Abstract
PurposeThis paper is a critical review of the descriptive phenomenological methodology in Korean nursing research. We propose constructive suggestions for the improvement of descriptive phenomenological methodology in light of Husserl’s phenomenological approaches.MethodsUsing the keywords of ‘phenomenology,’ ‘experience,’ and ‘nursing,’ we identify and analyze 64 Korean empirical phenomenological studies (selected from 282 studies) published in 14 Korean nursing journals from 2005 to 2018. The PubMed and the Korea Citation Index were used to identify the studies.ResultsOur analysis shows that all the reviewed articles used Giorgi’s or Colaizzi’s scientific phenomenological methodology, without critical attention to Husserl’s philosophical phenomenological principles.ConclusionThe use of scientific phenomenology in nursing research, which originated in North America, has become a global phenomenon, and Korean phenomenological nursing research has faithfully followed this scholarly trend. This paper argues that greater integration of Husserlian phenomenological principles into scientific phenomenological methodology in nursing research, such as participant-centered bracketing and eidetic reduction, is needed to ensure that scientific phenomenology lives up to its promise as a research methodology.
Highlights
Background/rationale As philosophy and research methodology, phenomenology has laid the foundation for theoretical knowledge and methodological clarity and rigor in qualitative nursing research [1,2]
In their systematic review of phenomenological nursing research published 10 years later, Norlyk and Harder [2] found that scientific phenomenology has been the major research methodology of descriptive phenomenological research in nursing, conceptually separated from its philosophical underpinnings in Husserlian phenomenology
In Korea, researchers have recognized the promise of scientific phenomenology and the need for further development which is solidly philosophically founded
Summary
Background/rationale As philosophy and research methodology, phenomenology has laid the foundation for theoretical knowledge and methodological clarity and rigor in qualitative nursing research [1,2]. In this article, ‘scientific phenomenology’ refers to the descriptive phenomenological methodology of Colaizzi [3] in 1978 or Giorgi [4] in 1997. Both use Husserlian philosophical phenomenology as its epistemic foundation. Scientific phenomenology in nursing research aims at discovering and describing the essential meanings of people’s lived experiences [5]. It includes researcher’s bracketing and participants’ interviews as data collection and employs a stepwise data analysis. Husserl [8] claims that assumptions about the existence of objects of experience outside the experience (e.g., physical objects) must be suspended
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