The Risks of Phenomenology in Qualitative Research: Methods and Concepts

In recent decades, phenomenological concepts and methodological ideals have been adopted by qualitative researchers. Several influential strands of what we will refer to as Phenomenological Research (PR) have emerged. We will call into question whether PR has been sufficiently sensitive to the issue of the prerequisites, or basic conditions, for doing phenomenological research. The practical implementation of phenomenological key concepts is important in working with phenomenology as a research methodology. Core concepts such as “bracketing” seems to be particularly important in PR. The question we would like to raise is not whether “bracketing” is possible, or to what extent, nor how it should be understood. Rather, we wish to illuminate the prerequisites for bracketing itself. We believe that a fuller recognition of the embeddedness of research practices like PR does have some broadly practical implications, which we shall expand upon in the present article.

To demonstrate a conceptual approach to applied phenomenology using the concept of embodiment. Traditionally, qualitative researchers and healthcare professionals have been taught phenomenological methods, such as the epoché, reduction or bracketing. These methods are typically construed as a way of avoiding biases so that one may attend to the phenomena in an open and unprejudiced way. However, it has also been argued that qualitative researchers and healthcare professionals can benefit from phenomenology's well-articulated theoretical framework, which consists of core concepts, such as selfhood, empathy, temporality, spatiality, affectivity and embodiment. This is a discursive article that demonstrates a conceptual approach to applied phenomenology. To outline and explain this approach to applied phenomenology, the Discussion section walks the reader through four stages of phenomenology, which progress incrementally from the most theoretical to the most practical. Part one introduces the philosophical concept of embodiment, which can be applied broadly to any human subject. Part two shows how philosophically trained phenomenologists use the concept of embodiment to describe general features of illness and disability. Part three illustrates how the phenomenological concept of embodiment can inform empirical qualitative studies and reflects on the challenges of integrating philosophy and qualitative research. Part four turns to phenomenology's application in clinical practice and outlines a workshop model that guides clinicians through the process of using phenomenological concepts to better understand patient experience. A conceptual approach to applied phenomenology provides a valuable alternative to traditional methodological approaches. Phenomenological concepts provide a foundation for better understanding patient experience in both qualitative health research and clinical practice, and therefore provide resources for enhancing patient care.

This article provides guidance on Front-Loaded Phenomenology (FLP) in qualitative research, an approach where researchers use phenomenological concepts and conceptual distinctions during initial research planning to shape how a study is designed and conducted. FLP studies have precise conceptual foci and enable the generation of nuanced findings that may be difficult to obtain using other qualitative approaches. Further, FLP does not require complex and controversial philosophical methods (e.g., bracketing, epoché, reductions) that are endorsed in other phenomenological research approaches. Shaun Gallagher initially proposed FLP to guide experimental research in the cognitive sciences, with the explicit use of FLP in qualitative research being a more recent development. However, limited guidance is available to help qualitative researchers decide when and how to use this approach. This article addresses this gap by consolidating and expanding upon available literature. We start by clarifying what FLP is and when it is an appropriate qualitative research approach compared to other phenomenological approaches. We then discuss qualitative studies that have used FLP, providing illustrative examples. Subsequently, we introduce a taxonomy of Applied Phenomenology , which helps distinguish FLP from other applied approaches, including Retrospective Phenomenology and the work of Amedeo Giorgi and Max van Manen. We also delineate three FLP subtypes. Building on this foundation, we provide guidance on how to conduct FLP in qualitative research and discuss potential benefits. We address two common misconceptions about FLP and conclude with future research areas. Overall, the label of FLP offers a name for what many researchers are already implicitly doing, and we argue that making the role and function of phenomenological concepts explicit will improve transparency and facilitate more constructive and critical engagement across studies. This article adds clarity and consistency to previously fragmented and inconsistent terminology and helps advance theory-informed phenomenological qualitative research that is rigorous yet pragmatic.

