phenomenology vs case study

Case Study vs. Phenomenology

What's the difference.

Case study and phenomenology are both research methods used in social sciences to gain a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon. However, they differ in their approach and focus. Case study involves an in-depth analysis of a specific case or individual, aiming to provide a detailed description and explanation of the phenomenon under investigation. It often involves collecting and analyzing various types of data, such as interviews, observations, and documents. On the other hand, phenomenology focuses on understanding the lived experiences and subjective perspectives of individuals. It aims to uncover the essence and meaning of a phenomenon by exploring the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of those involved. Phenomenology often involves interviews and reflective analysis to gain insights into the subjective experiences of individuals. Overall, while case study emphasizes detailed analysis of a specific case, phenomenology focuses on understanding the subjective experiences and meanings associated with a phenomenon.

Further Detail

Introduction.

Research methodologies play a crucial role in understanding and exploring various phenomena in different fields. Two commonly used methodologies are case study and phenomenology. While both approaches aim to gain insights and generate knowledge, they differ in their focus, data collection methods, and analysis techniques. In this article, we will compare the attributes of case study and phenomenology, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Case study is a research method that involves an in-depth investigation of a particular individual, group, or phenomenon within its real-life context. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject under study by examining multiple variables and their interrelationships. Case studies often utilize a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews, observations, documents, and archival records.

One of the key strengths of case study research is its ability to provide rich and detailed descriptions of complex phenomena. By focusing on a specific case, researchers can explore the intricacies and nuances that may not be captured by broader research designs. Case studies also allow for the examination of rare or unique cases, providing valuable insights that can contribute to theory development or inform practical applications.

However, case studies also have limitations. Due to their in-depth nature, they may be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Generalizability can be a concern, as findings from a single case may not be applicable to other contexts or populations. Additionally, the subjective interpretation of data by the researcher can introduce bias, potentially impacting the validity and reliability of the study.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a qualitative research approach that focuses on understanding the lived experiences of individuals and the meanings they attribute to those experiences. It aims to explore the essence and structure of a phenomenon as it is perceived by the participants. Phenomenological research often involves in-depth interviews, participant observations, and analysis of personal narratives or texts.

One of the main strengths of phenomenology is its emphasis on capturing the subjective experiences of individuals. By delving into the lived experiences, emotions, and perspectives of participants, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Phenomenology also allows for the exploration of complex and abstract concepts, shedding light on the underlying meanings and motivations.

However, phenomenology also has its limitations. The findings may be highly subjective and context-dependent, limiting their generalizability. The researcher's interpretation and biases can influence the analysis and findings. Additionally, the process of phenomenological analysis can be time-consuming and require significant expertise in qualitative research methods.

While case study and phenomenology differ in their focus and approach, they share some commonalities. Both methodologies involve an in-depth exploration of a particular subject, aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under study. They both utilize qualitative data collection methods, such as interviews and observations, to gather rich and detailed information.

However, there are also notable differences between case study and phenomenology. Case study research often examines multiple variables and their interrelationships, while phenomenology focuses on the subjective experiences and meanings attributed by individuals. Case studies aim to provide a holistic view of a complex phenomenon within its real-life context, whereas phenomenology aims to uncover the essence and structure of a phenomenon as it is perceived by the participants.

Another difference lies in the analysis techniques employed. In case study research, data analysis often involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, allowing for a comprehensive examination of the subject. Phenomenological analysis, on the other hand, focuses on identifying themes, patterns, and structures within the qualitative data, aiming to uncover the underlying meanings and essences.

Furthermore, case studies are often used in applied fields, such as psychology, business, and education, where practical implications and real-life contexts are of particular interest. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is commonly employed in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, where understanding subjective experiences and exploring abstract concepts are central to the research objectives.

Case study and phenomenology are two distinct research methodologies that offer valuable insights into various phenomena. While case study research provides a comprehensive understanding of complex phenomena within their real-life contexts, phenomenology focuses on exploring the subjective experiences and meanings attributed by individuals. Both approaches have their strengths and limitations, and the choice between them depends on the research objectives, the nature of the phenomenon under study, and the available resources. By understanding the attributes of case study and phenomenology, researchers can make informed decisions about the most appropriate methodology to employ in their studies.

Comparisons may contain inaccurate information about people, places, or facts. Please report any issues.

Case Study vs. Phenomenology: What's the Difference?

Key Differences

Comparison chart, data collection, application, depth vs. breadth, case study and phenomenology definitions, phenomenology, which method is broader: case study or phenomenology, is a case study the same as phenomenology, how many cases are typically studied in a case study research, are both methods qualitative in nature, what's the main goal of phenomenology, who coined the term "case study", can a case study be part of phenomenological research, which method is older: case study or phenomenology, how is phenomenology different from existentialism, can the results of a case study be generalized, can both case study and phenomenology be combined in a single research, is phenomenology only used in psychology, can a case study be quantitative, can a case study be experimental, is phenomenology only about negative experiences, what kind of data does phenomenology rely on, is phenomenology subjective, which method is more suitable for large-scale studies: case study or phenomenology, how long does a case study typically last, who is a key figure in the development of phenomenology.

Trending Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

New Comparisons

All about higher education & research

Marked Similarities and Key Differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

Case study and phenomenological research design share commonalities as qualitative research methods. Both approaches seek to provide in-depth insights into the complexities of human experiences and phenomena. They emphasize a qualitative nature, prioritizing rich, detailed exploration through methods like interviews, observations, and document analysis. Additionally, both approaches acknowledge the importance of context in understanding the subject matter and often involve flexible research designs that adapt to evolving insights. Moreover, they share a participant-centered focus, valuing the perspectives and experiences of those involved. In terms of analysis, both methodologies often employ inductive approaches, deriving themes and patterns from the collected data rather than imposing pre-existing theories.

Despite these similarities, key distinctions exist between case study and phenomenological research design. The primary focus of case studies is on a specific instance or bounded system, aiming for a holistic understanding within its real-life context. In contrast, phenomenological research design centers on uncovering the essence of lived experiences, exploring how individuals interpret and make sense of their encounters. The unit of analysis differs, with case studies examining a case itself (individual, group, organization), while phenomenological research focuses on the lived experiences of individuals.

Generalization is not the primary goal for either, but case studies may contribute to theory development, whereas phenomenological research is more inclined towards describing experiences rather than theory building. The role of the researcher also varies, with case study researchers often actively engaging with the case, while phenomenological researchers adopt a more neutral stance, bracketing preconceptions to facilitate a direct exploration of participants’ experiences.

These differences underscore the importance of choosing the most appropriate approach based on the specific research objectives and questions at hand. In this blog post, we highlight some of the noticeable similarities and stark differences between case study and phenomenological research design. But first of all, let us discuss the similarities between the two research designs.

Similarities between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

While case study and phenomenological research design have distinct characteristics, there are some very profound similarities between the two qualitative research approaches:

Qualitative nature:
Both case study and phenomenological research are qualitative research designs. They aim to explore and understand the complexities of human experiences and phenomena in depth.
In-depth exploration:
Both methods involve an in-depth exploration of the subject matter. Whether it’s a specific case or the lived experiences of individuals, researchers using these approaches seek to uncover rich, detailed information.
Emphasis on context:
Both approaches acknowledge the importance of context in understanding the phenomenon under investigation. Case studies often examine a case within its real-life context, while phenomenological research explores the subjective experiences within the context in which they occur.
Flexible research design:
Both case study and phenomenological research design allow for flexibility in their research design. Researchers have the freedom to adapt their methods and data collection techniques based on the evolving understanding of the phenomenon.
Holistic approach:
Both approaches often take a holistic perspective. Case studies aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the entire case, considering various aspects and relationships. Phenomenological research seeks to capture the essence of the lived experience as a whole.
Use of qualitative data collection methods:
Both methodologies typically rely on qualitative data collection methods, such as interviews, observations, and document analysis. These methods allow researchers to gather rich, detailed information directly from participants.
Participant-centered:
Both approaches prioritize the experiences and perspectives of participants. Whether studying a case or exploring lived experiences, the goal is to capture the participant’s viewpoint and make sense of their unique context.
Inductive analysis:
Both case study and phenomenological research often involve inductive analysis. Researchers aim to derive themes, patterns, and insights from the data rather than imposing pre-existing theories or frameworks.
Rich descriptions:
Both methodologies value the production of rich, detailed descriptions. Whether describing the intricacies of a case or the nuances of individual experiences, researchers aim to provide a thorough account of the subject of study.
Subjectivity of Researcher:
Both methods recognize the subjectivity of the researcher and the influence they may have on the research process. Researchers in both case study and phenomenological research design often engage in reflexivity to acknowledge and address their own biases.

While these similarities exist, it’s essential to recognize the differences as well, as they shape the specific goals, methods, and outcomes of each approach. Researchers should carefully consider their research questions and objectives when choosing between case study and phenomenological research design. In the next section of the write-up, we discuss key differences between case study and phenomenological research design

Key differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

Case study and phenomenological research design are two distinct qualitative research approaches, each with its own set of characteristics and purposes. Here are the key differences between them:

Focus and purpose:
Focuses on a particular instance or a bounded system (the “case”).
Aims to provide an in-depth understanding of a specific phenomenon, often within its real-life context.
Emphasizes a holistic approach to exploring the complexities of a case.
Focuses on understanding and describing the essence of lived experiences.
Aims to explore how individuals make sense of and interpret their experiences.
Emphasizes the subjective nature of the phenomenon under investigation.
Nature of data:
Involves a rich and detailed description of the case, including various sources of data such as interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts.
Seeks to capture the complexity and uniqueness of the case.
Involves gathering in-depth descriptions of participants’ experiences through methods like interviews and sometimes participant observations.
Focuses on the meanings individuals attribute to their experiences.
Unit of analysis:
The unit of analysis is the case itself, which could be an individual, a group, an organization, or a community.
The unit of analysis is the lived experience of individuals who have directly encountered the phenomenon being studied.
Generalization:
Generalization is typically not the primary goal; instead, the emphasis is on providing detailed insights into a specific case.
Generalization is often not the main objective, as phenomenological research aims to explore the depth and richness of individual experiences rather than making broad generalizations.
Analysis approach:
Analysis often involves pattern recognition, exploring relationships between different elements within the case, and deriving meaningful insights.
Analysis is focused on identifying and describing the essential themes and structures that characterize the lived experiences of participants.
Theory development:
May contribute to theory development, especially when patterns and relationships observed in the case have broader implications. However, it is not the sole and prime aim of the research endeavour
Emphasizes the description of experiences rather than theory development. However, findings can inform or contribute to existing theories.
Role of Researcher:
The researcher often plays an active role, engaging with the case and collecting multiple forms of data.
The researcher aims for a more neutral stance, trying to bracket their preconceptions to allow for a more direct exploration of participants’ experiences.

