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Phenomenological Research Methods for Counseling Psychology.

Article  in  Journal of Counseling Psychology · April 2005

DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.52.2.167

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Running Head: Phenomenology

Phenomenological Research Methods

for Counseling Psychology1

Frederick J. Wertz

Fordham University

(Please send request for article to [email protected])

1I would like to thank Andy Giorgi, Tom Cloonan, Connie Fischer, Steen Halling, Chris Mruk, Mufid Hannush,
Peter Ashworth, Niki Skoufalos, and Tracy Prout for their help. I would also like to express my gratitude to Joe
Ponterotto, Beth Haverkamp, and Sue Morrow for their vision, leadership, professionalism, sensitivity, and
meticulousness as editors.
 2

Abstract

This article familiarizes counseling psychologists with qualitative research

methods in psychology developed in the tradition of European phenomenology.

A brief history includes some of Edmund Husserl’s basic methods and concepts,

the adoption of existential-phenomenology among psychologists, and the

development and formalization of qualitative research procedures in North

America. The choice points and alternatives in phenomenological research in

psychology are delineated. The approach is illustrated by a study of a recovery

program for persons repeatedly hospitalized for chronic mental illness.

Phenomenological research is compared with other qualitative methods, and some

of its benefits for counseling psychology are identified.

 3

Phenomenological Research Methods

for Counseling Psychology

Phenomenology is a qualitative research method originally developed by the philosopher

Edmund Husserl. In the tradition of Giambattista Vico, Franz Brentano, and William Dilthey,

Husserl broadened the concepts and methods of modern science to include the study of

consciousness, profoundly influencing philosophy, other humanities, and the social sciences

throughout the 20th century. Husserl formulated scientific methods which are uniquely fashioned

to assist psychological researchers in the investigation of human experience and behavior.

The Phenomenological Movement and Mental Health Psychology

Throughout his career, Husserl devoted much attention to psychology. The

phenomenological movement, as it evolved through the 20th century, continued to make

substantive contributions to psychology in the work of Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Martin

Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, Gaston Bachelard, Gabriel

Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur (Spiegelberg, 1982). Although their works

provided ground-breaking knowledge in such basic areas of psychology as perception,

imagination, emotions, behavior, language, and social processes, the greatest impact on

psychology has occurred in the area of mental health (Spiegelberg, 1972). This work was a

protest against dehumanization in psychology and offered original research and theory that

faithfully reflects the distinctive characteristics of human behavior and first person experience.

Halling and Nill’s (1995) excellent brief history of phenomenology in psychiatry and

psychotherapy highlights the multiple sources and influences which undergird, compliment, and

permeate the field’s traditional and mainstream approaches. In Europe, Ludwig Binswanger,

Eugene Minkowski, Erwin Straus, Medard Boss, F.J.J. Buytendijk, Viktor von Gebsattel, Igor
 4

Caruso, Henri Ey, H.C. Rümke, J.H van den Berg, Viktor Frankl, and R.D. Laing assumed

leadership roles and produced an impressive volume and breadth of scholarship across diverse

topics in clinical psychology. Some themes unifying these works include the emphasis on

“experience, process, freedom, the importance of the client-therapist relationship, and viewing

the client’s problems from his or her perspective” (Halling and Nill, 1995, p.28).

This work began to come to the attention of American psychologists in the 1930s through

Robert McLeod and later Gordon Allport as well as through European-Americans Andreas

Angyl, Adrian Van Kaam, and Henri Ellenberger as well as more recent immigrants Kurt

Kaffka, Wolfgang Kohler, Paul Tillich and Erwin Straus. Halling and Nill (1995) cite Martin

Buber’s participation in the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures in 1957 and the

publication of Existence (May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958), a collection of previously

untranslated papers including those of many of the above mentioned authors, as the two pivotal

events that unexpectedly created an upsurge of psychotherapists’ interest in the European

existential-phenomenological movement. In 1962, Duquesne University began its doctoral

program in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology for the training of counseling and clinical

psychologists. American born mental health scholars and practitioners such as James Bugental,

Eugene Gendlin, and Irving Yalom have made original contributions to a broadening American

movement that continues today.

Some Basic Methods and Concepts of Phenomenology

This section will briefly detail the methods that characterize phenomenological research

developed by Husserl and some basic concepts concerning human psychological life that the

movement has contributed for use by clinical and counseling psychologists.

