Phenomenology.

There has been an active interest in phenomenology among my PhD students, so here are some thoughts. Especially they are how to do it thoughts rather than charging back to the big names. We will do that later.
Phenomenon is a Greek word meaning something which appears to be, as opposed to something which has substance. There are things we hold to be real, even though we cannot touch or measure them. Respect, love, success, wonder, motivation are all such things. The question is, how do we research them? One aspect lies in the question, What do we mean by real? How do we separate opinion from reality? Beneath opinions about respect, does the word 'respect' describe something real? or is it a concept, a classification of certain behaviours. The method traditionally used is to strip off ("bracket out"] statements identified as opinion, to see what's left. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology a hundred years ago, believed that something real existed beneath the opinion: these views are labelled "transcendental phenomenology". Seeing/glimpsing reality was called eidetic vision. This conclusion is however not essential to the method.

In education, we cannot phenomenologically study a school, or a class, or anything measurable with substance within it. But we can study learning, behaviour, ethos, relationships, morals or any other significant intangible. Psychology is fond of psychometric measures, so we have seen historic attempts to measure 'intelligence', and more recently emotional intelligence using intelligence tests. Personally I have no confidence that they measure anything other than the superficial. Robert Steinberg even claims that wisdom can be measured, but only by reducing the concept of wisdom to something measurable, around the notion of balance. I agree that we can put together a crude check-list to determine whether something is balanced or not, whether other points of view have been sought, and a win-win situation sought. But I would not identify this with wisdom.

Intangible realities could apply to many aspects of everyday life. What is my everyday experience of work? of leisure, of pleasure, of value, of well-being? Much phenomenology used in research today comes from this emphasis by Alfred Schutz. But how can we do this rigorously and well?

Data collection needs to be completed in the qualitative paradigm. Much can be learnt from ethnography, with its emphasis on observation and interviewing, especially in its auto-ethnographic aspect (that is, being part of what is being observed). Normally it is important to know how a range of people react to the phenomenon, so a sample of respondants will be put together. For example, researching respect, you might first determine what a sample of people mean by respect by asking that straightforward questionnaire question. This is called phenomenography. The more the data collection focuses on the researcher herself or himself, the more care has to be taken to establish reliability. This is a triangulation question; interviewing others, keeping a long-term fieldnote diary, being interviewed by another research are all responses to the need for triangulation.

Finally, the analysis needs to keep firmly to the phenomenon, looking at it from many perspectives - psychological, philosophical, sociological, and critical. Bracketing out opinions on the phenomenon produces a body of data which can be analysed interpretively and hermeneutically, so a broad picture of the phenomenon and its various interpretations can emerge.

Phenomenology is a way of looking at everyday intangible things. The research methods and analysis I have described are mainstream qualitative, and the same concern for rigour and reliability needs to be built in.

Tony Brown and William Golding

I came across by chance the biography of William Golding by John Carey, recently published by Faber and Faber. I rarely read literary biographies, let alone pay £25 for them, but this one was different. It was in part the biography of Tony Brown.

I worked with Tony from 1974-1977 and he welcomed me to his house just before he died from cancer. I was a teacher in a Salisbury school, where he was a part-time teacher of music. He drove an ancient Ford Popular, which looked antique even 40 years ago. We chatted in school, though what wisdom Tony received from so callow a youth I do not know. What I took from him I understand when reading this book - we were religious atheists together, socially aware communitarians before Blair made this popular. He lived in a lovely thatched cottage, near Salisbury, Wiltshire in a Bowerchalk garden, with bees. I was a gardener then, and have increasingly found this an important relaxation. I was no musician though. Tony's four children all played for famous orchestras, Iona Brown becoming a well-known conductor with St Martin in the Fields.

Tony spoke of his chess games with Golding, and his increasing withdrawal from the world and from writing. My last journey to Bowerchalk was to deliver a get well message and flowers from the school staff, but was detained for a while with conversation. After Tony died, much too soon, Golding wrote a very moving obituary for the Salisbury Times. And he began to write again.

One last thing. My neighbour but three now was a twin in the class Golding taught at Bishop Wordsworth, Salisbury as Lord of the Flies was being written, which famously includes twin boy characters. He thinks that all the boy characters in the story were recognizable as classmates. The twins later appeared as extras in the film of the book.

Sometimes, in life, our lives touch someone who makes a significant impact. We hope also that we might have an impact on others starting out on the journey we are finishing. Thanks, Tony for those chats long ago.

Maharajahs and air forces.

This unlikely title is the product of a weekend trip to London. Sunday was a visit to thew Hendon RAF Museum, and Monday to the Maharajah Exhibition in the V&A Museum. Both were excellent, so do not be put off by anything I say here. My issues are philosophical, about the way we view and value history.