Conclusion:

In summary, while both case study and phenomenological research are qualitative approaches that delve into the richness of human experiences, they differ in their focus, purpose, unit of analysis, and the nature of data they collect and analyze. The choice between the two depends on the research question, objectives, and the nature of the phenomenon under investigation.

Dr Syed Hafeez Ahmad

Marked Similarities and Key Differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

What is phenomenological research design and how it is used in a qualitative research study?

A Comprehensive Guide to Understand the Philosophical underpinnings of Ethnographic Research Design

Challenges in writing a PhD Research Proposal

How to Choose a perfect Theoretical Framework for Your Ethnographic Research Study?

Choosing the Right Research Philosophy for Grounded Theory Research Design

Exploring the Profound Importance and Limitations of Ethnography

What do you think cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

No Comments Yet.

About Author

Hi, my name is Dr. Hafeez

I am a research blogger, YouTuber and content writer. This blog is aimed at sharing my knowledge, experience and insight with the academics, research scholars and policy makers about universities' governance and changing dynamics of higher education landscape in Pakistan.

Philanthropy in higher education in Pakistan: Learning to donate

Historical Research Design: A step-by-step guide on how to develop it?

Organizations
Planning & Activities
Product & Services
Structure & Systems
Career & Education
Entertainment
Fashion & Beauty
Political Institutions
SmartPhones
Protocols & Formats
Communication
Web Applications
Household Equipments
Career and Certifications
Diet & Fitness
Mathematics & Statistics
Processed Foods
Vegetables & Fruits

Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

• Categorized under Miscellaneous | Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

Both case study and phenomenology are involved with research processes. They are also concerned with in-depth investigations of their respective subjects. Regarding their distinctions, a case study is a research method while phenomenology is a methodology as well as a philosophical movement. More of their differences are discussed below.

What is a Case Study?

A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event. It is a research method which examines a particular case in detail and answers the questions “why”, “how”, and “what”. Researchers who utilize this method may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, psychological testing, and other pertinent techniques in gathering information. The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Frederic Le Play, a French engineer, sociologist, and economist, in 1829. Le Play had a comprehensive study on family budgeting (2017, Sclafani).

The following are the different types of case studies:

Explanatory

This type focuses on an explanation for a phenomenon or research question. It answers the questions “how” and “why”.

Exploratory

This often leads to a large-scale research since it aims to prove that further investigation is essential. Exploratory case studies answer the questions “what” and “how”.

Comparative

This type focuses on the comparison of cases and answers questions such as, “How are cases different?” and “How are the cases alike?”.

This type uses data from various studies to frame the new study. It uses past research to find more information without spending more money and time.

This type focuses on a more comprehensive understanding of a very specific case. Intrinsic case studies aim to answer the questions “what”, “how”, and “why”.

Instrumental

This type aims to help refine a theory or generate more insights. Instrumental case studies play supportive roles.

What is Phenomenology?

“Phenomenology” came from the Ancient Greek word, “phainómenon” which means “thing appearing to view”. It is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view (Gallagher, 2012). As a methodology, it is generally a qualitative approach which centers on the collection of research participants’ descriptions of their lived experiences.

It is also a philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, in the early 20 th century. Phenomenology is based on the principle that a certain experience can be perceived in various ways, that an individual’s reality is different from another’s. For instance, you and your friend watched the same movie at the same time and place; however, the feelings and thoughts that you have experienced during the film are generally more positive than those of your friend’s.

There are two main approaches to phenomenology (Sloan, & Bowe, 2014):

Descriptive Phenomenology

This is also known as transcendental phenomenology and was developed by Husserl. In this approach, the observer takes a global view of the phenomena. Its focus is on what is being experienced and on how it is being experienced.

Interpretive Phenomenology

This is also known as hermeneutic phenomenology or existential phenomenology; this was developed by Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, and later his academic assistant. In this approach, the observer is one with the phenomena and is involved in interpreting meanings. As compared to descriptive phenomenology, interpretive phenomenology is more complex as it takes time and interaction with the environment into consideration.

Difference between Case Study and Phenomenology

Definition .

A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event. It is a research method which examines a particular case in detail and answers the questions “why”, “how”, and “what”. In comparison, “phenomenology” came from the Ancient Greek word, “phainómenon” which means “thing appearing to view”. It is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view. It is also a philosophical movement based on the principle that a certain experience can be perceived in various ways.

The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Frederic Le Play, a French engineer, sociologist, and economist, in 1829. Le Play had a comprehensive study on family budgeting. On the other hand, descriptive phenomenology, also known as transcendental phenomenology, was founded by Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, in the early 20 th century. Consequently, interpretive phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, or existential phenomenology was developed by Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, and later his academic assistant.

Types or Approaches

The types of case studies include explanatory, exploratory, comparative, collective, intrinsic, and instrumental. In comparison, the two main approaches to phenomenology are descriptive phenomenology and interpretive phenomenology.

Data Collection Methods

Researchers who conduct case studies may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, psychological testing, and other pertinent techniques in gathering information. As for the phenomenological approach, the main data gathering technic is interviews.

Research Population

Case studies focus on an individual, a group, an institution, or an event while phenomenology research looks into the lived experiences of several individuals.

Case Study vs Phenomenology

Summary

A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event.
Phenomenology is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view.
The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Le Play while descriptive phenomenology was founded by Husserl.
Researchers who conduct case studies may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, and psychological testing while those who conduct phenomenological research mainly use interviews.
Case studies generally focus on an individual or group while phenomenological research delves into the experiences of several individuals.
Recent Posts
Difference Between Hematoma and Melanoma - February 9, 2023
Difference Between Bruising and Necrosis - February 8, 2023
Difference Between Brain Hematoma and Brain Hemorrhage - February 8, 2023

Sharing is caring!

Pinterest 4

Search DifferenceBetween.net :

Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative
Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Difference Between How and Why
Difference Between Science and Philosophy
Difference Between Anthropology and History

Cite APA 7 Brown, g. (2020, July 14). Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-case-study-and-phenomenology/. MLA 8 Brown, gene. "Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology." Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects, 14 July, 2020, http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-case-study-and-phenomenology/.

Leave a Response

Name ( required )

Email ( required )

Please note: comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

References :

Advertisments, more in 'miscellaneous'.

Difference Between an Arbitrator and a Mediator
Difference Between Cellulite and Stretch Marks
Difference Between Taliban and Al Qaeda
Difference Between Kung Fu and Karate
Difference Between Expression and Equation

Top Difference Betweens

Get new comparisons in your inbox:, most emailed comparisons, editor's picks.

Difference Between MAC and IP Address
Difference Between Platinum and White Gold
Difference Between Civil and Criminal Law
Difference Between GRE and GMAT
Difference Between Immigrants and Refugees
Difference Between DNS and DHCP
Difference Between Computer Engineering and Computer Science
Difference Between Men and Women
Difference Between Book value and Market value
Difference Between Red and White wine
Difference Between Depreciation and Amortization
Difference Between Bank and Credit Union
Difference Between White Eggs and Brown Eggs

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Chapter 6: Phenomenology

Darshini Ayton

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to:

Identify the key terms, concepts and approaches used in phenomenology.
Explain the data collection methods and analysis for phenomenology.
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenological research.

What is phenomenology ?

The key concept in phenomenological studies is the individual .

Phenomenology is a method and a philosophical approach, influenced by different paradigms and disciplines. 1

Phenomenology is the everyday world from the viewpoint of the person. In this viewpoint, the emphasis is on how the individual constructs their lifeworld and seeks to understand the ‘taken for granted-ness’ of life and experiences. 2,3 Phenomenology is a practice that seeks to understand, describe and interpret human behaviour and the meaning individuals make of their experiences; it focuses on what was experienced and how it was experienced. 4 Phenomenology deals with perceptions or meanings, attitudes and beliefs, as well as feelings and emotions. The emphasis is on the lived experience and the sense an individual makes of those experiences. Since the primary source of data is the experience of the individual being studied, in-depth interviews are the most common means of data collection (see Chapter 13). Depending on the aim and research questions of the study, the method of analysis is either thematic or interpretive phenomenological analysis (Section 4).

Types of phenomenology

Descriptive phenomenology (also known as ‘transcendental phenomenology’) was founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). It focuses on phenomena as perceived by the individual. 4 When reflecting on the recent phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that there is a collective experience of the pandemic and an individual experience, in which each person’s experience is influenced by their life circumstances, such as their living situation, employment, education, prior experiences with infectious diseases and health status. In addition, an individual’s life circumstances, personality, coping skills, culture, family of origin, where they live in the world and the politics of their society also influence their experience of the pandemic. Hence, the objectiveness of the pandemic is intertwined with the subjectiveness of the individual living in the pandemic.

Husserl states that descriptive phenomenological inquiry should be free of assumption and theory, to enable phenomenological reduction (or phenomenological intuiting). 1 Phenomenological reduction means putting aside all judgements or beliefs about the external world and taking nothing for granted in everyday reality. 5 This concept gave rise to a practice called ‘bracketing’ — a method of acknowledging the researcher’s preconceptions, assumptions, experiences and ‘knowing’ of a phenomenon. Bracketing is an attempt by the researcher to encounter the phenomenon in as ‘free and as unprejudiced way as possible so that it can be precisely described and understood’. 1(p132) While there is not much guidance on how to bracket, the advice provided to researchers is to record in detail the process undertaken, to provide transparency for others. Bracketing starts with reflection: a helpful practice is for the researcher to ask the following questions and write their answers as they occur, without overthinking their responses (see Box 1). This is a practice that ideally should be done multiple times during the research process: at the conception of the research idea and during design, data collection, analysis and reporting.

Box 6.1 Example s of bracketing prompts

How does my education, family background (culture), religion, politics and job relate to this topic or phenomenon?

What is my previous experience of this topic or phenomenon? Do I have negative and/or positive reactions to this topic or phenomenon? What has led to this reaction?

What have I read or understood about this topic or phenomenon?

What are my beliefs and attitudes about this topic or phenomenon? What assumptions am I making?

Interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology was founded by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a junior colleague of Husserl. It focuses on the nature of being and the relationship between an individual and their lifeworld. While Heidegger’s initial work and thinking aligned with Husserl’s, he later challenged several elements of descriptive phenomenology, leading to a philosophical separation in ideas. Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology takes an epistemological (knowledge) focus while Heidegger’s interest was in ontology 4 (the nature of reality), with the key phrase ‘being-in-the-world’ referencing how humans exist, act or participate in the world. 1 In descriptive phenomenology, the practice of bracketing is endorsed and experience is stripped from context to examine and understand it.

Interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology embraces the intertwining of an individual’s subjective experience with their social, cultural and political contexts, regardless of whether they are conscious of this influence. 4 Interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology moves beyond description to the interpretation of the phenomenon and the study of meanings through the lifeworld of the individual. While the researcher’s knowledge, experience, assumptions and beliefs are valued, they do need to be acknowledged as part of the process of analysis. 4

For example, Singh and colleagues wanted to understand the experiences of managers involved in the implementation of quality improvement projects in an assisted living facility, and thus they conducted a hermeneutic phenomenology study. 6 The objective was to ‘understand how managers define the quality of patient care and administrative processes’, alongside an exploration of the participant’s perspectives of leadership and challenges to the implementation of quality improvement strategies. (p3) Semi-structured interviews (60–75 minutes in duration) were conducted with six managers and data was analysed using inductive thematic techniques.

New phenomenology , or American phenomenology , has initiated a transition in the focus of phenomenology from the nature and understanding of the phenomenon to the lived experience of individuals experiencing the phenomenon. This transition may seem subtle but fundamentally is related to a shift away from the philosophical approaches of Husserl and Heidegger to an applied approach to research. 1 New phenomenology does not undergo the phenomenological reductionist approach outlined by Husserl to examine and understand the essence of the phenomenon. Dowling 1 emphasises that this phenomenological reduction, which leads to an attempt to disengage the researcher from the participant, is not desired or practical in applied research such as in nursing studies. Hence, new phenomenology is aligned with interpretive phenomenology, embracing the intersubjectivity (shared subjective experiences between two or more people) of the research approach. 1

Another feature of new phenomenology is the positioning of culture in the analysis of an individual’s experience. This is not the case for the traditional phenomenological approaches 1 ; hence, philosophical approaches by European philosophers Husserl and Heidegger can be used if the objective is to explore or understand the phenomenon itself or the object of the participant’s experience. The methods of new phenomenology, or American phenomenology, should be applied if the researcher seeks to understand a person’s experience(s) of the phenomenon. 1

See Table 6.1. for two different examples of phenomenological research.

Advantages and disadvantages of phenomenological research

Phenomenology has many advantages, including that it can present authentic accounts of complex phenomena; it is a humanistic style of research that demonstrates respect for the whole individual; and the descriptions of experiences can tell an interesting story about the phenomenon and the individuals experiencing it. 7 Criticisms of phenomenology tend to focus on the individuality of the results, which makes them non-generalisable, considered too subjective and therefore invalid. However, the reason a researcher may choose a phenomenological approach is to understand the individual, subjective experiences of an individual; thus, as with many qualitative research designs, the findings will not be generalisable to a larger population. 7,8

Table 6.1. Examples of phenomenological studies

Phenomenology focuses on understanding a phenomenon from the perspective of individual experience (descriptive and interpretive phenomenology) or from the lived experience of the phenomenon by individuals (new phenomenology). This individualised focus lends itself to in-depth interviews and small scale research projects.

Dowling M. From Husserl to van Manen. A review of different phenomenological approaches. Int J Nurs Stud . 2007;44(1):131-42. doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2005.11.026
Creswell J, Hanson W, Clark Plano V, Morales A. Qualitative research designs: selection and implementation. Couns Psychol . 2007;35(2):236-264. doi:10.1177/0011000006287390
Morse JM, Field PA. Qualitative Research Methods for Health Professionals. 2nd ed. SAGE; 1995.
Neubauer BE, Witkop CT, Varpio L. How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others. Perspect Med Educ . 2019;8(2):90-97. doi:10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2
Merleau-Ponty M, Landes D, Carman T, Lefort C. Phenomenology of Perception . 1st ed. Routledge; 2011.
Singh J, Wiese A, Sillerud B. Using phenomenological hermeneutics to understand the experiences of managers working with quality improvement strategies in an assisted living facility. Healthcare (Basel) . 2019;7(3):87. doi:10.3390/healthcare7030087
Liamputtong P, Ezzy D. Qualitative Research Methods: A Health Focus . Oxford University Press; 1999.
Liamputtong P. Qualitative Research Methods . 5th ed. Oxford University Press; 2020.
Abbaspour Z, Vasel G, Khojastehmehr R. Investigating the lived experiences of abused mothers: a phenomenological study. Journal of Qualitative Research in Health Sciences . 2021;10(2)2:108-114. doi:10.22062/JQR.2021.193653.0
Engberink AO, Mailly M, Marco V, et al. A phenomenological study of nurses experience about their palliative approach and their use of mobile palliative care teams in medical and surgical care units in France. BMC Palliat Care . 2020;19:34. doi:10.1186/s12904-020-0536-0

Qualitative Research – a practical guide for health and social care researchers and practitioners Copyright © 2023 by Darshini Ayton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

From John W. Creswell \(2016\). 30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher \ . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods pp 377–382 Cite as

Phenomenological Studies

Thomas Ndame 4
First Online: 02 January 2023

3841 Accesses

Part of the book series: Springer Texts in Education ((SPTE))

Phenomenology, as both philosophy and research methodology, originated from the writings of a group of European philosophers with the movement championed by two German philosophers namely Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in the twentieth century.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

Available as PDF
Read on any device
Instant download
Own it forever
Available as EPUB and PDF
Compact, lightweight edition
Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Creswell, J.W. (2013). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches . Sage.

Google Scholar

Husserl, E. (1964a). Psychological and transcendental phenomenology and the confrontation with Heidegger. Husserl Studies, 17 , 125–148. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010771906591

Article Google Scholar

Husserl, E. (1964b). The Paris lectures . Martinus Nijhoff.

Book Google Scholar

Marshall, C., & Rossman, G. B. (2010). Designing qualitative research (5th ed.). Sage Publications.

Padilla-Díaz, M. (2015). Phenomenology in qualitative educational research: Philosophy as science or philosophical science? International Journal of Educational Excellence, 1 (2), 101–110.

Privitera, G., J., & Ahlgrim-Delzell, L. (2019). Research methods for education . Sage Publication.

Stone, F. (1979). Philosophical phenomenology: A methodology for holistic educational research. Multicultural Research Guides Series 4 . Connecticut University, Storrs. Thut (I.N.) World Education Centre.

Vallack, J. (2015). Alchemy for inquiry: A methodology of applied phenomenology in educational research. James Cook University, AARE Conference (pp. 1–10), Western Australia.

Additional Reading

Engelland, C. (2020). Phenomenology . MIT Press.

Manen, M., V. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing . Routledge.

Priya, A. (2017). Phenomenological social research: Some observations from the field. Qualitative Research Journal , 17(4) 294–305. DOI https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-08-2016-0047

Online Resources

Qualitative Research Design: Phenomenology (15.32 Minutes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYRlNrO6oA .

Phenomenological Research (7.24). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDuxiALnCQ .

Creating an Effective Phenomenological Study (5.34). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrdgqkpDTGY .

Susan Kozel: Phenomenology—Practice Based Research in the Arts, Stanford University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv7Vp3NPKw4 .

Phenomenology—IPA and Narrative Analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU9S8aRL6ys .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Buea, Buea, Cameroon

Thomas Ndame

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Ndame .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Janet Mola Okoko

Scott Tunison

Department of Educational Administration, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Keith D. Walker

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Ndame, T. (2023). Phenomenological Studies. In: Okoko, J.M., Tunison, S., Walker, K.D. (eds) Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04394-9_58

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04394-9_58

Published : 02 January 2023

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-04396-3

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-04394-9

eBook Packages : Education Education (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Find a journal
Track your research

Case Study vs. Phenomenology — What's the Difference?

Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

Table of contents, key differences, comparison chart, data origin, application fields, philosophical roots, compare with definitions, phenomenology, common curiosities, does phenomenology always involve interviews, are case studies subjective, is a case study quantitative or qualitative, is phenomenology purely descriptive, how does phenomenology differ from other qualitative methods, how long does a case study typically last, can a case study involve multiple cases, what's the primary goal of phenomenology, can case studies be published, is phenomenology only a research method, why are case studies important in business, does phenomenology aim to generalize findings, what's a limitation of the case study method, can a case study be exploratory, is phenomenology tied to any specific discipline, share your discovery.

Author Spotlight

Popular Comparisons

Trending Comparisons

New Comparisons

Trending Terms

Table of Contents
Random Entry
Chronological
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries
Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.

1. What is Phenomenology?

2. the discipline of phenomenology, 3. from phenomena to phenomenology, 4. the history and varieties of phenomenology, 5. phenomenology and ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, 6. phenomenology and philosophy of mind, 7. phenomenology in contemporary consciousness theory, classical texts, contemporary studies, other internet resources, related entries.

Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.

The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20 th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al . In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)

In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”.

Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20 th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20 th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporary purview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).

Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions—conditions of the possibility—of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.

The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results.

Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.

We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; our focus is on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)

Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature—that of being experienced—is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, “I see / think / desire / do …” This feature is both a phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).

How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unless its type is what interests us.

Classical phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyze the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practiced analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.

These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of “neurophenomenology” assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings—mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.

What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke’s notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes’ sense of consciousness ( conscience , co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one’s mind’s operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one’s mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of phenomenological analysis shape the characterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.

Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology—our own experience—spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)

To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person:

I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific.
I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital.
I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology.
I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week.
I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare.
I intend to finish my writing by noon.
I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk.
I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin.
I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.

Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term “I” indicates the first-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceeds from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity described: perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression (“that fishing boat off the coast”) articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience: subject-act-content-object.

Rich phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty et al ., will far outrun such simple phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.

In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analyzing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, background social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs.

The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon , appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, albeit only occasionally.

In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena : literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato’s cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?

Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The Latin term “Phenomenologia” was introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. Subsequently, the German term “Phänomenologia” was used by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a book titled Phänomenologie des Geistes (usually translated as Phenomenology of Spirit ). By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called “descriptive psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.

Suppose we say phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to us—and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.

In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind are sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one’s own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind are ideas, rationally formed “clear and distinct ideas” (in René Descartes’ ideal). In Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte’s theory of science, phenomena ( phenomenes ) are the facts ( faits , what occurs) that a given science would explain.

In 18 th and 19 th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.

As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19 th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are what occur in the mind: mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colors and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist “intentionally” in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called “intentional in-existence”, but the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). More generally, we might say, phenomena are whatever we are conscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves, even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.

Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano’s descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.

Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900–01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and also William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); and logical or semantic theory, on the heels of Bernard Bolzano and Husserl’s contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Husserl’s day.)

Husserl’s Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano’s ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations ( Vorstellungen ). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema , from the Greek verb noéō (νοέω), meaning to perceive, think, intend, whence the noun nous or mind. The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis , while its ideal content is called noema . The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the object as intended”. Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl’s theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl’s basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)

For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and analyzes types of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic—a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics)—in that it describes and analyzes objective contents of consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how people happen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.