 5

The Epochés and the Psychological Phenomenological Attitude

Husserl’s phenomenology employs the familiar methodological principle that scientific

knowledge begins with a fresh and unbiased description of its subject matter. Husserl

(1913/1962) employed two procedures called epochés, which are abstentions from influences

that could short-circuit or bias description. The first is the “epoché of the natural sciences”

(Husserl, 1939/1954, p. 135), and requires that the researcher abstain from utilizing (“brackets”)

natural scientific theories, explanations, hypotheses, and conceptualizations of the subject matter.

This epoché involves setting aside prior scientific assumptions in order to gain access, in

Husserl’s famous phrase, “to the things themselves (Sachen selbst)!” This epoché delivers the

investigator to manifestations of the subject matter as it exists prior to and independent of

scientific knowledge. This return to phenomena as they are lived in contrast to beginning with

scientific preconceptions is a methodological procedure and does not imply that such knowledge

is false; it simply suspends received science, puts it out of play, and makes no use of it for the

sake of fresh research access to the matters to be investigated.

This first epoché delivers the investigator to the “natural attitude” in the prescientific life-

world (lebenswelt), that is, to the unreflective apprehension of the world as it is lived, precisely

as it is encountered in everyday affairs. In the natural attitude, we live straightforwardly toward

the world, whose existence we assume. For the most part, we do not notice the conscious and

experiential processes through which the world is objectively given, do not reflect on its

meanings, and do not attend to the subjective performances that constitute the world’s meanings.

The natural attitude is appropriate for physical scientific research, which does not investigate

meaning or subjectivity; however, sciences that seek knowledge of human experience cannot

remain naïve about consciousness. They require a transformation of attitude, a new epoché, the
 6

epoché of the natural attitude (Husserl, 1939/1954, p. 148-150). This second epoché is a

methodological abstention used to suspend or put out of play our “naive” belief in the existence

of what presents itself in the life-world in order to focus instead on its subjective manners of

appearance and givenness—the lived-through meanings and the subjective performances that

subtend human situations. Again, this is a purely methodological operation; it does not imply

that what presents itself in human life does not exist. The existence and validity of human

situations are “bracketed” only in order to allow the shift from naïve, straightforward encounter

to a reflection on how the life-world presents itself, that is, to its constitutive meanings and

subjective performances (e.g., perceptual syntheses, kinestheses, emotions, beliefs, expectations,

and intersubjective communalizations).

This second epoché and the analyses that follow from it allow us to recollect our own

experiences and to empathically enter and reflect on the lived world of other persons in order to

apprehend the meanings of the world as they are given to the first person point of view. The

psychologist can investigate his or her own original sphere of experience and also has an

intersubjective horizon of experience that allows access to the experiences of others (Husserl,

1939/1954, p. 254). Husserl refers to the focus on experience (apart from issues concerning the

existence of what is experienced) as the phenomenological psychological reduction (1939/1954,

p. 236) because it “reduces” the investigative field to the psychological. This presence to the

psychological allows the investigator to reflectively describe the meanings of and psychological

performances in the situations lived through. In Husserl’s view, the scientific study of

subjectivity requires a more radical epoché beyond the scope of this article--the transcendental

phenomenological reduction, which is necessary to philosophically ground and inform the

science of psychology (1954, p. 260).

 7

Intuition of Essences (The Eidetic Reduction)

Husserl established another important but much misunderstood scientific procedure

fundamental to qualitative research because it grasps “what” something is: the intuition of

essence or the eidetic reduction. This method is neither inductive nor deductive; it descriptively

delineates the invariant characteristic(s) and clarifies the meaning and structure/organization of a

subject matter. Husserl (1913/1962) developed and formalized a special procedure that provides

rigor in knowing essences called free imaginative variation. One starts with a concrete example

of the phenomenon of which one wishes to grasp the essence and imaginatively varies it in every

possible way in order to distinguish essential features from those which are accidental or

incidental. This is the method par excellence for the acquisition of qualitative knowledge, for it

informs us of what something essentially is. Eidetic seeing or insight provides evidence of those

features that must be present in any instance and all possible instances of a subject matter.

