Phenomenology, however, does not become part of a professional ethics issue except in the case of the ethics of teaching. It may seem that in phenomenology, the subject-object discontinuity or dichotomy is only an academic rather than a technically ethical matter as in engineering. To say that objects are disconnected from and do not reflect subjectivity is not an ethical matter.
Range Phenomenology
For many years the scientific, range and phenomenology, and research market has seen major advancements in thermal imaging systems to help identify, measure, and track the heat signatures/energy signatures of various sources, both friendly and foe. Infrared imaging technology offers a way to measure temperatures of objects that do not easily lend themselves to physical contact.
Phenomenology as 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.
Pure phenomenological research seeks essentially to describe rather than explain, and to start from a perspective free from hypotheses or preconceptions
Research Method:
The goal of qualitative phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a phenomenon. As this is a qualitative analysis of narrative data, methods to analyze its data must be quite different from more traditional or quantitative methods of research.
Data collection:
Any way the participant can describe their lived phenomenal experience can be used to gather data in a phenomenological study.
Data analysis:
The first principle of analysis of phenomenological data is to use an emergent strategy, to allow the method of analysis to follow the nature of the data itself. Only those elements that can't be changed without losing the meaning of the narrative contribute to the theme.
Presentation of your results:
The standard APA style lab report can be used to present the results of your phenomenological study.
In the Results section of the report, present your findings, that is, the themes of the descriptions of the participants' experience. Label & define your theme, with examples of narratives that illustrate your theme. You may wish to directly quote from the narratives for each theme to illustrate it.
In the Discussion section, relate to theories presented in the Introduction, or develop your discussion from the themes you have found. As your goal in phenomenological research is to describe your participants' lived experience, in this section, you can expand on the themes & relate them to similar experiences you have found discussed or described by your sources.
Phenomenology: A field guide (A Field Guide for the Qualitative Student)
An excellent summary to help the new researcher get started. Data analysis for a typical phenomenological study is represented in the list of phases below:
Phase : Activity
Data managing: Create and organize files for data
Reading, memoing: Read through text, make margin notes, form initial codes
Describing: Describe the meaning of the experience for the researcher
Classifying: Find and list statements of meaning
Interpreting
Develop a textual description: "What happened?"
Develop a structural description: "How was the phenomenon experienced?"
Develop an overall description of the experience, the "essence"
Representing, visualizing: Present narration of the "essence" of the experience; use tables or figures of statements and meaning units
Conclusion
The concept of research often can be intimidating when one examines qualitative methods, such as phenomenology. If it is qualitative, review the specific philosophical underpinnings. If the underlying philosophy is phenomenology, ask if the researcher used bracketing as part of the method. Ask yourself whether a researcher truly can bracket life experiences.
Variants of phenomenology
1. Reflective Lifeworld Approach.
2. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)
3. Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA)
4. Heuristic approach adopted by Moustakas (1990)
5. Relational research approaches
6. Dialogal research approach
All the variants of phenomenology above share a similar focus on describing lived experience and recognising the significance of our embodied, intersubjective lifeworld.
Essential Qualities
The essential qualities of phenomenological research are: a focus on the wholeness of the experience rather than the parts, a search for meaning and essence, a subjective relationship with the object (i.e. research problem), regarding human experience in order to develop an experiential sensibility and understanding the intrinsic relationship between subject and object. To extend perception into consciousness and furthering our objective gaze with subjective sensibilities.
Phenomenology as a research method in education tries to "ward off any tendency toward constructing a predetermined set of fixed procedures, techniques and concepts that would rule-govern the research project". While there is not a set of fixed procedures, hermeneutic phenomenological research in the human sciences has six research activities:
(1) turning to a phenomenon which seriously interests us and commits us to the world;
(2) investigating experience as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it;
(3) reflecting on the essential themes which characterize the phenomenon;
(4) describing the phenomenon through the art of writing and rewriting;
(5) manipulating a strong and oriented pedagogical relation to the phenomenon;
(6) balancing the research context by considering parts and whole.
Seven Widely Accepted Features of the Phenomenological Approach
Phenomenologists conduct research in ways that share most of the following positive and negative features.
1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking;
2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also called objectivism and positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance;
3. Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition and some also evaluation and action.
4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known;
5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called "encountering" as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon "objects as they are encountered" (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is);
6. Phenomenologists tend to recognize the role of description in universal, a priori, or "eidetic" terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and
7. Phenomenologists tend to debate whether or not what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epochê and reduction is useful or even possible.
References:
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