As early as 1917 Paul F. Linke writes: “In the interest of assessing the meaning … of the phenomenological perspective, one might do well to first become somewhat acquainted with its history” (1917: 163). Within the context of his Prague lecture on April 5, 1929, Pfander remarks: “Since about 1900 phenomenology has had the aspiration to be the final foundation for philosophy and all the sciences” (1973: 146). The phenomenological project, it seems, unveils its own meaning primarily in hindsight of its original formation. Only that stance makes evident what phenomenology is driving at (see Husserl 1976b: 73). This new science is practiced by a community of researchers, as a “movement”(see Spiegelberg 1983). These are not world-historical individuals in Hegel’s sense. Even if not the result of an individual’s Promethean act, though, the movement cannot dispense with subjects altogether, embracing, as Kant did, the words of Bacon: “De nobis ipsis silemus” (“About ourselves we keep silent”). Phenomenology is the objective correlate of subjectivity, but in the plural; it persists in the historically cultivated and growing phenomenological movement. It is for this reason that its most thorough specialist, Herbert Spiegelberg, opened his own Encyclopaedia Britannica article forty years after Husserl’s with just these words: “Phenomenology was not founded: it grew” (Spiegelberg 1975: 3). Sprouted neither like armor-clad Athena out of the head of a single thinker, nor conceived originarily at a precisely knowable point in time, phenomenology, in Husserl’s words, does not depict an exact, but rather a morphological entity, in other words the correlate of a description. The resulting constitutive vagueness may remind some of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance.” In any case, the unity of phenomenology in the twentieth century, as subtle and variously natured as it may concretely be, is characterized by a reflexivity that leads back to Husserl’s thought. Husserl invariably views the historical setting of his phenomenology, and hencealso its relation to prior philosophies, in terms of a curious duality of simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Through his “blunt emphasis on the unscientific character of all previous philosophy” (Husserl 1964: 10), he distances himself decisively from possible trail-blazers and forerunners of phenomenology. And yet, even exactly for this reason, phenomenology represents to him “the secret nostalgia of all modern philosophy” (Husserl 1982: 142), that parousia of the absolute and full expanse of time towards which all earlier thinkers worked teleologically in ascending increments. These two aspects seem closest together in Husserl’s letter to E. Parl Welchon June 17-21, 1933: “Fundamentally, I am to a great extent an autodidact,” but “many, indeed all great philosophers in history … , including those I never studied,” have “at least indirectly influenced my phenomenology” (Spiegelberg 1981: 178-79). This reveals the twofold aspect of Husserl’s close relation to the history ofphenomenology. On the one hand, phenomenology is exclusively that science, “which I have de facto introduced into history” (Husserl 1976b: 440). On the other, Hume’s Treatise counts for him as “the first attempt at a coherent phenomenology” (Husserl 1971: 155). Something similar reappears later in the phenomenological camp. For Jean Hering, “there is hardly anyone but F. Brentano whose thought… contains the seeds of the blossoming of phenomenology” (1926: 78). Michael Landmann by contrast considers even “Socrates as a Precursor of Phenomenology” (1941). Such examples most of all reveal the openness and indefiniteness of the term“phenomenology” in its historical use. The point can be further illustrated by several examples that I purposely draw from outside the frame of the phenomenological movement sensu stricto. Akos Pauler takes Aristotle to be “the founder of phenomenology” (1925: 271), while Rudolf Schafke describes Aristoxenes of Tarent, a pupil of Aristotle renowned for his theory of music, as the herald of “a phenomenological, specifically musical aesthetic” (1934: 145).3 For the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz, Richard of Saint Victor, far ahead of his medieval times, is the guarantor of “the phenomenological orientation” (1853: 35). According to the aesthetician T. W. Danzel, on the other hand, Friedrich Schiller is “the first phenomenologist.” Crucially, Danzel thought it necessary to add: “in the Hegelian sense” (1844: 238).4 Moritz Geiger, too, weighs in that “in reality Lessing’s or Schiller’s aesthetic texts … already belonged to the phenomenological method” (Bekker 1925: 241; on the lecture referred to here see Geiger 1975: 287-89). All of these examples seem to illustrate two things. First, that the “opacity” (Fink1976: 189) at the heart of the most foundational of Husserl’s “operative” terms, namely “phenomenology,” is evidently not limited to his obvious redefinition of the term. And second, that Hegel seems to play a key role in the historical handing down of the concept to Husserl. Could it be that the one is related to the other? Answering this will require a look at the prehistory of “phenomenology” and what it can teach about the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that the historical concept of phenomenology possesseseven less of a unified and precise essence than does the phenomenological one. The search for a morphological concept of phenomenology will prove just as pointless. Nevertheless, the fear of sliding into equivocation by means of “simple verbal analogies” (de Waelhens 1958: 7)5 is an exaggerated caution in this case. This is because the concept of equivocation, posited by Aristotle in contradistinction to univocality, assumes the unambiguous correspondence between concept and object: an assumption that likely became questionable well before Cassirer’s thesis of the human being as animal symbolicum. To this day, there is no trustworthy account of the creation and first use of theterm “phenomenology.” Heidegger liked to claim that it “presumably arose in the Wolffian school” (1978: 51; see also 2002: 151: “The word ‘phenomenology’ … was already commonly used in academic philosophy at the time”). I myself prefer not to venture beyond the year 1762, when its adjectival form (in expressions such as “thephenomenological Hippocratic art,” “to phenomenologically explain,” “phenomenological way of thinking,” “phenomenological method of inference”) appears relatively often in the two parts of Philosophie der Alten (Philosophy of the Ancients), written by the Swabian theosophist and alchemist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (cf. the quotations that appear in Piepmeier [1976: 91-94], and Zimmermann [1969: 149-58].6 “Phenomenologically” there refers to the method of drawing holistic conclusions based on the observation of given appearances in nature, where we only have access to the proximate causes of appearances. This inferential method, native to humans alone, seeks to explain nature unto the deepest depths of its creation by God himself.7 Similarly, in 1762 Johann Heinrich Lambert developed the idea of a “Phaenomenologia or transcendental optic,” i.e. the “study of appearance” as contrasted with the study of truth (1918: 28).8 He uses the substantive here, as is common elsewhere in his writings. Neither of the two authors gives the impression that he is inventing a new term. This, along with the redefinition they link it with, makes it safe to assume that they are using an already established term. H. Spiegelberg’s claim seems quite right: “the formation of a concept like ‘phenomenology’ was almost inevitable, once ‘phenomena’ seemed worth studying at all, and once ‘-ologies’ had become the fashion” (1982: 7). This idea is all the more attractive, given Gustav Fulleborn’s late eighteenth-century comment regarding the Germanicization of earlier Latin philosophical terms in the time after Wolff: “Some … sensed greater rigor in the use of foreign technical terms with German endings. … Thus a great number of logieen and tiken easily entered into circulation … at a particular time” (1794: 134). He was probably directing his remarks at Lambert, who was trying to popularize terms such as “dianology,” “aleth(e)iology,” “systematology,” and “agathology,” among others. And yet, the origin of the term “phenomenology” is not thereby exhaustively explained. What Lambert’s friend Georg Christoph Lichtenberg said about him might be quite applicable in this case, namely that he tended to conceptualize in distinct steps, only at the end looking up “other books, especially dictionaries, in order to grasp the entire extension of a term” (1970: xiii). This directs us to the context of Newton’s natural philosophy, which represents a point of overlap between Lambert and Oetinger. Of particular relevance is the ambiguous relation of phenomenon and hypothesis in Newton; these terms may collapse into one another,9 insofar as the natural philosopher applies hypotheses “to the solution of phenomena” (Cohen 1958: 119-21, 179). Nonetheless, only statements which are not derived from phenomena and thus are unable to validate any truth claim are to be taken as hypotheses; they have no place in experimental philosophy. “Hypotheses non fingo” (“I do not make up hypotheses”), Newton remarks in his well-known Scholium Generale of the second edition of the Principia. The phenomenon thus motivates the inductive search for its underlying causes on the one hand, while on the other it serves as the criterion to distinguish technically useful explanations from simply arbitrary ones. Newton’s theory of science does indeed prepare the ground for the Oetingerian and the Lambertian conceptions of phenomenology (see Koyre [1965: 25-40, pp. 261-82] for a reliable overview of the connection between hypothesis and phenomenon).10