The Maharajah Exhibition first. No expense has been spared, bringing a superb range of artifacts together and linking them with a sober commentary. It is a glittering display of wealth, power and opulence. My question is, why are wealth, power and opulence valued?

The Maharajahs came out of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with monuments such as the Taj Mahal. Yet they were tyrants and despots. Aurangzeb for example executed Sikh gurus when expanding his empire with military might. Power is won by military action, and power is kept by military action. The exhibition celebrates the careers of these men of power and their repressive regimes. True some of them claimed a philanthropic bent, but only in ways which increased their status and stature. For example, in order to give starving subjects work and income, did the Maharajah build schools, universities and hospitals? or excourage new food production techniques, and new technology? Of course not, they built new palaces in the latest taste. The Maharajahs and their families were grotesque, and their values grotesque, and their excesses of money over sense are celebrated here. Also, the British East India Company pulled strings and were the real power behind these thrones. They can be seen in processions in their top hats and red livery, failing to sit on the floor comfortably. What were the British doing in India? Aside from the usual flannel heard, they were making money and exerting power. Queen Victoria made herself Empress of India to impress her German cousins, but never bothered to go to the investiture. Their presence there was always improper, but the old Maharajahs were not a better answer.

There is another side. The artifacts made by the craftsmen and women who laboured brilliantly to achieve results of fabulous beauty and zero utility. Elsewhere in the V&A is the William Morris gallery: he asserted that all things must at the same time be useful and beautiful. That throws out most of the Maharajah 'stuff' - certainly beautiful, but of no practical purpose but to declare power and status.

The RAF Museum has links to abuse of power, despots and suffering populace. A museum of war materials is always treading a tightrope. I remember visiting a small gallery in Tottenham Court Road in the 1980s celebrating Iraqi munitions. The poison gassings took place at about the same time. The rest the world knows. That RAF Museums (and there are several) celebrate the defeat of tyranny is a bonus. Yet we are on our own knife-edge: are we celebrating killing machines? The bombers such as the Lancaster, B17, Vulcan; the 4000 lb to 12000 bombs that flattened Dresden? Are we celebrating the kills? The bomb tallies on the planes, the aces with their 20, 40, 60 or 80 'victories' (or is it 'victims'?). Presenting a war museum is tricky. In my book, it needs to show that war is ghastly (Hendon manages this well). Also that killing should be no joy (the feelings of people involved is always ambivalent as they have lost friends and want revenge). Looking forward, there should be some thought to oranising the world without aggression, war, despotism, and above all without war crimes.

The Saigon Museum of War Crimes sets the agenda well, and I have written about this before. War causes things to be done on both sides that ought not to be done. The aggressor is in no way exonerated by the fact that it is war, for it is their war. Saigon remembers "the American War" and "the French War". Defenders at least have some moral defence, within the limits of humanity. Our war musuems remember the dead who perished in defence of freedom. And this is right. If the Nazis had won, we would now live in a world without ethnic minorities, without any disabled people, without people or colour, without Jews, and without human rights. Even leaving the morals and human rights to one side, this would be a diminished world, a depleted world - and actually a pointly world. Human civilizations do need a way of policing for good, and war museums need to keep a firm hold of this. The current inclusive practice of remembering the second world war alongside the former enemy is a good tradition, so both sides together can think of the enormity of what happened, and what might have happened.

Lived Experience 3. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

This comes from MvM, chapter 5. It purports to be a study of Obsessive and Compulsive Disorder, and is by Mary Haase.

This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.

The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.

So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.

This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.

Lived Experience, part 2.

The previous post explored an aspect of phenomenological research which explores lived experience. This post looks at Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry edited by Max van Manen, 14 case studies of this kind of research, with introduction, conclusion and commentary by MvM. We focus here on his concluding chapter (16, pp.237-252), called Writing in the Dark. It is, true to form, a phenomenological study of the lived experience of writing.

a) addressive and allusive writing.
We are talking here about writing which is not superficial and contentless but is intended to have meaning. This could apply to a novel, or to autobiography, diary, blog. It is addressive when it addresses or speaks personally to the reader. It is the intention of the writer to speak to readers (in the phenomenology of experience of reading, the same point is approached from the opposite direction). The text is allusive when it causes the reader to compare what is being read with their own experiences; the text alludes to the readers own life.

b) being self readers.
There is a danger of superficial and sentimental writing and reading. Once we start to focus on this deeper experiential level, we should go back to our own writings (and for that matter oral memories) "where meanings resonate and reverberate with reflective being" (p.238).

c) what is real?
Gazing into the dark is MvM's description of trying to find the ineffable 'real'. He uses mythology to emphasise that naming the intangible destroys it, because the words then become a substitute for the reality. The name becomes a stereotype, a typical definition rather than a dynamic (ever changing) description of reality. This is the intimate connection between the real and the interpreted.

