A Phenomenological Research Design Illustrated
Through illustration of a particular research project on co-operative education, this week’s reading is focused on phenomenology. I had to admit that I found the concept of phenomenology a little bit abstract..
The first article briefly discussed the notion of phenomenology. Then, a research project using phenomenological framework was examined by discussing the selection process of the participants, data collection and analysis process.
The goal of phenomenology is to “Back to the things themselves”, looking for the pure truth, pure realities. Anything unrelated to the facts or the pure realities are ignored. Phenomenology is focused on closely examining the lived experience of people involved with the research topic. The author states that “The aim of the researcher is to describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, refraining from any pre-given framework, but to remaining true to the fact.”-This is a “stop” for me as I am really curious on how researchers or what researchers can do to perform this delicate work.
There was one interesting point about the participants’ selection process. In the case study, participants were specifically chosen by the researcher based on his judgement. I wonder if this purposive sampling will cause any bias in the research finding. In terms of data collection and gathering, interview is used the main source as well as focus group, written work, and memoing. The size of the sampling does not seem to be large as it is considered ideal to have long interviews with up to 10 people.
To facilitate the explicitation process, five steps were identified by the author and one of them involves “bracketing and phenomenological reduction”. In my option, I think this is probably the most critical and challenging part in a phenomenological research. Phenomenological reduction to “pure subjectivity” demands not having researcher’s own assumptions, meanings, and interpretation, theoretical concepts influence the lived experience of the participant.
Phenomenology, to me, is like a process of making a art piece where researchers are the artists. Researchers are required to make accurate and artistic judgement calls in carrying out the research process. Truth, and truth only is what phenomenology aims to achieve.
The first article briefly discussed the notion of phenomenology. Then, a research project using phenomenological framework was examined by discussing the selection process of the participants, data collection and analysis process.
The goal of phenomenology is to “Back to the things themselves”, looking for the pure truth, pure realities. Anything unrelated to the facts or the pure realities are ignored. Phenomenology is focused on closely examining the lived experience of people involved with the research topic. The author states that “The aim of the researcher is to describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, refraining from any pre-given framework, but to remaining true to the fact.”-This is a “stop” for me as I am really curious on how researchers or what researchers can do to perform this delicate work.
There was one interesting point about the participants’ selection process. In the case study, participants were specifically chosen by the researcher based on his judgement. I wonder if this purposive sampling will cause any bias in the research finding. In terms of data collection and gathering, interview is used the main source as well as focus group, written work, and memoing. The size of the sampling does not seem to be large as it is considered ideal to have long interviews with up to 10 people.
To facilitate the explicitation process, five steps were identified by the author and one of them involves “bracketing and phenomenological reduction”. In my option, I think this is probably the most critical and challenging part in a phenomenological research. Phenomenological reduction to “pure subjectivity” demands not having researcher’s own assumptions, meanings, and interpretation, theoretical concepts influence the lived experience of the participant.
Phenomenology, to me, is like a process of making a art piece where researchers are the artists. Researchers are required to make accurate and artistic judgement calls in carrying out the research process. Truth, and truth only is what phenomenology aims to achieve.
Hi Hui，
ReplyDeleteThank you for your nice summary. After reading this blog, I had the same feeling as you, which is phenomenology is a little bit abstract. Another thing is that as you mentioned, "looking for the pure truth, pure realities. Anything unrelated to the facts or the pure realities are ignored, " but people have their own emotions and perspectives about a certain thing especially for thing they are involved, so they could not stay objectively towards it. I wonder how can the researchers gain the pure truth and pure realities. In addition, the participants in this research are selected by researchers, and it sounds a little bit biased. Are there any standards or measurements about the selection of participants in phenomenology?
Hi Hui,
ReplyDeleteThank you for a great summary of a difficult piece. I too found the concept of phenomenology a bit abstract, but your summary goes some way to simplifying it. I love how the author recognizes this challenge too and offers the paper “as a guide to spare other researchers some agony.”!
Challenges aside, the focus of phenomenology in the objective description of a phenomenon connects us with our observation exercise blog posts. I see that, like me, you had difficulty in stopping yourself from projecting backstories on to the people we observed; if we only described what we were seeing, we would not bring other “unknowns” into our observations – [“Maybe they were colleagues and this could be their coffee breaks”]. I found myself inventing all kinds of stories for the people I was observing and had to keep bringing it back to just noting “the facts”.
Trying to achieve “pure subjectivity” in research must be very problematic. While surveying the color of cars downtown and reporting the facts on this could be done pretty easily [*], I feel that in any research involving people and lived experience it is close to impossible to remain “neutral”; at least in our thoughts, but perhaps less so in what we actually report. This connects with the question we were asked earlier in our class about how we know something is true. Both of us mentioned that “experts” can reveal the truth but if these experts are not entirely subjective, does this mean that we are only getting their version of the truth and not the “pure” truth?
Hi Hui,
ReplyDeleteThanks for summarizing this article since it seems to be abstract to read. Haha.
I think you are legitimate to worry about the objectivity when the researcher chooses his participants based on his judgement. That might more or less cause bias. But in the same time it seems to be a good way to keep the research on the same track with how it was designed. Otherwise, random participants may involve other variables and could therefore make the article incredibly long. So I think as readers we should always be critical and be alert to the possibility of the article being biased.