A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl’s development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations , Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas I (1913). And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.

Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practicing phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practicing phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practicing phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practicing phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came to full flower in Husserl.

Husserl’s work was followed by a flurry of phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20 th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one’s own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.

The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.

In his Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focused squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”, centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly “in the first person”. (See Husserl, Ideas I, ¤¤33ff.) In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness—that is, conscious experience of various types—as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and also acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.

In Ideas I Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of “transcendental idealism”, looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Husserl’s transcendental turn also involved his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics’ notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a Eucalyptus, with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.

Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl’s (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain allied with a realist ontology, as in Husserl’s Logical Investigations . Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance to Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl’s early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 succeeded Husserl in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always “in the world”, our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called “fundamental ontology”. We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others.

In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of “logos” and “phenomena”, so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of “letting things show themselves”. In Heidegger’s inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “ ‘phenomenology’ means …—to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” (See Heidegger, Being and Time , 1927, ¦ 7C.) Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl’s call, “To the things themselves!”, or “To the phenomena themselves!” Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating ( Verhalten ) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much of Being and Time develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.

In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl’s vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger’s most innovative ideas was his conception of the “ground” of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.

In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of past experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes’ work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes’ insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one’s own body, or one’s lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20 th century.

In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre’s model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon just is a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their “being-in-itself”. Consciousness, by contrast, has “being-for-itself”, since each consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself ( conscience de soi ). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the “I” or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).

For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations—a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Sartre’s phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing one’s self, the defining pattern of one’s past actions. Through vivid description of the “look” of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuanced account of the perceived role of women as Other.

In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analyzing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focused on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focused on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focused on the “body image”, our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.

The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing:

Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. [408]

In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).

In the years since Husserl, Heidegger, et al . wrote, phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, including intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al . has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20 th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.

Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl’s Logical Investigations . Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn Føllesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl’s phenomenology and Frege’s logical semantics (in Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”, 1892). For Frege, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: thus, two expressions (say, “the morning star” and “the evening star”) may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: thus, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.

More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered phenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today’s cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioral studies and mathematical modeling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on. We address philosophy of mind below.

The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?

Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field:

Ontology is the study of beings or their being—what is.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge—how we know.
Logic is the study of valid reasoning—how to reason.
Ethics is the study of right and wrong—how we should act.
Phenomenology is the study of our experience—how we experience.

The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is “first philosophy”, the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.

Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive kind of first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.

Consider logic. As we saw, logical theory of meaning led Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se ).

Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl’s phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings—all parts of ontology.

Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist ), and he once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to “fallenness” and “authenticity” (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre analyzed with subtlety the logical problem of “bad faith”, yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicitly phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focused on the significance of the “face” of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.

Allied with ethics are political and social philosophy. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically engaged in 1940s Paris, and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analyzed the phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practiced a kind of phenomenology of language, seeking social meaning in the “deconstruction” of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French “poststructuralist” theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.

Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.

It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.

The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs—“believe”, “see”, etc.—does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to “the ghost in the machine”). With Ryle’s rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related?

René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem.

After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person’s mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person’s brain at that time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them—sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.

In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set in, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: their function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behavior proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human (or animal) organism. More specifically, on a favorite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: mind is to brain as software is to hardware; thoughts are just programs running on the brain’s “wetware”. Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences—from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience—have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.

In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) that consciousness itself—especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience—escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia—what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc.—are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.

In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require a “first-person” ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains “secrete” consciousness.

The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle’s theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl’s. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state’s intentionality by specifying its “satisfaction conditions”). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists—including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.

Since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, a variety of writers working in philosophy of mind have focused on the fundamental character of consciousness, ultimately a phenomenological issue. Does consciousness always and essentially involve self-consciousness, or consciousness-of-consciousness, as Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre held (in varying detail)? If so, then every act of consciousness either includes or is adjoined by a consciousness-of-that-consciousness. Does that self-consciousness take the form of an internal self-monitoring? If so, is that monitoring of a higher order, where each act of consciousness is joined by a further mental act monitoring the base act? Or is such monitoring of the same order as the base act, a proper part of the act without which the act would not be conscious? A variety of models of this self-consciousness have been developed, some explicitly drawing on or adapting views in Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. Two recent collections address these issues: David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson (editors), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (2005), and Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford (editors), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (2006).

The philosophy of mind may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind:

Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analyzing the structure—the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions—of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, analyzed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience, typically manifest in embodied action. Here we study the import of language and other social practices, including background attitudes or assumptions, sometimes involving particular political systems.
Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).

This division of labor in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano’s original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.

The ontological distinction among the form, appearance, and substrate of an activity of consciousness is detailed in D. W. Smith, Mind World (2004), in the essay “Three Facets of Consciousness”.

Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.

Phenomenological issues, by any other name, have played a prominent role in very recent philosophy of mind. Amplifying the theme of the previous section, we note two such issues: the form of inner awareness that ostensibly makes a mental activity conscious, and the phenomenal character of conscious cognitive mental activity in thought, and perception, and action.

Ever since Nagel’s 1974 article, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, the notion of what-it-is-like to experience a mental state or activity has posed a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in theory of mind. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is held to be constitutive or definitive of consciousness. What is the form of that phenomenal character we find in consciousness?

A prominent line of analysis holds that the phenomenal character of a mental activity consists in a certain form of awareness of that activity, an awareness that by definition renders it conscious. Since the 1980s a variety of models of that awareness have been developed. As noted above, there are models that define this awareness as a higher-order monitoring, either an inner perception of the activity (a form of inner sense per Kant) or inner consciousness (per Brentano), or an inner thought about the activity. A further model analyzes such awareness as an integral part of the experience, a form of self-representation within the experience. (Again, see Kriegel and Williford (eds.) (2006).)

A somewhat different model comes arguably closer to the form of self-consciousness sought by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. On the “modal” model, inner awareness of an experience takes the form of an integral reflexive awareness of “this very experience”. That form of awareness is held to be a constitutive element of the experience that renders it conscious. As Sartre put the claim, self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness, but that self-consciousness is “pre-reflective”. This reflexive awareness is not, then, part of a separable higher-order monitoring, but rather built into consciousness per se. On the modal model, this awareness is part of the way the experience unfolds: subjectively, phenomenally, consciously. This model is elaborated in D. W. Smith (2004), Mind World, in the essay “Return to Consciousness” (and elsewhere).

Whatever may be the precise form of phenomenal character, we would ask how that character distributes over mental life. What is phenomenal in different types of mental activity? Here arise issues of cognitive phenomenology. Is phenomenality restricted to the “feel” of sensory experience? Or is phenomenality present also in cognitive experiences of thinking such-and-such, or of perception bearing conceptual as well as sensory content, or also in volitional or conative bodily action? These issues are explored in Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011), Cognitive Phenomenology.

A restrictive view holds that only sensory experience has a proper phenomenal character, a what-it-is-like. Seeing a color, hearing a tone, smelling an odor, feeling a pain—these types of conscious experience have a phenomenal character, but no others do, on this view. A stringent empiricism might limit phenomenal experience to pure sensations, though Hume himself presumably recognized phenomenal “ideas” beyond pure sense “impressions”. A somewhat more expansive view would hold that perceptual experience has a distinctive phenomenal character even where sensation is informed by concepts. Seeing that yellow canary, hearing that clear Middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the sharp odor of anise, feeling a pain of the jab of the doctor’s needle in receiving an injection—these types of conscious experience have a character of what-it-is-like, a character informed by conceptual content that is also “felt”, on this view. A Kantian account of conceptual-sensory experience, or “intuition”, would endorse a phenomenal character in these types of experience. Indeed, “phenomena”, in the Kantian idiom, are precisely things as they appear in consciousness, so of course their appearance has a phenomenal character.

Now, a much more expansive view would hold that every conscious experience has a distinctive phenomenal character. Thinking that 17 is a prime number, thinking that the red in the sunset is caused by the sun’s light waves being bent by the atmosphere, thinking that Kant was more right than Hume about the grounds of knowledge, thinking that economic principles are also political—even such highly cognitive activities have a character of what-it-is-like to so think, according to this expansive view.

Classical phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty surely assumed an expansive view of phenomenal consciousness. As noted above, the “phenomena” that are the focus of phenomenology were assumed to present a rich character of lived experience. Even Heidegger, while de-emphasizing consciousness (the Cartesian sin!), dwelt on “phenomena” as what appears or shows up to us (to “Dasein”) in our everyday activities such as hammering a nail. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch (1964) explicitly studies the “phenomenal field”, embracing all that is presented in our experience. Arguably, for these thinkers, every type of conscious experience has its distinctive phenomenal character, its “phenomenology”—and the task of phenomenology (the discipline) is to analyze that character. Note that in recent debates the phenomenal character of an experience is often called its “phenomenology”—whereas, in the established idiom, the term “phenomenology” names the discipline that studies such “phenomenology”.

Since intentionality is a crucial property of consciousness, according to Brentano, Husserl, et al., the character of intentionality itself would count as phenomenal, as part of what-it-is-like to experience a given type of intentional experience. But it is not only intentional perception and thought that have their distinctive phenomenal characters. Embodied action also would have a distinctive phenomenal character, involving “lived” characters of kinesthetic sensation as well as conceptual volitional content, say, in the feel of kicking a soccer ball. The “lived body” is precisely the body as experienced in everyday embodied volitional action such as running or kicking a ball or even speaking. Husserl wrote at length about the “lived body” (Leib), in Ideas II, and Merleau-Ponty followed suit with rich analyses of embodied perception and action, in Phenomenology of Perception. In Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011) see the article on conative phenomenology by Terence Horgan, and in Smith and Thomasson (eds.) (2005) see articles by Charles Siewert and Sean Kelly.

But now a problems remains. Intentionality essentially involves meaning, so the question arises how meaning appears in phenomenal character. Importantly, the content of a conscious experience typically carries a horizon of background meaning, meaning that is largely implicit rather than explicit in experience. But then a wide range of content carried by an experience would not have a consciously felt phenomenal character. So it may well be argued. Here is a line of phenomenological theory for another day.