According to Husserl, there are different kinds of essences such as the exact, formal

essences of mathematics (e.g., “three,” “triangle”) and material essences (e.g., “rock,” “lentil”)

that require inexact, morphological concepts to delineate them. The life sciences study vital

phenomena which have their own kind of essential being, and psychology must consider the

essential characteristics of its subject matter--“the body”, “behavior”, “perception”, “stress”,

“schizophrenia” or “mental life”--in order to insure that its properly psychological features are

reflected in research findings and knowledge. This procedure is important in the

phenomenological critique and overcoming of reductionism. For instance, it has shown that

physicalistic concepts distort the essence of the body, which is not merely an object in the

physical world but an agent of action, and the essence of behavior, which is not merely muscular

movement but involves a meaningful goal structure. Eidetic science helps set the proper
 8

epistemological and conceptual foundations for the empirical sciences. Through eidetic

analyses, phenomenological philosophy has offered “regional ontologies” which inform us of the

essential kinds of being investigated in empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology,

psychology, sociology, and theology. A rigorously scientific empirical psychology requires the

foundation of eidetic psychology if its investigations are to respect the essential qualities of its

subject matter.

Intentionality and Intentional Analysis

In bracketing natural science knowledge and carrying out descriptions of such

psychological processes as perceiving, thinking, imagining, speaking, and feeling in an effort to

gain insight into their essence(s), Husserl reaffirmed and radically revised Brentano’s broadly

applicable concept of intentionality, that is, that consciousness is consciousness of something

(independent of consciousness itself). I see a blackbird, think two and two is four, hallucinate a

pink elephant, speak my mother’s name, open a door, or resent an insult. In these examples, my

mental life involves a transcendence, that is, a relation to something (an “object”) beyond itself

that means something to me. The procedure developed by Husserl (1913/1962, 1939/1954)

called intentional analysis is relevant to psychology because it provides knowledge of human

situations, their meaning, and the processes that generate those meanings. Intentional analysis

begins with a situation just as it has been experienced--with all its various meanings--and

reflectively explicates the experiential processes through which the situation is lived.

The Life-world (lebenswelt)

Phenomenology’s recognition of the fundamental nature of intentionality makes its

analyses of mental life radically contextual and ecological. “The lived world” is a central theme.

The intentionality of human mental life is not an isolated ray, illuminating a single object;
 9

intentionality includes its relational context as it illuminates a “world.” The life-world manifests

itself as a structural whole that is socially shared and yet apprehended by individuals through

their own perspectives. Spatial surroundings span through and beyond my immediate situation

in an order of mutual references including equipment, cultural objects, natural objects, aesthetics,

other people, and cultural institutions. While human situations are at every moment given

meanings through a living present, they unfold within a larger temporal process that includes

both the collective and individual person’s determinate past and yet-to-be-determined future.

Every human situation includes our bodies not only as things in the world but as subjective ways

of relating to our surroundings. The human body plays a key role in the constitution of the world

and the establishment of the meaning of our surroundings through its sensory-perceptive

openness and behavioral exploration. As body-subjects we activate historically sedimented skills

and habits in situations whose meanings (e.g., “too hot,” “useful,” “comfortable,” “nearly within

reach”) are constituted by our bodily ways of being toward them. The life-world as a whole--

every situation in it and every moment of our psychological lives--entails various forms of

sociality as part of its essential structure. Language also pervades the meanings of our

surroundings and forms part of what makes the life-world more a collective place than the

product of an individual’s isolated subjectivity. Collective forms of subjectivity at various

levels—e.g., the ethnic, national, cultural, and religious--have historically shaped and

inextricably pervade the life-world and must therefore be acknowledged by any psychology that

seeks full knowledge of the human being. And yet the individual person experiences this world

in a way that is uniquely relevant and meaningful to the self in the course of their individual

histories that begin with their birth and end with their death, making the life-world a place

meaningfully apprehended from “one’s own” perspective (Eigenwelt). A person must not be
 10

reduced to his or her facticity or actuality because as long as the person is alive, he/she holds

greater potential for activities and meaningful relations to the world which means that the future

remains an indeterminate ground of hope.

Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology

Apart from research in which norms are borrowed from the physical sciences--research

where hypothetical deductive explanations have been tested by means of quantitative analysis,

psychologists of many stripes have used qualitative methods designed to investigate meaning and

subjectivity. However, these works, including Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams

(1900) and William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/1982), lacked a

supporting conceptualization of science, formal specification of methods, and explicit

methodological norms. The Social Science Research Council began an initiative in the 1930s to

study such qualitative methods that were being used across the social sciences. Sponsored by the

Council, Gordon Allport (1942) cited extensive use of qualitative methods in psychology,

acknowledged their low status but high scientific value, compellingly challenged virtually every

criticism of these methods, and called for a formal account that would establish rigorous

methodological norms for their use. Only in the 1970s did American psychology begin to

benefit from the formalization and deliberate development of such methods and methodologies.

