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.