phenomenological approach week 11

• Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)


  Research design, qualitative research approach that aims to understand the meaning of personal and social experiences
• Qualitative research designs


  • Phenomenological approaches
  • IPA: Interpretative Phenomenological Approach
• Stages in IPA


  1. Self-reflection

  2. Familiarise yourself with the data

  3. Writing descriptive summaries

  4. Making initial interpretations

  5. Clustering themes

  6. Developing a narrative account

  7. Contextualising the analysis

  8. Write-up
• Phenomenology


  The study of human experience and the way in which things are perceived as they appear to consciousness
• Hermeneutics


  Theory of interpretation
• Phenomenology


  Aims to understand the meaning of human experience
• Hermeneutics


  Consideration of the interpretative activity involved in the analytical process when doing research with people
• Idiographic


  Focus on the particular
• Aim of IPA


  Understand what personal and social experiences mean to those who experience them
• Unit of study in IPA


  Experiential account
• IPA as a critical realist method


  Aims to understand the meaning of personal and social experiences
• Empathy in IPA


  "What I think I am hearing is..."
• Double hermeneutics in IPA


  The researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of their own experience
• Formulating research questions in IPA


  Focused on understanding the meaning of a particular experience
• Purposive/Homogeneous sampling in IPA

  Selected for a specific purpose - to describe & understand a particular phenomenon/experience
• Collecting data in IPA


  Experiential accounts through semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions
• Transcription in IPA


  More like a play script, verbatim transcript with only occasional reference to non-verbal language
• Step one in IPA: Self-reflection


  Initial thoughts on reflection and quality, transparency, audit trail
• Step two in IPA: Familiarise yourself with the data


  Reading, listening, watching, returning to transcripts for more detailed read, noting thoughts and observations in a diary, summarising the account to give a gist of content
• Step three in IPA: Writing descriptive summaries


  Breakdown transcripts into smaller sections, descriptive summaries of what participants say, issues they raise, events they include, feelings they convey
• Step four in IPA: Making initial interpretations


  Initial interpretations of what the meanings, events, might mean and how they help understand the participant's experience and sense of the phenomena
• Step five in IPA: Clustering themes


  Involves a more analytical or theoretical ordering as the researcher tries to make sense of the connections between themes which are emerging
• Emergent themes in IPA are data-driven
• The richer the data, the more themes will emerge in IPA
• Step eight in IPA: Write-up


  Persuade, defend, each theme in turn, extracts and commentary, recommendations