Formalization of Phenomenological Methods

The advances made in counseling and clinical psychology within the phenomenological

movement were similar to those in psychoanalysis in that, although qualitative research was

conducted, there was almost no formal specification of its procedures or methodological norms.

Research based on scholarly reading and informal analyses of clinical experience was presented,

but systematic empirical research utilizing publicly available data collected primarily for
 11

research purposes was extremely rare. One notable exception was Lang and Esterson’s (1963)

interview-based study of the relationship of schizophrenic symptoms to the family, but even this

study left implicit the analytic procedures through which they reached their conclusions

regarding the social intelligibility of symptoms. The emergence of rigorously specified and

deliberately employed research procedures and of attempts to make the research process

transparent in publications did not occur until the 1960s and 1970s.

Cloonan (1995) provides a history of phenomenological research in American

psychology and credits Amedeo Giorgi with leadership. Giorgi, who is not a clinical

psychologist but received his PhD from Fordham University in Experimental Psychology

(Psychophysics), joined the graduate program at Duquesne University in Existential-

Phenomenological Psychology that had been founded by Van Kaam, in 1962. His primary task,

given his background in rigorous empirical research, was to develop a phenomenological

research method in which general psychology students as well as those researching clinical and

counseling topics could be trained. Influenced by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Giorgi worked

through the 1960s to develop such a method and in 1970 offered the first course in the Duquesne

program in phenomenological research methods for psychology. Qualitative research training in

the program quickly expanded into a multi-semester sequence, required of all doctoral students,

that culminated in an “Integration Seminar” taught by Giorgi and attended by other dissertation

advisors in which students formulated their dissertation research methods. In 1970, Giorgi

founded and edited the Journal of Phenomenolgical Psychology, the first psychology journal

with the explicit intent of providing a forum for qualitative research in psychology.

The emergence of phenomenological research was led by Giorgi and the Duquesne

Circle, including William Fischer, Rolf Von Eckartsberg, Anthony Barton, Constance Fischer,
 12

Edward Murray, Frank Buckley, Charles Maes, and Paul Richer. From 1970 to the present,

Giorgi developed varied methods, described procedures used in various projects, refined his

understanding of their phenomenological core, and wrote on such general methodological issues

as reliability and validity. This focus on reflectively and deliberately developing and accounting

for research methods has given rise to an impressive production of research projects. In the past

40 years, Duquesne doctoral students trained in phenomenological research methods have

completed over 250 psychological dissertations, most on topics relevant to counseling

psychology (Smith, 2002). These topics include, for instance, expectations prior to

psychotherapy, disclosing one’s problem to an intake physician, insight in psychotherapy, use of

diazepam to transform anxiety, transformative imagining in systematic desensitization,

resolution of adolescent suicide ideation, disclosing one’s HIV+/AIDS diagnosis, and caring for

a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease. Other graduate programs have trained students in the use of

phenomenological methods and the publication of a considerable body of empirical research has

appeared in the psychological literature (e.g., Valle and Halling, 1988; Giorgi et al, 1971, 1975,

1979, & 1983).

Phenomenological research, largely influenced by this work at Duquesne, has led the

qualitative research movement in psychology. Rennie, Watson, and Monteiro (2000) conducted

a study of the rise of qualitative research in the 20th century that included a literature search using

terms currently associated with the field. Prior to 1980, “phenomenological (and existential

phenomenological) psychology” is the only term that yielded hits in psychology journals—a total

of 126 hits in contrast to 9 for “Qualitative Research”, “Grounded Theory”, and “Discourse

Analysis” combined across the social sciences. Of journals publishing articles involving the

search terms, the Journal of Phenomenolgical Psychology, consistent over the last three decades,
 13

included by far the most (195), with the next closest journals being the Journal of Pragmatics (a

Language and Communications journal with 54 discourse analysis articles) and Canadian

Psychology (20). Of Rennie et al’s key terms, “phenomenological psychology”

“overwhelmingly appeared in psychology journals and dissertations rather than coming from

other fields (350 vs. 9)” and came mainly from North America (269 vs. 92) (2000, p. 185-186).

A Common Core through Variations

Phenomenological methods are scientific by virtue of being methodical, systematic,

critical, general and potentially intersubjective. Like all good science, they require critical

thinking, creativity, and reflective decision making that give rise to many procedural variations

and innovations. Many different types of research participants, situations, forms of

expression/description, analytic procedures, and ways of presenting findings have been used.