Review question/objective The objective of this systematic review is to provide a narrative summary synthesis of the quality of existing Husserlian phenomenological research studies in the health sciences. As a methodological systematic review, only studies that focus on adult patients’ experiences of preventive, screening, diagnosis, treatment or rehabilitation interventions/procedures will be considered to serve as a paradigm “case” of the use of the Husserlian phenomenological approach within the broad field of health. The review question is: What is the quality of existing Husserlian phenomenological research studies in the health sciences? The motivation for this systematic review is not to fault authors of existing Husserlian phenomenological research, but to explore the problems encountered in existing research literature, if any, and to provide guidance to authors for future health research guided by this specific philosophical perspective. In order to avoid repetition, the term ‘Husserlian phenomenological approach’ as used in the text refers to the approach described by Edmund Husserl in English translations of his own published work; or as described in English language commentaries by internationally recognized scholars; or from Husserlian phenomenological scholars including the structured framework presented by Spiegelberg. Each time the ‘content of Husserlian phenomenological research studies’ is used in the text it should be understood to mean ‘content of Husserlian phenomenological research studies as reflected in the stated philosophical perspective, research methodology, data collection methods, data analysis methods, presentation and interpretation of the results, and the conclusions’. Definition of terms: 1. Husserlian phenomenological research studies refers to primary qualitative research studies that are explicitly grounded in the work of Husserl reflected in explicit statements or descriptions by the authors. 2. Quality refers to the extent to which there is congruence between the Husserlian phenomenological approach and the content of Husserlian phenomenological research studies. These stipulative definitions are intended to preclude the need to cite the scientific literature as there is no need to demonstrate their ‘validity’ or ‘acceptability’ by the communities of scholars. TRUNCATED AT 350 WORDS.