Brentano, F., 1995, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, London and New York: Routledge. From the German original of 1874. Brentano’s development of descriptive psychology, the forerunner of Husserlian phenomenology, including Brentano’s conception of mental phenomena as intentionally directed and his analysis of inner consciousness distinguished from inner observation.
Heidegger, M., 1962, Being and Time , Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. From the German original of 1927. Heidegger’s magnum opus, laying out his style of phenomenology and existential ontology, including his distinction between beings and their being, as well as his emphasis on practical activity.
Heidegger, M., 1982, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology . Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. From the German original of 1975. The text of a lecture course in 1927. Heidegger’s clearest presentation of his conception of phenomenology as fundamental ontology, addressing the history of the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle onward.
Husserl, E., 2001, Logical Investigations . Vols. One and Two, Trans. J. N. Findlay. Ed. with translation corrections and with a new Introduction by Dermot Moran. With a new Preface by Michael Dummett. London and New York: Routledge. A new and revised edition of the original English translation by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. From the Second Edition of the German. First edition, 1900–01; second edition, 1913, 1920. Husserl’s magnum opus, laying out his system of philosophy including philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology. Here are the foundations of Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intentionality.
Husserl, E., 2001, The Shorter Logical Investigations . London and New York: Routledge. An abridged edition of the preceding.
Husserl, E., 1963, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology . Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books. From the German original of 1913, originally titled Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , First Book. Newly translated with the full title by Fred Kersten. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983. Known as Ideas I. Husserl’s mature account of transcendental phenomenology, including his notion of intentional content as noema.
Husserl, E., 1989, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , Second Book. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. From the German original unpublished manuscript of 1912, revised 1915, 1928. Known as Ideas II. Detailed phenomenological analyses assumed in Ideas I, including analyses of bodily awareness (kinesthesis and motility) and social awareness (empathy).
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012, Phenomenology of Perception , Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Prior translation, 1996, Phenomenology of Perception , Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. From the French original of 1945. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology, rich in impressionistic description of perception and other forms of experience, emphasizing the role of the experienced body in many forms of consciousness.
Sartre, J.-P., 1956, Being and Nothingness . Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. From the French original of 1943. Sartre’s magnum opus, developing in detail his conception of phenomenology and his existential view of human freedom, including his analysis of consciousness-of-consciousness, the look of the Other, and much more.
Sartre, J.-P., 1964, Nausea . Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing. From the French original of 1938). A novel in the first person, featuring descriptions of how things are experienced, thereby illustrating Sartre’s conception of phenomenology (and existentialism) with no technical idioms and no explicit theoretical discussion.
Block, N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. (eds.), 1997, The Nature of Consciusness . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Extensive studies of aspects of consciousness, in analytic philosophy of mind, often addressing phenomenological issues, but with limited reference to phenomenology as such.
Chalmers, D. (ed.), 2002, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Core readings in philosophy of mind, largely analytic philosophy of mind, sometimes addressing phenomenological issues, with some reference to classical phenomenology, including selections from Descartes, Ryle, Brentano, Nagel, and Searle (as discussed in the present article).
Dreyfus, H., with Hall, H. (eds.), 1982, Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Studies of issues in Husserlian phenomenology and theory of intentionality, with connections to early models of cognitive science, including Jerry Fodor’s discussion of methodological solipsism (compare Husserl’s method of bracketing or epoché), and including Dagfinn Føllesdal’s article, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema” (1969).
Kriegel, U., and Williford, K. (eds.), 2006, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciusness . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Essays addressing the structure of self-consciousness, or consciousness-of-consciousness, some drawing on phenomenology explicitly.
Mohanty, J. N., 1989, Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Accoun t. Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell. A study of structures of consciousness and meaning in a contemporary rendition of transcendental phenomenology, connecting with issues in analytic philosophy and its history.
Mohanty, J. N., 2008, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development , New Haven and London: Yale University Press. A detailed study of the development of Husserl’s philosophy and his conception of transcendental phenomenology.
Mohanty, J. N., 2011, Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938 . New Haven and London: Yale University Press. A close study of Husserl’s late philosophy and his conception of phenomenology involving the life-world.
Moran, D., 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology . London and New York: Routledge. An extensive introductory discussion of the principal works of the classical phenomenologists and several other broadly phenomenological thinkers.
Moran, D., 2005, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology . Cambridge and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. A study of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
Parsons, Charles, 2012, From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Studies of historical figures on philosophy of mathematics, including Kant, Frege, Brentano, and Husserl.
Petitot, J., Varela, F. J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M., (eds.), 1999, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenmenology and Cognitive Science . Stanford, California: Stanford University Press (in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York). Studies of issues of phenomenology in connection with cognitive science and neuroscience, pursuing the integration of the disciplines, thus combining classical phenomenology with contemporary natural science.
Searle, J., 1983, Intentionality . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Searle’s analysis of intentionality, often similar in detail to Husserl’s theory of intentionality, but pursued in the tradition and style of analytic philosophy of mind and language, without overtly phenomenological methodology.
Smith, B., and Smith, D.W. (eds.), 1995, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Detailed studies of Husserl’s work including his phenomenology, with an introduction to his overall philosophy.
Smith, D. W., 2013, Husserl , 2nd revised edition. London and New York: Routledge. (1st edition, 2007). A detailed study of Husserl’s philosophical system including logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and ethics, assuming no prior background.
Smith, D. W., and McIntyre, R., 1982, Husserl and Intentionality: a Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language . Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company (now Springer). A book-length development of analytic phenomenology, with an interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, his theory of intentionality, and his historical roots, and connections with issues in logical theory and analytic philosophy of language and mind, assuming no prior background.
Smith, D. W., and Thomasson, Amie L. (eds.), 2005, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Essays integrating phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind.
Sokolowski, R., 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A contemporary introduction to the practice of transcendental phenomenology, without historical interpretation, emphasizing a transcendental attitude in phenomenology.
Tieszen, R., 2005, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Essays relating Husserlian phenomenology with issues in logic and mathematics.
Tieszen, R., 2005, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics . Cambridge and New York: Camabridge University Press. Essays relating Husserlian phenomenology with issues in logic and mathematics.
Tieszen, R., 2011, After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A study of Gödel’s work in relation to, inter alia, Husserlian phenomenology in the foundations of logic and mathematics.
Zahavi, D. (ed.), 2012, The Oxford Handbook on Contemporary Phenomenology . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A collection of contemporary essays on phenomenological themes (not primarily on historical figures).

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Husserl.net : Open content source of Husserl’s writings and commentary.
Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology : Information about phenomenology, centered at Florida Atlantic University.

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
HHS Author Manuscripts

Research MethodologyOverview of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research methods are a robust tool for chaplaincy research questions. Similar to much of chaplaincy clinical care, qualitative research generally works with written texts, often transcriptions of individual interviews or focus group conversations and seeks to understand the meaning of experience in a study sample. This article describes three common methodologies: ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. Issues to consider relating to the study sample, design, and analysis are discussed. Enhancing the validity of the data, as well reliability and ethical issues in qualitative research are described. Qualitative research is an accessible way for chaplains to contribute new knowledge about the sacred dimension of people's lived experience.

INTRODUCTION

Qualitative research is, “the systematic collection, organization, and interpretation of textual material derived from talk or conversation. It is used in the exploration of meanings of social phenomena as experienced by individuals themselves, in their natural context” ( Malterud, 2001 , p. 483). It can be the most accessible means of entry for chaplains into the world of research because, like clinical conversations, it focuses on eliciting people's stories. The stories can actually be expressed in almost any medium: conversations (interviews or focus groups), written texts (journal, prayers, or letters), or visual forms (drawings, photographs). Qualitative research may involve presenting data collected from a single person, as in a case study ( Risk, 2013 ), or from a group of people, as in one of my studies of parents of children with cystic fibrosis (CF) ( Grossoehme et al., 2013 ). Whole books are devoted to qualitative research methodology and, indeed, to the individual methods themselves. This article is intended to present, in rather broad brushstrokes, some of the “methods of choice” and to suggest some issues to consider before embarking on a qualitative research project. Helpful texts are cited to provide resources for more complete information.

Although virtually anything may be data, spoken mediums are the most common forms of collecting data in health research, so the focus of this article will mainly be on interviews and to a lesser extent, focus groups. Interviews explore experiences of individuals, and through a series of questions and answers, the meaning individuals give to their experiences ( Tong, Sainsbury, & Craig, 2007 ). They may be “structured” interviews, in which an interview guide is used with pre-determined questions from which no deviation is permitted by the interviewer, or semi-structured interviews, in which an interview guide is used with pre-determined questions and potential follow-up questions. The latter allows the interviewer to pursue topics that arise during the interview that seem relevant ( Cohen & Crabtree, 2006 ). Writing good questions is harder than it appears! In my first unit of CPE, the supervisor returned verbatims, especially our early efforts, with “DCFQ” written in the margin, for “direct, closed, factual question.” We quickly learned to avoid DCFQs in our clinical conversations because they did not create the space for reflection on illness and the sacred the way open-ended questions did. To some extent, writing good open-ended questions that elicit stories can come more readily to chaplains, due perhaps to our training, than to investigators from other disciplines. This is not to say writing an interview guide is easy or an aspect of research that can be taken lightly, as the quality of the data you collect, and hence the quality of your study, depends on the quality of your interview questions.

Data may also be collected using focus groups. Focus groups are normally built around a specific topic. They almost always follow a semi-structured format and include open discussion of responses among participants, which may range from four to twelve people ( Tong et al., 2007 ). They provide an excellent means to gather data on an entire range of responses to a topic, or on the social interactions between participants, or to clarify a process. Once the data are collected, the analytic approach is typically similar to that of interview data.

Qualitative investigators are not disinterested outsiders who merely observe without interacting with participants, but affect and are affected by their data. The investigator's emotions as they read participants' narratives are data to be included in the study. Simply asking “research” questions can itself be a chaplaincy intervention: what we ask affects the other person and can lead them to reflect and change ( Grossoehme, 2011 ). It is important to articulate our biases and understand how they influence us when we collect and analyze data. Qualitative research is often done by a small group of researchers, especially the data coding. This minimizes the bias of an individual investigator. Inevitably, two or more people will code passages differently at times. It is important to establish at the outset how such discrepancies will be handled.

Ensuring Rigor, Validity, and Reliability

Some people do not think qualitative research is not very robust or significant. This attitude is due, in part, to the poor quality of some early efforts. Increasingly, however, qualitative studies have improved in rigor, and reviewers of qualitative manuscripts expect investigators to have addressed problematic issues from the start of the project. Two important areas are validity and reliability. Validity refers to whether or not the final product (usually referred to a “model”) truly portrays what it claims to portray. If you think of a scale on which you weigh yourself, you want a valid reading so that you know your correct weight. Reliability refers to the extent to which the results are repeatable; if someone else repeated this study, would they obtain the same result? To continue the scale analogy, a reliable scale gives the same weight every time I step on it. A scale can be reliable without being valid. The scale could reliably read 72 pounds every time I step on it, but that value is hardly correct, so the measure is not valid.

