Pre-conference

My own work over the past thirty years in teaching this method to students in psychology (and sometimes nursing) has been directed towards a clarification of the reflective “steps” within the procedure of conducting human science research. What are we actually “doing” when we read and reflect upon qualitative data? What are the operative principles for our demarcation of “meaning units,” and in what sense are we “involved” with the data – empathically, imaginatively, experientially – during what we refer to as our “procedure,” which for the phenomenologist includes “intuition,” “analysis,” and “description”? 

For this workshop, I will be drawing upon my understanding of the phenomenological method as originally developed at Duquesne University in the 1970s by Giorgi and Colaizzi, and elaborated by many others over the years. Giorgi has derived some of his method from Husserl’s epoche and reductions (while not making the transcendental turn with Husserl); he also drew upon his familiarity with the writings of Merleau-Ponty to assist him in adopting a phenomenological attitude when reading data.  In addition to these influences, I also draw upon Dilthey and Heidegger, whose hermeneutic principles come to play when one is attempting to describe, not one’s own intuitions, but those of naïve research participants whose experience is communicated in descriptions. Once our data shifts from our own personal intuitions, drawn from our encounterings within the lifeworld, to the worlds of others as expressed in words written down or spoken by participants, then “hermeneutic” principles necessarily come into play.

This workshop will attempt to “sort out” where the researcher stands when reflecting upon his or her own experience, versus when reflecting upon someone else’s as communicated to us in words.  We will discuss first person, second person, and third person perspectives insofar as they come to play in the experience of conducting research.  The perception of “intentional gestalts” will be discussed in the context of making observations about the data that we read (or observe). All of these considerations will be directed towards the challenge of engaging the audience in reflection and dialogue with respect to their own styles of conducting human science research, in the hopes of more rigorously grounding our personal styles of research in the seminal principles of phenomenology (whether “pure” or “existential-hermeneutic”).

The process will include lecture and dialogue, as well as group analysis of a protocol on an “emotional experience.”