Illuminating Lived Experience: Phenomenological Research From Conceptualization to Conclusion

This workshop builds on the work begun at SSWR's 2010 Annual Conference through a Workshop and Round Table titled respectively ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: Specificity and Diversity in Three Qualitative Traditions' and ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: Current Issues and Controversies in Qualitative Research. These learning opportunities addressed the need for clarity and transparency in conducting qualitative research through distinguishing among several qualitative epistemologies and the methods deriving from them. While SSWR draws experienced qualitative researchers as attendees and presenters, it also serves as a central meeting place for newer scholars who look to SSWR to inform their growth and capacity as qualitative researchers. Comments and questions after these presentations suggested that there is a strong interest in the ‘how to's'--from conceptualization to conclusion--of qualitative research projects. This workshop offers a clear conceptual and experiential grounding in descriptive phenomenology as epistemology and method. It begins with the key theoretical elements of the philosophy of phenomenology developed by Edmond Husserl—intentionality, lifeworld and consciousness—that underpin this qualitative methodology. Husserl posited that in order to discover meaning as it is lived it is necessary to return to the thing itself; to set aside pre-existing assumptions and biases; to deliberately and with attentive thoughtfulness describe the phenomenon; to discover themes in the descriptions and to posit a structure of meaning based on the emergent themes. This workshop engages participants in the process of conceptualizing, designing, and conducting a phenomenological human science research project. Participants will be invited to use their own interests and experiences, integrated with examples from this presenter's completed phenomenological research—My Body My Self: Aging and the Lived Experience of Embodied Womanhood--to illustrate the components of a successful project including forming a research question that is consistent with the phenomenological approach to qualitative research. Participants will learn key elements such as conducting a literature review that attends to the ‘atheoretical' dimension of phenomenology; designing a parsimonious interview guide appropriate to the phenomenological project; in-depth interviewing that is empathically attuned and conducted from a ‘presuppositionless' perspective; ‘dwelling with' data during data analysis; ‘horizons' of meaning; clustering; free imaginative variation and illuminating invariant meaning. Several ‘thornier' issues--transcription, use of software, member-checking--and the ethical implications of these and other methodological decisions will be introduced. The workshop emphasizes that fidelity to the phenomenological method requires that the researcher attend to the perspective of her discipline in conducting the project, i.e. that when a social worker conceptualizes a phenomenological project she is cognizant of the meanings with which her discipline endows lived experience; that the purpose and application of the research is rooted in the discipline from which it emanates. It concludes with a discussion of the consonance between phenomenology and social work; that empathic attunement, in-depth interviewing, imaginative variation and synthesizing to discover meaning are the social work practice skills of engagement, interviewing, associating to descriptions and assessment. From this perspective the practitioner/researcher is more than a possibility, it is a lived reality.