Swinton and Mowat (2006) discussed ensuring the “trustworthiness” of the data. N narrative data which are “rich” in their use of metaphor and description, and which express deeper levels of meaning and nuance compared to everyday language are likely to yield a trustworthy final model because the investigators have done a credible job of completely describing and understanding the topic that is under study. Validity is also enhanced by some methodologies, such as grounded theory, which use participants' own words to name categories and themes, instead of using labels given by the investigator. The concept of “member checking” also enhances validity. Once the analyses are complete and a final model has been developed, these findings are shown to all or some of the participants (the members) who are invited to check the findings and give feedback. Do they see themselves in the words or conceptual model that is presented? Do they offer participants a new insight, or do they nod agreement without really reengaging the findings?

Reliability

One means of demonstrating reliability is to document the research decisions made along the way, as they were made, perhaps in a research diary ( Swinton & Mowat, 2006 ). Qualitative methodologies accept that the investigator is part of what is being studied and will influence it, and that this does not devalue a study but, in fact, enhances it. Simply deciding what questions to ask or not ask, and who you ask them to (and not) reflect certain decisions that should be consciously made and documented. Another researcher should be able to understand what was done and why from reading the research diary.

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

Elisa Sobo (2009) defines ethnography as the presentation of, “… a given group's conceptual world, seen and experienced from the inside” (p. 297). Ethnography answers the question, “what's it like to be this person?” One example of this kind of study comes from the work of Fore and colleagues ( Fore, Goldenhar, Margolis, & Seid, 2013 ). In order to design tools that would enable clinicians and persons with pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IDB) to work together more efficiently, an ethnographic study was undertaken to learn what it was like for a family when a child had IDB. After 36 interviews, the study team was able to create three parent-child dyad personas: archetypes of parents and children with IDB based directly on the data they gathered. These personas were used by the design team to think about how different types of parents and children adapted to the disease and to think what tools should be developed to help different types of parents and children with IDB. An ethnographic study is the method of choice when the goal is to understand a culture, and to present, or explain, its spoken and unspoken nature to people who are not part of the culture, as in the example above of IDB. Before “outsiders” could think about the needs of people with IDB, it was necessary to learn what it is like to live with this disease.

Determining the sample in ethnographic studies typically means using what is called a purposive sample ( Newfield, Sells, Smith, Newfield, & Newfield, 1996 ). Purposive samples are based on criteria that the investigator establishes at the outset, which describe participant characteristics. In the aforementioned IDB example, the criteria were: (1) being a person with IDB who was between 12 and 22 years old or the parent of such a child; (2) being or having a child whose IDB care was provided at one of a particular group of treatment centers; (3) being a pediatric gastrointestinal nurse at one of the centers; or (4) a physician/researcher at one of five treatment centers. Having a sample that is representative of the larger population, always the goal in quantitative research, is not the point in ethnographic studies. Here, the goal is to recruit participants who have the experience to respond to the questions. Out of their intimate knowledge of their culture, the investigator can build a theory, or conceptual model, which could later be tested for generalizability in an entire population.

Ethnographic study designs typically involve a combination of data collection methods. Whenever possible, observing the participants in the midst of whatever experience is the study's focus is desirable. In the process of an ethnographic project on CF, for instance, two students spent a twelve-hour period at the home of a family with a child who had CF, taking notes about what they saw and heard. Interviews with participants are frequently employed to learn more about the experience of interest. An example of this is the work of Sobo and colleagues, who interviewed parents of pediatric patients in a clinic to ask about the barriers they experienced obtaining health care for their child ( Seid, Sobo, Gelhard, & Varni, 2004 ). Diaries and journals detailing people's lived experience may also be used, alone, or in combination with other methods.

Analysis of ethnographic data is variable, depending on the study's goal. One common analytic approach is to begin analysis after the first few interviews have been completed, and to read them to get a sense of their content. The next step is to name the seemingly important words or phrases. At this point, one might begin to see how the names relate to each other; this is the beginning of theory development. This process continues until all the data are collected. At that point, the data are sorted by the names, with data from multiple participants clustered under each topic name ( Boyle, 1994 ). Similar names may be grouped together, or placed under a larger label name (i.e., category). In a sense, what happens is that each interviewer's voice is broken into individual fragments, and everyone's fragments that have the same name are put together. From individual voices speaking on multiple topics, there is now one topic with multiple voices speaking to it.

GROUNDED THEORY RESEARCH

Grounded theory is “grounded” in its data; this inductive approach collects data while simultaneously analyzing it and using the emerging theory to inform data collection ( Rafuls & Moon, 1996 ). This cycle continues until the categories are said to be “saturated,” which typically means the point when no new information is being learned ( Morse, 1995 ). This methodology is generally credited to Glaser and Strauss, who wanted to create a means of developing theoretical models from empirical data ( Charmaz, 2005 ). Perhaps, more than in any other qualitative methodology, the person of the investigator is the key. The extent to which the investigator notices subtle nuances in the data and responds to them with new questions for future participants, or revises an emerging theory, is the extent to which a grounded theory research truly presents a theory capturing the fullness of the data from which it was built. It is also the extent to which the theory is capable of being used to guide future research or alter clinical practice. Grounded theory is the method of choice when there is no existing hypothesis to test. For instance, there was no published data on how parents use faith to cope after their child's diagnosis with CF. Using grounded theory allowed us to develop a theory, or a conceptual model, of how parents used faith to cope ( Grossoehme, Ragsdale, Wooldridge, Cotton, & Seid, 2010 ). An excellent discussion of this method is provided by Charmaz (2006) .

The nature of the research question should dictate the sample description, which should be defined before beginning the data collection. In some cases, the incidence of the phenomena may set some limits on the sample. For example, a study of religious coping by adults who were diagnosed with CF after age 18 years began with a low incidence: this question immediately limited the number of eligible adults in a four-state area to approximately 25 ( Grossoehme et al., 2012 ). Knowing that between 12 and 20 participants might be required in order to have sufficient data to convince ourselves that our categories were indeed saturated, limiting our sample in other ways: for example, selecting representative individuals spread across the number of years since diagnosis would not have made sense. In some studies, the goal is to learn what makes a particular subset of a larger sample special; these subsets are known as “positive deviants” ( Bradley et al., 2009 ).

Once the sample is defined and data collection begins, the analytic process begins shortly thereafter. As will be described in the following paragraphs, interviews and other forms of spoken communication are nearly always transcribed, typically verbatim. Unlike most other qualitative methods, grounded theory uses an iterative design. Sometime around the third or fourth interview has been completed and transcribed and before proceeding with further interviews, it is time to begin analyzing the transcripts. There are two aspects to this. The first is to code the data that you have. Grounded theory prefers to use the participants' own words as the code, rather than having the investigator name it. For example, in the following transcript excerpt, we coded part of the following except:

INTERVIEWER: OK. Have your beliefs or perhaps relationship with God changed at all because of what you've gone through the last nine and 10 months with N.?
INTERVIEWEE: Yeah, I mean, I feel that I'm stronger than I was before actually.
INTERVIEWER: Hmm-hmm. How so? Can you put that into words? I know some of these could be hard to talk about but …
INTERVIEWEE: I don't know, I feel like I'm putting his life more in God's hands than I ever was before.

We labeled, or coded, these data as, “I'm putting his life more in God's hands,” whereas in a different methodology we might have simply named it “Trusting God.” Focus on the action in the narrative. Although it can be difficult, you as a researcher must try very hard to set your own ideas aside. Remember you are doing this because there is no pre-existing theory about what you are studying, so you should not be guided by a theory you have in your mind. You must let the data speak for themselves.

The second point is to reflect on the codes and what they are already telling you. What questions are eliciting the narrative data you want? Which ones are not? Questions that are not leading you to the data you want probably need to be changed. Interesting, novel ideas may emerge from the data, or topics that you want to know more about that you did not anticipate and so the interviewer did not' follow up on them. What are the data not telling you that you are seeking? All of this information flows back to revising the semi-structured interview guide ( Charmaz, 2006 ). This issue raised mild concern with the IRB reviewer who had not encountered this methodology before. This concern was overcome by showing that this is an accepted method with voluminous literature behind it, and by showing that the types of item revisions were not expected to significantly alter the study's effect on the participants. From this point onward you collect data, code it, and analyze it simultaneously. As you code a new transcript and come across a statement similar to others, you can begin to put them together. If you are using qualitative analysis software such as NVivo ( “NVivo qualitative data analysis software,” 2012 ), you can make these new codes “children” of a “parent” node (the first statement you encountered on this topic). The next step is called “focused coding” and in this phase you combine what seems to you to be the most significant codes ( Charmaz, 2006 ). These may also be the most frequently occurring, or the topic with the most duplicates, but not necessarily. This is not a quantitative approach in which having large amounts of data is important. You combine codes at this stage in such a way that your new, larger, categories begin to give shape to aspects of the theory you think is going to emerge. As you collect and code more data, and revise your categories, your idea of the theory will change.

Axial coding follows, as you look at your emerging themes or categories, and begin to associate coded data that explains that category. Axial coding refers to coding the words or quotations that are around the category's “axis,” or core. For example, in a study of parental faith and coping in the first year after their child's diagnosis with CF ( Grossoehme et al., 2010 ), one of the categories which emerged was, “Our beliefs have changed.” There were five axial codes which explain aspects of this category. The axial codes were, “Unchanged,” “We've learned how fragile life is,” “Our faith has been strengthened,” “We've gotten away from our parents' viewpoints,” and “I'm better in tune with who I am.” Each of these axial codes had multiple explanatory phrases or sentences under them; together they explain the breadth and dimensions of the category, “Our beliefs have changed.”

The next step is theoretical coding, and here the categories generated during focused coding are synthesized into a theory. Some grounded theorists, notably one of the two most associated with it (Glaser), do not use axial coding but proceed directly to this step as the means of creating coherence out of the data ( Charmaz, 2006 ). As your emerging theory crystallizes, you may pause to see if it has similarities with other theoretical constructs you encountered in your literature search. Does your emerging theory remind you of anything? It would be appropriate to engage in member-checking at this point. In this phase, you show your theoretical model and its supporting categories to participants and ask for their feedback. Does your model make sense to them? Does it help them see this aspect of their experience differently ( Charmaz, 2005 ). Use their feedback to revise your theory and put it in its final form. At this point, you have generated new knowledge: a theory no one has put forth previously, and one that is ready to be tested.