Background and aim:Researchers, in qualitative researches, both influences on and take effect from the research process. One of the mainissues in qualitative research is validity of the researcher as an instrument of data collection. If the researcher doesnot have enough validity in the data collection, the results of the study will also not be cited. The researcher asinstrument provides an opportunity for researchers to enter into the unknown world of individual about thephenomena in question and sometimes faced many challenges in reaching this goal. This study has been reviewingthe opportunities and challenges of researchers as an instrument in the qualitative research.Materials and methods:This was a review study on the methodology of qualitative research. Using keywords including qualitative research,instrument, challenges, and opportunities, articles and available books were investigated in PubMed, Scopus,Science Direct, Proquest, Magiran iSCI iIranDoc, SID, Medlib, IranMedex databases with no time limit. TheQuality of the articles was assessed by using the McMaster Critical Review Form for Qualitative studies.Findings:Studies over 12 books and 18 articles showed that the role of the researcher can be varied in different qualitativeresearch designs such as phenomenology researches, grounded theory, ethnography, and content analysis researches.Also previous experience and skills in the process of observation and interview, having effective communicationand asking the appropriate questions have an important impact on the role of researchers as a key factor inqualitative research.Conclusions:Researchers have the main role, especially in data gathering of different types of qualitative researches. 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But there is no sharp boundary between methodological propositions and propositions within a method. Wittgenstein Perhaps no single philosophical influence on Heidegger is at once so important and yet so complex and controversial as that of his elder friend, colleague, and mentor, Edmund Husserl. Any serious discussion of Heidegger's thought presupposes some familiarity with Husserl's phenomenological method, his critique of naturalism, and his theory of intentionality. Husserl's phenomenology was of paramount importance for the conception and composition of Being and Time , yet it is difficult to say exactly what the nature and scope of his influence on Heidegger amounted to in the end. Scholars have consequently advanced radically different accounts of the sources and implications of Husserl's and Heidegger's ideas, their conceptions of phenomenology, their philosophical commitments, and their apparent agreements and disagreements on a wide range of issues. Rather than address the question of their relation directly, some have simply given up drawing them onto the same intellectual maps at all, concentrating their efforts on one to the exclusion of the other, or else concluding that they were speaking such different philosophical languages as to share virtually no common conceptual ground. The historical and stylistic jump from Husserlian to Heideggerian phenomenology is, as one commentator has rightly said, something like a “Gestalt switch.”