Giorgi (1989b) has indicated several core phenomenological characteristics that hold across the

variations of these psychological research methods: this research is descriptive, utilizes the

phenomenological reductions, investigates the intentional relationship between persons and

situations, and provides knowledge of psychological essences (that is, the structures of meaning

immanent in human experience) through imaginative variation. Of the process of analyzing

descriptions provided by research participants, Giorgi (1985; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003), says that

four steps are involved: 1) reading the entire description in order to grasp the sense of the whole;

2) rereading the description and demarcating spontaneous shifts in meaning, or “meaning units”

in the text with a psychologically sensitive interest in the phenomenon under investigation; 3)

reflecting on each and every meaning unit in order to discern what it reveals about the

phenomenon under investigation or what research-relevant psychological insight can be gained

from it; 4) synthesizing these reflections and insights into a consistent statement that expresses
 14

the psychological structure of the experience. Every descriptive statement by research

participants is accounted for and its analytic treatment is available for public scrutiny.

In an effort to document the diverse procedures used in phenomenological research that

had been conducted at Duquesne in 1978, I reviewed all completed dissertations and attempted

to specify the procedures from start to finish of the research project. I was especially interested

in the “operative intentionality” of researchers in Giorgi’s 3rd step, that of psychological

reflection. I supplemented this with an effort to reflectively track my own operative procedures

of psychological reflection in a research project on “being criminally victimized.” These two

efforts led to a more explicit specification of the phenomenological analytic operations involved

in psychological research (Wertz, 1983a & 1985). A subsequent review of informally conducted

psychological research in the broad phenomenological tradition found the same procedures to be

implicitly operative throughout the literature prior to 1970 (Wertz, 1983b). These same basic

constituents of descriptive psychological reflection have been found to be used by Freud and

subsequent psychoanalysts (Wertz, 1993), leading to the conclusion that the method Giorgi has

begun to specify characterizes any and every genuinely psychological qualitative research

method. The role of the phenomenological approach to psychology has merely been to clarify its

nature and provide an adequate justification. This is to be expected if the phenomenological

research method is what it intends to be, a method that is shaped according to the intrinsic

demands “of the things themselves”--the psychological lives of human beings.

Typical Variations and Options in Research Methods

Identifying the Phenomenon and the Research Problem

The research project begins with the identification of a psychological topic. This

identification involves locating and delineating its presence in the life-world. Counseling
 15

phenomena might include problems or situations that lead clients to counseling; professional

counseling practices; the counseling process; relational issues between counselor and client;

outcomes of counseling. In defining the research problems and goals, the researcher reviews

established knowledge and critically identifies its limits; some gap between knowledge and

reality that requires qualitative knowledge, an understanding of what occurs. Research is then

designed to solve the problem, fill in the gap, overcome the flaw. All the choices the researcher

makes throughout the project are ideally determined after critically and reflectively weighing the

relative merits of the alternatives for making our knowledge a better description of reality.

Data Constitution

Participants. One of the researcher’s first choices involves the identification and

selection of human beings whose lives involve a revelatory relationship with the subject matter

under investigation. Phenomenological researchers have solicited the participation of 1) the

researcher him/herself, 2) ordinary individual lay persons, 3) expert--professional or literary—

witnesses, 4) a system or group of related persons. The basis of this decision is the judgment of

whose experience most fully and authentically manifests or makes accessible what the researcher

is interested in. In a study on “racism related stress,” participants may be recruited from among

working racial minorities, but the researcher may also identify a novel that would offer

revelatory descriptions of this phenomenon. It is also possible that non-minority co-workers

would contribute relevant descriptions of the expressive responses of racially stressed workers.

If the gap in the literature or analyses of the experiences of work-stressed minorities suffering

stress indicates the need to better understand the “stressors,” persons who induce stress, then they

might well be recruited as participants.

 16

The question of “how many participants?” can only be answered properly by considering

the nature of the research problem and the potential yield of findings. If in depth knowledge of

one individual’s experience will fulfill the goal(s) of the research, one participant may be

sufficient. For instance, if a researcher seeks to know in depth the psychological process through

which a professional develops multicultural counseling competence, the choice of one master

counselor who is recognized as a superlative model in this area might provide sufficient access to

the phenomenon to fulfill important research aims. However, knowledge of differences in the

field may suggest the need for representatives of other approaches if the research aims at

generality across the field. It is not always possible to determine the required number of

participants before conducting the research and carrying out analyses. Particularly when the

research requires knowledge that addresses a broad range of the topic’s manifestations, the

researcher may deliberately continue recruiting different additional participants until

“saturation,” redundancy of findings that fulfill the research goals, is achieved. The nature and

number of participants cannot be mechanically determined beforehand or by formula. Rather,

deliberation and critical reflection considering the research problem, the life-world position of

the participant(s), the quality of the data, and the value of emergent findings with regard to

research goals are required in a continuing assessment of adequacy. Participant selection always

limits the results, and reflective accounting of such limits is an important part of the research

process.