PHENOMENOLOGY RESEARCH

Perhaps the most chaplain-friendly qualitative research approach is phenomenology, because it is all about the search for meaning. Its roots are in the philosophical work of Husserl, Heidegger and Ricoeur ( Boss, Dahl, & Kaplan, 1996 ; Swinton & Mowat, 2006 ). This approach is based on several assumptions: (1) meaning and knowing are social constructions, always incomplete and developing; (2) the investigator is a part of the experience being studied and the investigator's values play a role in the investigation; (3) bias is inherent in all research and should be articulated at the beginning; (4) participants and investigators share knowledge and are partners; (5) common forms of expression (e.g., words or art) are important; and (6) meanings may not be shared by everyone (Boss et al.). John Swinton and Harriet Mowat (2006) described the process of carrying out a phenomenological study of depression and spirituality in adults and reading their book is an excellent way to gain a sense of the whole process. Phenomenology may be the method of choice when you want to study what an experience means to a particular group of people. May not be the best choice when you want to be able to generalize your findings. An accurate presentation of the experience under study is more important in this approach than the ability to claim that the findings apply to across situations or people (Boss et al.). A study of the devil among predominately Hispanic horse track workers is unlikely to be generalizable to experiences of the devil among persons of Scandinavian descent living in Minnesota. Care must be taken not to overstate the findings from a study and extend the conclusions beyond what the data support.

The emphasis on accurately portraying the phenomenon means that large numbers of participants are not required. In fact, relatively small sample sizes are required compared to most quantitative, clinical studies. The goal is to gather descriptions of their lived experience which are rich in detail and imagery, as well as reflection on its theological or psychological meaning. The likelihood of achieving this goal can be enhanced by using a purposeful sample. That is, decide in the beginning approximately how large and how diverse your sample needs to be. For example, CF can be caused by over 1,000 different genetic mutations; some cause more pulmonary symptoms while others cause more gastrointestinal problems. Some people with CF have diabetes and others do not; some have a functioning pancreas and others need to take replacement enzymes before eating or drinking anything other than water. Some CF adolescents may have lung function that is over 100% of what is expected for healthy adolescents of their age and gender, whereas others, with severe pulmonary disease, may have lung function that is just 30% of what is expected for their age and gender. A study of what it is like for an adolescent to live with a life-shortening genetic disease using this approach might benefit from purposive sampling. For example, lung disease severity in CF is broadly described as mild, moderate or severe. A purposeful sample might call for 18 participants divided into 3 age groups (11–13 years; 14–16 years; and 17–19 years old) and disease severity (mild, moderate, and severe). In each of those nine groups there would be one male and one female. In actual practice, one might want to have more than 18 to allow for attrition, but this breakdown gives the basic idea of defining a purposive sample. One could reasonably expect that having the experience of both genders across the spectrum of disease severity and the developmental range of adolescence would permit an accurate, multi-dimensional understanding to emerge of what living with this life-shortening disease means to adolescents. In fact, such an accurate description is more likely to emerge with this purposeful sample of 18 adolescents than with a convenience sample of the first 18 adolescents who might agree to participate in the study during their outpatient clinic appointment. Defining the sample to be studied requires some forethought about what is likely to be needed to gain the fullest understanding of the topic.

Any research design may be used. The design will be dictated by what data are required to understand the phenomena and its meaning. Interviews are by far the most common means of gathering data, although one might also use written texts, such as prayers written in open prayer books in hospital chapels, for example ( ap Sion, 2013 ; Grossoehme, 1996 ), or drawings ( Pendleton, Cavalli, Pargament, & Nasr, 2002 ), or photographs/videos ( Olausson, Ekebergh, & Lindahl, 2012 ). Although the word “text” appears, it should be with the understanding that any form of data is implied.

The theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology, which are beyond the scope of this article, suggest to users that “a method” is unnecessary or indeed, contrary, to phenomenology. However, one phenomenological researcher did articulate a method ( Giorgi, 1985 ), which consists of the following steps. First, the research team immerses themselves in the data. They do this by reading and re-reading the transcribed interviews and listening to the recorded interviews so that they can hear the tone and timbre of the voices. The goal at this stage is to get a sense of the whole. Second, the texts are coded, in which the words, phrases or sentences that stand out as describing the experience or phenomena under study, or which express outright its meaning for the participant are extracted or highlighted. Each coded bit of data is sometimes referred to as a “meaning unit.” Third, similar meaning units are placed into categories. Fourth, for each meaning unit the meaning of the participants' own words is spelled out. For chaplains, this may mean articulating what the experience means in theological language. Other disciplines might transform the participants' words into psychological, sociological or anthropological language. Here the investigators infer the meaning behind the participants' words and articulate it. Finally, each of the transformed statements of meaning are combined into a few thematic statements that describe the experience ( Bassett, 2004 ; Boss et al., 1996 ). After this, it would be appropriate to do member-checking and a subsequent revision of the final model based on participants' responses and feedback.

PRACTICAL CONCERNS

Just as questionnaires or blood samples contain data, in qualitative research it is the recording of people's words, whether in an audio, video, or paper format which hold the data. Interviews, either in-person or by telephone should be recorded using audio, video or both. It is important to have a device with suitable audio quality and fresh batteries. Experience has shown me the benefit of using two audio recorders so that you do not lose data if one of them fails. There are several small recorders available that have USB connections that allow the audio file to be uploaded to a computer easily. To protect participants' privacy, all data should be anonymized by removing any information that could identify individuals. The Standard Operating Procedure in my research group is to replace all participants' names with an “ N .” During the transcription process, all other individuals are identified by their role in square brackets, “[parent].” Depending on the study's goal and the analytic method you have selected, you may want to include symbols for pauses before participants respond, or non-fluencies (e.g., “ummm. …”, “well … uh …”) or non-verbal gestures (if you are video recording). Decide before beginning whether it is important to capture these as data or not. There are conventional symbols which are inserted into transcriptions which capture these data for you. After the initial transcription, these need to be verified by comparing the written copy against the original recording. Verification should be done by someone other than the transcriptionist. There are several tasks at this stage. Depending on the quality of your recording, the clarity of participants' speech and other factors, some words or phrases may have been unintelligible to the transcriptionist, and this is the time to address them. In my research group our Standard Operating Procedure is to highlight unintelligible text during the transcription phase, and a “verifier” attempts three times to clarify the words on the original recording before leaving them marked “unintelligible” in the transcript. No transcriptionist is perfect and if they are unfamiliar with the topic, they may transcribe the recording inaccurately. I recently verified a transcript where a commercial medical transcriptionist changed the participant's gender from “he” to “she” when the word prior to the pronoun ended with an “s.” If this pattern had not been caught during the verification process, it would have been very difficult during the coding to know whether the pronoun referred to the participant or to their daughter.

ETHICAL ISSUES IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Study design.

The issue of power and the possibility of subtle coercion is the concern here. There is an inherent power differential between a research participant and the investigator, which is exacerbated when the investigator is a chaplain. Despite our attempts to be non-threatening, the very words, "chaplain," or "clergy" connote power. For this reason, the chaplain-investigator should not approach potential participants regarding a study. Potential participants may be informed regarding their eligibility to participate by their physician or a chaplain, but the recruitment and informed consent process should be handled by someone else, perhaps a clinical research coordinator. However, as the chaplain-investigator, you will need to teach them how to talk with potential participants about your study and answer their questions. Choose a data collection method that is best-suited to the level of sensitivity of your research topic. Focus groups can provide data with multiple perspectives, and they are a poor choice when there may be pressure to provide socially correct responses, or when disclosures may be stigmatizing. In such cases, it is better to collect data using individual semi-structured interviews.

Develop a plan for assessing participants' discomfort, anxiety, or even more severe reactions during the study. For instance, what will you do when someone discloses his/her current thoughts of self-harm, or experiences a flashback to a prior traumatic event that was triggered during an interview? How will you handle this if you are collecting data in person? By telephone? You will need to be specific who must be informed and who will make decisions about responding to the risk.

Privacy and Confidentiality

In addition to maintaining privacy and confidentiality of your actual data and other study documents, consider how you will protect participants' privacy when you write the study up for publication. Make sure that people cannot be identified by their quotations that you include as you publish data. The smaller the population you are working with, the more diligently you need to work on this. If the transcriptionist is not an employee of your institution and under the same privacy and confidentiality policies, it is up to you to ensure that an external transcriptionist takes steps to protect and maintain the privacy of participants' data.

Qualitative research is an accessible way for chaplains to contribute new knowledge regarding the sacred dimension of people's lived experience. Chaplains are already sensitive to and familiar with many aspects of qualitative research methodologies. Studies need to be designed to be valid and meaningful, and are best done collaboratively. They provide an excellent opportunity to develop working relationships with physicians, medical anthropologists, nurses, psychologists, and sociologists, all of whom have rich traditions of qualitative research. This article can only provide an overview of some of the issues related to qualitative research and some of its methods. The texts cited, as well as others, provide additional information needed before designing and carrying out a qualitative study. Qualitative research is a tool that chaplains can use to develop new knowledge and contribute to professional chaplaincy's ability to facilitate the healing of brokenness and disease.