Hegel is known for coining the word “phenomenology” as a description of the methodological approach that he pursues in the famous work that bears this title. It has long been an open question the degree to which the later philosophical school of phenomenology in fact follows the actual method developed by Hegel or if it merely co-opted the name and applied the term in a new context. While Husserl was dismissive of Hegel, the French phenomenologists were generally receptive to Hegel’s conception of phenomenology. This chapter argues that there are in fact some important points of continuity and that the French phenomenological school’s understanding of Hegel as a forerunner of their movement is quite legitimate.

At no time since its “breakthrough” in Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1) has phenomenology been absent from the world’s philosophical stage, but today there are remarkable signs of the continuing vitality of this philosophical approach. It thus seems appropriate to ask just what it is that makes phenomenology a distinctive way of philosophizing. And with its centenary year recently behind us, it is also appropriate that this question be posed to the Logical Investigations, a work that Robert Sokolowski has described as “literally a new beginning” since what Husserl started here “cannot be considered as continuing a tradition that had taken shape before him.”1 Just what was the breakthrough that oc-curred in the Logical Investigations, and what claim does it have on us today? These questions matter not only because they are important for Husserl scholarship, but because they are much disputed now, and upon their an-swer depend our expectations of what phenomenological philosophy can ac-complish, and what, if anything, lies beyond its scope. For if there is renewed interest in phenomenology today, this has brought with it — or is it the con-sequence of? — a tendency to inflate the very concept of phenomenology. Today the borders between phenomenological philosophy, metaphysical speculation, and neo-Kantian construction show signs of collapsing. One reason for this is clear enough: the ascetic, anti-metaphysical “positivism” of Husserl’s early writing belongs to a cultural and philosophical milieu that is no longer our own, and if its residue cannot be excised from the phenomeno-logical program, that program will be felt by some to be too restrictive. Yet Dominique Janicaud seems to speak well when he says that “[p]henomenol-ogy is not all philosophy. It has nothing to win [...] by an overestimation of its possibilities.”2 Must a renewal of phenomenology involve its overestimation?

In this work I compare Hegel and Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology and its role in their thinking. Though these two thinkers are not often examined from this angle, and though there is controversy surrounding just how phenomenological each thinker might actually be, an examination of the two thinkers in this regard serves to identify interesting connections between Hegel and Heidegger while also raising questions about phenomenology in general. In short, I seek to establish that phenomenology in both Hegel and Heidegger is not adequately understood unless it is placed in the context of each thinker’s conception of human freedom along with the imperative to somehow realize that freedom. In this work, I begin by examining each thinker’s conception of phenomenology separately while intimating phenomenology’s role in their greater project and aims. I then end with a comparison of the two thinker’s conceptions of human freedom and then show how phenomenology for each thinker seems to be formed and oriented within the context of the imperative to realize human freedom. Phenomenology is thus not only a rigorous, immanent philosophical methodology, but a transformative practice. I then pose questions concerning the phenomenological method in general that arose from this investigation.

Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics as a study of human relationships or of persons as between-ness (aidagara) is often conceived as a critical, but fruitful, development in phenomenological studies. However, in the last chapter of Ethics as a Study of Human Beings, Watsuji evidently claims that hermeneutic and phenomenological methods are incompatible and that phenomenology cannot make any contributions to ethics. This chapter aims at presenting Watsuji’s ethics as the product of an opponent of phenomenology rather than a good colleague in good standing in phenomenological circles by considering what precisely his criticism of phenomenology is and to what extent this criticism plays a significant role in the framework of his hermeneutic ethics. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section reconstructs Watsuji’s criticism of the basic concepts in phenomenology: intentionality and person. The second section illustrates Watsuji’s observation that the phenomenological account of intentionality and person inevitably fails to treat the communal aspects of human beings: further, it explains how this leads to Watsuji’s rejection of phenomenological methods for ethical thinking. The final section assesses his criticism of what he terms the Cartesian individualism of phenomenology and defends the methodological meaning of the Husserlian version of Cartesianism for ethical considerations.

This paper discusses the phenomenological method as a theoretical basis for qualitative research. Phenomenology, which originates from the philosophical tradition, emphasizes the importance of understanding individual subjective experiences of a particular phenomenon or event. Through this approach, researchers can deepen and understand individual meanings, perceptions, and interpretations of the reality they experience. This paper explains the basic concepts of phenomenology, contributions from leading philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and how phenomenological principles are applied in qualitative research. Apart from that, this paper also reviews the advantages and disadvantages of the phenomenological method in the context of qualitative research and provides examples of its practical application in various fields of study. It is hoped that through this paper, readers can gain a deep understanding of the relevance and significance of phenomenology in qualitative research.

The Destiny of Phenomenology: Gadamer on Value, Globalism, and the Growth of Being

I show some problems with recent discussions within qualitative research that centre around the “authenticity” of phenomenological research methods. I argue that attempts to restrict the scope of the term “phenomenology” via reference to the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl are misguided, because the meaning of the term “phenomenology” is only broadly restricted by etymology. My argument has two prongs: first, via a discussion of Husserl, I show that the canonical phenomenological tradition gives rise to many traits of contemporary qualitative phenomenological theory that are purportedly insufficiently genuine (such as characterisations of phenomenology as “what-its-likeness” and presuppositionless description). Second, I argue that it is not adherence to the theories and methods of prior practitioners such as Husserl that justifies the moniker “phenomenology” anyway. Thus, I show that the extent to which qualitative researchers ought to engage with the theory of philosophical phenomenology or adhere to a particular edict of Husserlian methodology ought to be determined by the fit between subject matter and methodology and conclude that qualitative research methods still qualify as phenomenological if they develop their own set of theoretical terms, traditions, and methods instead of importing them from philosophical phenomenology.

The author attempts to describe and explain the original situation regarding the phenomenology, in Romanian philosophy in the first decades of twentieth century. Nae Ionescu introduced a method of philosophizing using some techniques belonging to phenomenology, especially to Husserl’s works (Logical Investigations, Ideas I and II, Cartesian Meditations etc.). In fact, he used some phenomenological concepts—intentionality, phenomenological method, intuition, etc.—in a ‘technical’ kind, in order to approach certain themes from the history of metaphysics: essence of the world and ego, God existence, knowledge constituting, thing and object, things and essences, subject and object of knowledge, relationships between contemplation, imagination, and reason, etc. In this paper, all such themes are interpreted from a perspective that allow to emphasize, on the one hand, their similarities with certain phenomenological concepts, and on the other hand, the phenomenological technics used by Ionescu in order to approach them. So, the intentionality, in Husserl’s concept, is applied to certain topics; also, the neutrality modification, epoche, eidetic intuition, non-actionality modification, etc. are also applied to different topics in many contexts of his works (in fact, his courses at University of Bucharest published by his students). Also, in the problem of relation between being and nothingness that is possible on the basis of the “passional act” Ionescu conceives this latter concept in analogy with Heidegger’s concept of state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit). All such connections are described and interpreted in such a way that the unity of Ionescu’s conception to be illustrated. At the end of article, along with some original contributions in phenomenology belonging to some Romanian thinkers from the same period (interwar), some direct Ionescu’s influences to certain Romanian philosophers are mentioned.