Situation(s). The situations studied further limit the knowledge achieved by research.

The researcher may select the situation(s) to be described, as one might in investigating a

particular short term vocational counseling protocol that is offered at several educational sites.

The researcher may also designate a “type” of experience and invite the participant to choose the
 17

particular situation(s), as when an investigator asks a client to describe a situation in which

he/she kept a secret from his/her counselor. Situations researched can be naturally occurring, as

when Mexican American students are asked to describe a situation at college in which they

“became very distressed”. The situation can also be constructed specifically for the research, as

might occur if one solicited participants to learn a new relaxation intervention in the research

situation and provide descriptions of the learning process as they master the activity.

Procedures of description. Descriptions are usually verbal but some researchers have

used other expressive forms such as drawings (Wertz, 1997a). Descriptions may be generated

from the point of view of the “self,” the “other,” or both. Phenomenology does not privilege first

person description and acknowledges that others have (in some cases superior) access to

psychological phenomena. For instance, counselors might provide revelatory descriptions of

clients who do not return after the first visit by describing their expressive behavior during the

initial consultation. The phenomenon of “denial of homophobia” might be fruitfully described

by a person who observes another person’s conduct. However, many studies, such as one on the

expectations of counseling prior to the first visit, require first person description.

Typically, descriptions use ordinary language and may be provided verbally or in writing

by individuals, through dialog/interview, or in group discussion. In each case, the researcher

gives the participant(s) a descriptive task with instructions that specify a focus and yet remain

open to the particular content that the participant offers. Interviews are useful when the

phenomenon of interest is complex in structure, extensive in scope, and/or subtle in features that

participants are not likely to offer spontaneously in response to questions or instructions at the

outset. Interviews typically begin with open-ended instructions such as “Please describe a

situation in which you had an interaction with another person who was unsupportive of your
 18

sexual orientation.” The researcher might have an interview schedule with a number of follow

up issues or questions that would be brought into the interview at appropriate moments or in

order to complete the description if they were not spontaneously addressed, such as “did that

unsupportive interaction change the other person in any way after the interaction occurred?.”

Descriptions of actual life experiences can be provided simultaneously or retrospectively.

Researchers have sometimes used literary, even fictional texts or asked participants to provide

imaginative descriptions, which can be useful provided that they are not ideologically derived

and truly describe in detail a specific instance of the subject matter. The most outstanding

quality of data sought by the phenomenological researcher is concreteness, that the descriptions

reflect the details of lived situations rather than hypotheses or opinions about, explanations of,

interpretations of, inferences, or generalizations regarding the phenomenon. If an interview

participant starts out saying “In my view, sexual risk taking is primarily due to the failure of

parental responsibility,” the researcher might gently ask the participant to “describe an actual

situation in which you did something risky in a sexual encounter, starting beforehand and

walking through the experience from its beginning through what happened afterwards.” The

data collected should provide the researcher access to concretely described psychological life

beyond any previous knowledge or preconceptions. Descriptions are almost always surprising in

their concrete details. These descriptions of situations provide data that transcends even what the

participants themselves think or know about the topic.

Analysis of the Data

Preparatory operations. In order to prepare the data for analysis, the phenomenological

researcher may listen to and transcribe verbal descriptions and interviews. Once in written form,

data are openly read first without the research focus in mind in order to grasp the participant’s
 19

expression and meaning in the broadest context. Because the description may be lengthy and

complex, particularly when it involves time and multiple features and processes, the researcher

differentiates parts of the description, identifying “meaning units” which organize data for later

analysis of parts. For instance, in a description of career counseling, the researcher may

differentiate the following series of meaning units: 1) the participant’s surprise at a suggestion

(based on an inventory) that she has interest in business, 2) a spontaneous series of images of

unattractive business work situations, 3) voicing doubt to the counselor about the rightness of the

inventory, 4) the counselor asking the client to elaborate a series of positive responses to

business-related inventory items, and so on.

