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.