Seeing as if for the First Time: Practising Transcendental Phenomenology with Emma Collins

So Sally, let's start by thinking about what we mean by descriptive or transcendental phenomenology, and this is most closely associated with Edmund Husserl, so the, the, the, the father of phenomenology, if you like, where a lot of the root of these ideas and philosophy come from.

And in research practice, where approaches such as, uh, Moustakas or Giorgi would be used, um, because it does something quite different to hermeneutic phenomenology or, or IPA because it seeks to describe the essential structures or meaning of an experience, um, as faithfully as possible.

So what researchers will do is they'll attempt to adopt the phenomenological attitude through pa- practices such as the epoché reduction or, or bracketing.

And this is where we are trying to, um, understand our presuppositions, our positionality, but we're trying to bracket that out, move it to one side, so we can see, uh, the essential structures without making too much interpretation from the position of the researcher.

And the aim there is, is not to simply summarize, um, uh, what participants said, but it's to move from this individual description towards what we call an underlying structure of the experience.

Um, interpretation's not necessarily absent though, because we are human, we can't not interpret.

But researchers generally seek to restrain assumptions and remain closely oriented towards a description of the experience.

So Sally, very different to what we might expect in, in a hermeneutic or an IPA piece of research.

Yeah, absolutely.

It, it...

And for me, this is, this is about this kind of distilling process, this, this refinement towards, I say, those essential structures.

It's a bit like, you know, how we may kind of, you know, distill, um, uh, you know, kind of essential oil.

You know, it's that-

Mm

... that thing about how do we, what do we really understand about what's going on in terms of what's, what's, what's bringing, you know, what's contributing to that, uh, phenomena.

What, what are those structures, those meanings that people are giving, um, through which the phenomena becomes, again, visible and understandable? Um, but yes, it's a very different type of process.

Mm.

And it's interesting because there are some shared concepts and understandings, um, because we use...

Uh, we don't tend to use the term as bracketing, um, in hermeneutic or, or IPA, but we might use bridling, or we might use this, these concepts of, um, demonstrating our presuppositions in slightly different ways.

But it's, it's the way in which the researcher uses those presuppositions, and it's really about how interpretive you're trying to be.

And if we see it in a simplistic way on a spectrum, if we're understanding descriptive hu- descriptive phenomenology, transcendental phenomenology as being as the least interpretive as possible, hermeneutic, um, phenomenology is deeply involving the, um, researcher as the central interpreter of the lived experience, so very interpretive.

And then IPA, we have this understanding of the double hermeneutic.

So it's the researcher understanding and interpreting the participant's own interpretation and meaning-making of their lived experience.

And we can kind of see these, these approaches on that, that, um, continuum between trying to avoid interpretation to trying to interpret, to trying to interpret an interpretation, and it's those, those steps that we take from it.

And, and I think, Lewis, at the same time, you know, empirical phenomenologists generally acknowledge that complete neutrality is, is-