In preparing the data, researchers may eliminate redundancy, for instance in interview

data, if it does not appear to contribute to the meaning of the description (sometimes redundancy

is meaningful). Other incidental and irrelevant expressions found in the description may be

eliminated. Some phenomenological researchers name themes found in the descriptions in order

to better organize lengthy and complex material. In phenomenological research, the

identification of themes and any “coding” or categorization of data is merely preparatory in that

it organizes data conveniently for a more in depth, structural, eidetic analysis that follows.

Finally, descriptive material may be reordered so as to be maximally useful for the later analysis.

Researchers often use a narrative that temporally reflects the original experience, but material

may be ordered by themes if that better suits the research. These operations prepare an

organized written description of situation(s) in the first person language of the participant(s).

This protocol has been called a “Situated Description” or an “Individual Phenomenal

Description,” for instance, “The Day I Was Sexually Harrassed by My Mentor.”

 20

Attitude. Phenomenological research requires an attitude of wonder that is highly

empathic. The researcher strives to leave his or her own world behind and to enter fully, through

the written description, into the situations of the participants. The researcher empathically joins

with participants (“co-performs” participants’ involvement) in their lived situation(s). This

sharing of the experience is the basis for later reflection on meanings and experiential processes.

This attitude involves an extreme form of care that savors the situations described in a slow,

meditative way and attends to, even magnifies all the details. This attitude is free of value

judgments from an external frame of reference and instead focuses on the meaning of the

situation purely as it is given in the participant’s experience. This is the implementation of the

phenomenological epoché. The researcher attends not only to what is experienced but also

reflects on the how--the psychological processes—bodily, perceptual, emotional, imaginative,

linguistic, social, behavioral, and so on that are involved in its constitution and in this way

carries out an intentional analysis using the phenomenological psychological reduction.

Analyzing Individual Descriptions. Phenomenological analysis begins by focusing on

particular situations prior to attempting general knowledge. Idiographic analysis involves a

number of reflective operations. The contours of the phenomenon of interest are distinguished

from its baseline--the lived experience prior to the subject matter of interest. For instance, the

researcher may note in a protocol describing “perfectionism,” the point at which the participant

begins becoming perfectionistic while working on a term paper, before which the work was not

perfectionistic. This enables the researcher to grasp what the matter being investigated is,

distinct from the rest of the participant’s experience in which it is embedded. The researcher

then goes on to distinguish its parts or constituents as preparation for discovering how the

various moments interrelate in their overall organization. For instance, in the protocol on
 21

perfectionism, the participant’s imagination of the teacher citing numerous faults may be one

part of the description distinct from the student’s repetitive use of a grammar check tool. The

researcher reflects on the relevance of each part of the described situation and of the

psychological process involved, that is, what they freshly reveal for our knowledge about the

phenomenon of interest. The phenomenological researcher does not remain content to grasp the

obvious or explicit meanings but reads between the lines and deeply interrogates in order to gain

access to implicit dimensions of the experience-situation complex. For instance a researcher

might grasp in a participant’s thought of suicide not only a challenge to an abandoning other but

an implicit trust that the other will show love though rescue. The phenomenological researcher

continually focuses on relations between different parts of the situation and the psychological

processes that subtend it while attempting to gain explicit knowledge of how each constituent

contributes to the organization of the experience as a whole. The researcher continually moves

from part to part and from part to whole in order to grasp the structural organization and

interdependence of parts that make up the lived experience. A distinctively phenomenological

characteristic of analysis is that the researcher attempts to grasp the essence of the individual’s

life experience through imaginative variation.

Finally, in an advanced stage of the analysis, the researcher may deliberately abandon the

epoché and interrogate the situation in view of previously posited concepts and theories.

Preconceptions may be used as heuristic guides for knowledge. If they are phenomenologically

useful, they may reveal aspects of the material that were or were not yet previously evident.

Analytically tracking a heuristically adopted theory’s relation to the descriptive manifestation of

the phenomenon can be instructive for a later discussion of the theory. The researcher may

synthesize his or her insights concerning the essence of this particular instance of the topic with
 22

statementa in the voice and language of the psychologist. This amounts to a single case study, in

which an idiographic psychological structure of the phenomenon in described. For instance,

such descriptions might be titled “An Individual Psychological Structure of Being Sexually

Harrassed by a Mentor” or “An Idiographic Structure of Suicide Ideation” (see Wertz, [1983a

and 1985] for an individual analysis of Marlene’s experience of being criminally victimized).

