This document provides an overview of phenomenological research methods. It discusses what phenomenological research is, how to develop a phenomenological question, the data analysis process, and key concepts like lived experience, temporality, and the givenness of phenomena. The document is intended to orient students to descriptive phenomenological approaches and how they could apply these methods for dissertation research.

1. Phenomenological
Research
class orientation
Marc Applebaum, PhD
January 2021

2. Agenda
1. What is descriptive phenomenological research?
2. What’s a phenomenological question?
3. What occurs in data analysis?
4. What’s it like to work with data?
5. What’s it like to conduct a study?
6. How could I use this method for my dissertation?

3. The Descriptive Phenomenological
method is:
A qualitative psychological research method
For investigating lived-experience
By gathering qualitative data, most often through
interviews
Using one core question to invite a concrete, rich
description of a specific experience
And analyzing this data in order to arrive at an
essential (eidetic) psychological structure of the
phenomenon
As situated within a specific context
Purpose: To produce new, depth understanding of a shared
human experience, staying true to the way that experience is
lived

4. A phenomenological question
Uses everyday, non-theoretical language
Does not assume that the person you’re
interviewing has psychological training
Is expressed in a single sentence
Asks the person to describe a specific
experience of theirs, not to explain or
analyze it
Often phrased: “Please describe in detail a
specific experience you had of [the
phenomenon].”

5. In analyzing data…
You trust that the experience is a meaningful
psychological whole for the person who lived it
Recognize and progressively set aside your
expectations or theories
Shift from affirming or negating facts to focus on the
meanings of the experience for the participants
Inquire imaginatively into the holistic meaning of the
phenomenon, writing to re-articulate the meanings in
the data in increasingly essential ways
Discover what parts (constituents) of the phenomenon
are least variant and most essential to the meaningful
whole

7. data & the given
Data, singular datum, comes from the Latin dare (“to give”) and
refers to what’s given
Givenness brings us to a central phenomenological theme: the
always already-present-ness of world. Research does not
construct the world, it makes more visible what’s already
always-present, from a chosen perspective, in the light of a
particular interest
Therefore in phenomenologizing we aim at “recognizing the
meaning that the phenomenon itself gives from itself and to
itself. The method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by
fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro-ducing it…it travels in
tandem with the phenomenon, as if protecting it and clearing a
path for it by eliminating roadblocks.”
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward
a Phenomenology of Givenness (2002
9)

8. empirical & empiricism
empirical (Gr: empeiria, La: experientia) versus
empiricism (and positivism)
phenomenology is empirical and it is an alternative
to the positivist interpretation of empiricism

9. experience & lived-experience
In German these are two contrasting terms:
Erfahrung and Erlebnis
Erfahrung is the way German translates the Latin
experiencia—signifying knowledge gained
through trials, tests, proofs, experiments
Erlebnis in German contains the word lieb—life—
and refers to something lived-through,
something one has undergone—putting another
way, it is the way the meanings of what’s been
lived reside within the human person

10. passivity & the unconscious
You’re likely familiar with Freud’s conception of the
unconscious
Husserl alternatively envisions consciousness as
comprised of multiple interrelated layers, reflective
and pre-reflective
Pre-reflective consciousness includes bodily and
affective intentionality
As we discussed, there is a rising into reflective
awareness of that which was previously lived
passively, and which, after being grasped reflectively,
“sinks” back into passivity where it is sedimented and
retained, perhaps to be reawakened…

11. time & temporality
As you recognized, a narrative given about a
past event holds meanings that are alive in the
present…
You saw how even a brief narrative often has
multiple temporal modes within it
More to come…