Publisher's Disclaimer: Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

ap Sion T. Coping through prayer: An empirical study in implicit religion concerning prayers for children in hospital. Mental Health, Religion & Culture. 2013; 16 (9):936–952. doi: 10.1080/13674676.2012.756186. [ Google Scholar ]
Bassett C. Phenomenology. In: Bassett C, editor. Qualitative research in health care. Whurr Publishers, Ltd; London, UK: 2004. pp. 154–177. [ Google Scholar ]
Boss P, Dahl C, Kaplan L. The use of phenomenology for family therapy research. In: Sprenkle DH, Moon SM, editors. Research methods in family therapy. Guilford Press; New York, NY: 1996. pp. 83–106. [ Google Scholar ]
Boyle J. Styles of ethnography. In: Morse JM, editor. Critical issues in qualitative research methods. Sage Publications; Thousand Oaks, CA: 1994. pp. 159–185. [ Google Scholar ]
Bradley EH, Curry LA, Ramanadhan S, Rowe L, Nembhard IM, Krumholz HM. Research in action: Using positive deviance to improve quality of health care. Implementation Science. 2009; 4 (25) doi: 10.1186/1748-5908-4-25. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Charmaz K. Grounded theory in the 21st century. In: Denzin NK, Lincoln YS, editors. The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications; Thousand Oaks, CA: 2005. pp. 507–535. [ Google Scholar ]
Charmaz K. Constructing grounded theory. Sage Publications; Thousand Oaks, CA: 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
Cohen D, Crabtree B. Qualitative research guidelines project. 2006 Retrieved March 11, 2014, from http://www.qualres.org/HomeSemi-3629.html .
Fore D, Goldenhar LM, Margolis PA, Seid M. Using goal-directed design to create a novel system for improving chronic illness. JMIR Research Protocols. 2013; 2 (2):343. doi: 10.2196/resprot.2749. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Giorgi A. Phenomenology and psychological research. Dusquesne University Press; Pittsburgh, PA: 1985. [ Google Scholar ]
Grossoehme DH. Prayer reveals belief: Images of God from hospital prayers. Journal of Pastoral Care. 1996; 50 (1):33–39. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Grossoehme DH. Research as a chaplaincy intervention. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 2011; 17 (3–4):97–99. doi: 10.1080/08854726.2011.616165. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Grossoehme DH, Cotton S, Ragsdale J, Quittner AL, McPhail G, Seid M. "I honestly believe God keeps me healthy so I can take care of my child": Parental use of faith related to treatment adherence. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 2013; 19 (2):66–78. doi: 10.1080/08854726.2013.779540. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Grossoehme DH, Ragsdale JR, Cotton S, Meyers MA, Clancy JP, Seid M, Joseph PM. Using spirituality after an adult CF diagnosis: Cognitive reframing and adherence motivation. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 2012; 18 (3–4):110–120. doi: 10.1080/08854726.2012.720544. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Grossoehme DH, Ragsdale J, Wooldridge JL, Cotton S, Seid M. We can handle this: Parents' use of religion in the first year following their child's diagnosis with cystic fibrosis. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 2010; 16 (3–4):95–108. doi: 10.1080/08854726.2010.480833. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Malterud K. Qualitative research: Standards, challenges, and guidelines. The Lancet. 2001; 358 (9280):483–488. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Morse JM. The significance of saturation. Qualitative Health Research. 1995; 5 :147–149. [ Google Scholar ]
Newfield N, Sells SP, Smith TE, Newfield S, Newfield F. Ethnographic research methods. In: Sprenkle DH, Moon SM, editors. Research methods in family therapy. The Guilford Press; New York, NY: 1996. pp. 25–63. [ Google Scholar ]
NVivo qualitative data analysis software . QSR International Pty Ltd. 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
Olausson S, Ekebergh M, Lindahl B. The ICU patient room: Views and meanings as experienced by the next of kin: A phenomenological hermeneutical study. Intensive and Critical Care Nursing. 2012; 28 (3):176–184. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Pendleton SM, Cavalli KS, Pargament KI, Nasr SZ. Religious/spiritual coping in childhood cystic fibrosis: A qualitative study. Pediatrics. 2002; 109 (1):E8. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Rafuls SE, Moon SM. Grounded theory methodology in family therapy research. In: Sprenkle DH, Moon SM, editors. Research methods in family therapy. The Guilford Press; New York, NY: 1996. [ Google Scholar ]
Risk JL. Building a new life: A chaplain's theory based case study of chronic illness. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 2013; 19 :81–98. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Seid M, Sobo EJ, Gelhard LR, Varni JW. Parents' reports of barriers to care for children with special health care needs: Development and validation of the barriers to care questionnaire. Ambulatory Pediatrics. 2004; 4 (4):323–331. doi: 10.1367/A03-198R.1. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
Sobo EJ. Culture and meaning in health services research. Left Coast Press, Inc; Walnut Creek, CA: 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
Swinton J, Mowat H. Practical theology and qualitative research. SCM Press; London, UK: 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
Tong A, Sainsbury P, Craig J. Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ): A 32-item checklist for interviews and focus groups. International Journal for Quality in Health Care. 2007; 19 (6):349–357. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

COMMENTS

Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology
Main Difference - Case Study vs Phenomenology. Case study and phenomenology are two terms that are often used in the field of social sciences and research. Both these terms refer to types of research methods; however, phenomenology is also a concept in philosophical studies.As a research methodology, the main difference between case study and phenomenology is that case study is an in-depth ...
Case Study vs. Phenomenology
Case studies aim to provide a holistic view of a complex phenomenon within its real-life context, whereas phenomenology aims to uncover the essence and structure of a phenomenon as it is perceived by the participants. Another difference lies in the analysis techniques employed. In case study research, data analysis often involves a combination ...
PDF Comparing the Five Approaches
Case study research has experienced growing recognition during the past 30 years, evidenced by its more frequent application in published research and increased avail-ability of reference works (e.g., Thomas, 2015; Yin, 2014). Encouraging the use of case study research is an expressed goal of the editors of the recent . Encyclopedia of Case Study
Case Study vs. Phenomenology: What's the Difference?
13. While case studies provide detailed and comprehensive insights into a specific case, phenomenology seeks to uncover the essence or structure of experiences across multiple cases. In other words, while a case study might delve into the intricacies of one person's experience with a rare medical condition, phenomenology might explore the ...
What are the main differences between case study and phenomenological
Popular answers (1) Case study is a research method, but phenomenology is a methodology. While case study is a detailed investigation of the development of the single event (case), in ...
Marked Similarities and Key Differences between Case Study and
Case study and phenomenological research design share commonalities as qualitative research methods. Both approaches seek to provide in-depth insights into the complexities of human experiences and phenomena. They emphasize a qualitative nature, prioritizing rich, detailed exploration through methods like interviews, observations, and document analysis. Additionally, both approaches ...
Capturing Lived Experience: Methodological Considerations for
Phenomenology studies embodiment which includes "skillful comportment and perceptual and emotional responses" (Benner, 1994a, p. 104). ... In the case of the exemplar study, the principal researcher wrote a preliminary analysis and a synthesis for each data collection episode (see Figure 2). Figure 2. Participant observation template.
How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others
Introduction. As a research methodology, phenomenology is uniquely positioned to help health professions education (HPE) scholars learn from the experiences of others. Phenomenology is a form of qualitative research that focuses on the study of an individual's lived experiences within the world. Although it is a powerful approach for inquiry ...
PDF Five Qualitative Approaches to Inquiry
4. Five Qualitative Approaches to Inquiry. I. n this chapter, we begin our detailed exploration of narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case studies. For each approach, I pose a definition, briefly trace its history, explore types of stud- ies, introduce procedures involved in conducting a study, and indicate ...
Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology
A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event. It is a research method that examines a particular case in detail and answers the questions "why", "how", and "what". Phenomenology is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view. It is a philosophical movement based on the principle that a certain experience can be perceived in various ways.
Doing Phenomenological Research and Writing
14) The philosopher Edward Casey (2000, 2007) has written several insightful and eloquent phenomenological studies on topics such as places and landscapes, the glance, and imagining. Casey (2000) asserts that the phenomenological method as conceived by Husserl takes its beginning from carefully selected examples.
We are all in it!: Phenomenological Qualitative Research and
Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy dedicated to the description and analysis of phenomena, that is, the way things, in the broadest sense of the word, appear (Husserl, 1911, 1913; see e.g., Hintikka, 1995). In recent decades, phenomenological concepts and methodological ideals have been adopted by qualitative researchers.
Chapter 6: Phenomenology
Why a phenomenology study was implemented. Focuses on the lived experience of the participants, acknowledging the dynamic nature of their experiences. Does not require the researchers to analyse and extract the point of view of the participants and focuses on the perspectives of the participants. (p109) Focus on the lived experience. Study setting
PDF Chapter 30 Introducing Qualitative Designs
This concept may be something like "loneliness," "developing a professional identity," or "being a charismatic leader.". It is a single concept and is the centerpiece of the phenomenological study. Collects data from individuals who have experienced the phenomenon. This is an important idea in phenomenology.
Phenomenological Studies
According to Padilla-Díaz (), three types of phenomenological methods are used in qualitative research designs.They include: (a) Descriptive or hermeneutical phenomenology—which refers to the study of personal experience and requires a description or interpretation of the meanings of phenomena experienced by participants in an investigation; (b) Eidetic (essence) or transcendental ...
An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology
Perhaps supplanting the use of case studies, there are increasing efforts to combine qualitative research with phenomenology 30 and there are now numerous published accounts offering instructions on how to conduct a phenomenological interview firsthand. 31 Phenomenological interview methods have been developed to enable researchers to more ...
Case Study vs. Phenomenology
Phenomenological research might explore feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, trying to grasp the essence of a particular experience. For instance, while a Case Study might explore a single patient's journey with a specific illness, Phenomenology might probe the emotions and perceptions of multiple patients with that illness. 11.
What is the Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology ...
Case Study can be characterized as an examination technique that is utilized to research an individual, a gathering of individuals or an occasion. Phenomenology is an examination procedure and ...
Phenomenology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which ...
Understanding Case Study, Phenomenological and Grounded ...
This is a short video on three qualitative approaches: case study, phenomenological and grounded theory approach.To access the PowerPoint Slides, please go t...
A Phenomenological Case Study of the Experiences of African American
This was a phenomenological study that utilized intensive open-ended interviews and follow-up interviews for data collection. Initial interview sessions were structured to get to know the participants and to establish trust. Each member of the study signed a participant consent form detailing the goals and data collection requirements of the study.
Research MethodologyOverview of Qualitative Research
Enhancing the validity of the data, as well reliability and ethical issues in qualitative research are described. Qualitative research is an accessible way for chaplains to contribute new knowledge about the sacred dimension of people's lived experience. Keywords: chaplaincy, ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, qualitative research.
Should I use Phenomenology or Case Study?
Popular answers (1) Michael Sorrentino. Argosy University. Phenomenology and case studies are distinctly different because case studies deal with actual participants understanding the variables ...

Case Study vs. Phenomenology

Further Detail

Phenomenology

Case Study vs. Phenomenology: What's the Difference?

Key Differences

Trending Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

New Comparisons

Marked Similarities and Key Differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

Dr Syed Hafeez Ahmad

You Might Also Like

What is phenomenological research design and how it is used in a qualitative research study?

A Comprehensive Guide to Understand the Philosophical underpinnings of Ethnographic Research Design

Challenges in writing a PhD Research Proposal

How to Choose a perfect Theoretical Framework for Your Ethnographic Research Study?

Choosing the Right Research Philosophy for Grounded Theory Research Design

Exploring the Profound Importance and Limitations of Ethnography

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

About Author

Hi, my name is Dr. Hafeez

Historical Research Design: A step-by-step guide on how to develop it?

Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

What is a Case Study?

What is Phenomenology?

Difference between Case Study and Phenomenology

Types or Approaches

Data Collection Methods

Research Population

Case Study vs Phenomenology

Summary

Search DifferenceBetween.net :

Leave a Response

References :

Top Difference Betweens

Chapter 6: Phenomenology

Learning outcomes

What is phenomenology ?

Types of phenomenology

Box 6.1 Example s of bracketing prompts

Advantages and disadvantages of phenomenological research

Table 6.1. Examples of phenomenological studies

Share This Book

Phenomenological Studies

Buying options

Additional Reading

Online Resources

Author information

Corresponding author

Editor information

Rights and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Download citation

Share this chapter

Case Study vs. Phenomenology — What's the Difference?

Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

Author Spotlight

Popular Comparisons

Trending Comparisons

New Comparisons

Trending Terms

Bibliography

Phenomenology

1. What is Phenomenology?

Support SEP

Research MethodologyOverview of Qualitative Research

INTRODUCTION

Ensuring Rigor, Validity, and Reliability

Reliability

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

GROUNDED THEORY RESEARCH

PHENOMENOLOGY RESEARCH

PRACTICAL CONCERNS

ETHICAL ISSUES IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Privacy and Confidentiality

COMMENTS