d) 'seeing' and insight.
Reflective writing in the phenomenological mode can be a struggle, as different points of view are tossed around and worries about intention and meaning are wrestled with. The writer, says MvM, "may find an updraft and suddenly soar" (p.246), "really 'seeing' something". Such moments of insight generate the desire to 'see' more. Conversation shares interior knowing, but writing is scriptural, producing authoritative text (that is, text which is corrected, manipulated, artificial, and to some extent ambiguous). Reflective writing may more resemble conversation than corrected polished product, more hand-written text than ever editable word processed text. We may need to get back to quickly composed and unedited writing, rather like in this blog.

e) Darkness
Behind writing ( and reading) is a domain of total absorption. We read a book and get pulled into it. We write, and create a new state of being, a new environment, a new family of characters. We are delving in the unknown, in darkness. We, writers and readers, are open to what comes, receptive, but passive. We experience this new world through the minds of the characters within it, whether these are fictional or images from our past. The state of mind opened up is a form of wonder, an experience unformed by our mind, and uncontrolled by it. It is an experience we get absorbed by, and becomes part of us.

Summing up
Writing is a process that opens up a new world within us, through which we can reappraise who we are and what we are about. Reflective writing is therefore hard to do, as it makes us vulnerable; but having started it, it may be hard to stop. It is a private affair, but being able to share it with one or more empathetic yet critical others sharpens the process. Responding to reading, whether of fiction or critical studies, in a personal way can elicit new ideas and streams of thought. There is no perfect answer or solution; it is a process or journey rather than a destination.

Researching Lived Experience

Most people need to reflect on and seek to understand their own experiences and the experiences of others. Qualitative research generally uses observations and interviews to discover the points of view of a representative range of people. However, it is easy to be superficial or to be biased.

The book Researching Lived Experience is by Max van Manen. That might refer to experience I have lived, or that others have lived, and probably both. This is to research something which is non-substantial. A chemist, physicist or biologist studies substance, things measurable and observable. This applies also to the brain-science part of psychology, where measurability is important. There are however things we hold to be true which have no substance. I would not deny that my experiences of love, anger and vulnerability are real, yet researching them requires different approaches as compared to experimental science. In my experiences, I need to distinguish between what might be real, and the ways in which I interpret experiences, a kind of level 1/level 2 approach. I remember as a 16 year old having a fleeting but seemingly everlasting experience of transcendence, being part of the universe and not a lonely individual teenager. Abraham Maslow speaks of these as 'peak experiences'. The experience was and is taken to be real. There are aspects I could discuss - what induced it? Was it a medication-induced hallucination? No, as it happens, but some transcendental experiences certainly are. Is one real and the other not? Did the experience change my life, or not? Why do I remember it still, and do I hope for another such experience? Why? Also I could ask if others have such experiences, and look for patterns. This opens up for me a research pathway of glimpsing what I might be looking for. Moving to level two, the interpretation, people had interpreted such events as religious conversion, enlightenment or transcendence depending on their culture. Though interesting, these are different concerns.

The philosophy stemming from this is phenomenology and the research therefore phenomenological research. The phenomenon being research needs to be identified or the research has no clarity. A phenomenon is something 'manifest', i.e. held to exist and be true, without having physical substance. The philosophical quest is whether we can 'see' the phenomenon or whether we can only talk about it at the level of interpretation. 'Seeing' was called by Edmund Husserl (the founder/father of phenomenology) eidetic vision from the Greek 'to know'. He believed that this is possible; hence his version of phenomenology is called transcendental. Those colleagues who emphasised the processes of interpretation embedded in it contributed to the field of hermeneutics (the word comes from theologians interpreting the Bible, but is now secularised) - Martin Heidegger for example studied how humans experience time, emphasising opinion and interpretation rather than attempting scientific proof, as Husserl was doing. Alfred Schutz emphasised experiences of everyday life, and it is this line of phenomenology that is followed by such as Clark Moustakas for Psychology (in Phenomenological Research Methods) and Max van Manen for Education.

All phenomenologists employ the strategy of bracketing, called from the Greek epoche (pronounced e-po-kay). This means putting brackets around intrusive material such as opinion and interpretation, so that the 'real' is left revealed, however elusive. There needs to be considerable and careful thought about what is bracketed, and we have to remember that the stuff within the brackets might be as interesting as the stuff outside them. In other words, bracheting is an elicitation device for discussion, and if that discussion involved several people and points of view, so much the better.

In the next post, I will explore examples from Van Menan's edited work Writing in the Dark where he encourages his students to write about particular life experiences phenomenologically, which shows the method in practice.