Grasping General Structures. Researchers are usually interested in general knowledge of

a topic, and the research problem or goals require movement beyond particular individual

instances. Fortunately, this is possible because what is generally qualitatively true is also

necessarily evident in each individual instance encountered and analyzed in the study.

Nevertheless, general meanings and psychological structures may be difficult to identify. A

series of interdependent procedures establish general qualitative knowledge. One is to look in

the individual empirical analyses for what seem to be general characteristics and features. Such

judgments remain relatively inconclusive inasmuch as individual analysis do not directly present

evidence of generality, but a tentative effort to identify apparent or “possible/probable”

generality may be utilized as a starting point for the process of directly examining evidence that

will allow the researcher to draw grounded conclusions.

The second procedure, which brings to bear a broader scope of empirical evidence of

generality, is to look in other cases for a feature that was identified as potentially general in the

first case in order to “verify” the broader applicability of the insight or knowledge. Anything

that can be “verified” in more than one instance is to some extent “general.” Questions

regarding “how general?” may carry us beyond qualitative research into the quantitative realm,

but generality in qualitative knowledge can be extended in other ways. Two or many more

individual cases that were analyzed individually can be compared, and commonalities can be
 23

identified and delineated. Phenomenological researchers typically perform this operation with

all of the instances collected empirically in order to identify common meanings, general

constituents, themes, psychological processes, and organizational features. This operation often

yields the finding that some knowledge statements are evident in more than one case and are

therefore general but are not true of all cases. For instance, although the “dream of rescue” may

be found in some instances of suicide ideation, others may hold no such immanent meaning and

some may instead contain the implicit teleology of an end to worldly suffering in detached,

solitary peace. This gives rise to insights into typical variations in the subject matter or

knowledge of types.

Typologies or knowledge of limited generalities are quite valuable in psychology because

what is universal is often trivial and of little use; variations (differences) that are not completely

idiosyncratic though not universally true are usually the most significant. Procedures using

systematically collected and freshly generated data may be supplemented by less formal but

invaluable use of instances generated from the researchers’ personal memory. In addition, non-

fictional publications and media (including professional literature offering genuinely concrete

descriptions), personal imaginative production, and fictional publication and media may be used

to provide broader ranging and more diverse data sources for reflection on levels of generality.

These can be essential in the researcher’s ability to extend knowledge from the idiosyncratic,

through the typical, to the highly general and finally even the universal. While remembering,

imagining, and collecting new instances of already discovered findings, the researcher stays on

the lookout for counter-instances of the phenomenon that throw into question and require

modification of the general knowledge as it takes shape.

 24

One distinctively phenomenological method is imaginative free variation, used for the

purpose of grasping general essences at various levels, for instance the essences of particular

context bound “types.” Essential knowledge in psychology does not imply freedom from context,

abstraction or universality; it qualitatively characterizes the context bound structures of

phenomena. Contextual dependency of psychological structure is phenomenologically

demonstrated by the imaginal exercise of removing that context and discovering the collapse of

meaningful coherence. Through imaginative variation, one determines what must be the case of

all (imaginable) instances for them to be considered members of the typical category of

phenomena. Giorgi (1982, pp. 332-338) clarifies the point that essential generality in

psychology tends not to be universal laws but what he calls “empirical generality,” “contingent

generality,” or “context-bound generality.”

Presentation

Presentations of good phenomenological research in psychology require more space than

does quantitative research and this is gladly provided by journals committed to publishing such

material. Beyond the framing of the research problem in light of previous knowledge, reports

require an account of methods used including selection of participants, choice of situations

researched, procedures of data collection, and methods used in organizing and analyzing the

data. The validity of these procedures is established by demonstrating their fidelity to the

phenomenon under investigation in its prescientific life-worldly presence. Because this research

emphasizes the importance of access “to the things themselves” and honors the most concrete

individual instance with the bedrock level of evidence they require, research reports may contain

raw data—verbatim descriptions provided by participants or interviews, either in the body of the

text or as an appendix. It is also common practice to include material that reflects the
 25

researcher’s organization of the data and expresses lived experience quite directly, such as

succinct first person narratives distilled from long interview transcripts. Research reports may

also contain sample analyses that illustrate and account for procedures. These provide readers

with an opportunity to follow and judge the soundness and evidentiary basis of the conclusions.

Findings may be presented in various forms ranging from an abstract to a series of nutshell

propositions in bullet points or to long elaborative essays. Findings may be represented and

summarized through diagrams, tables, illustrations, and photographs. Illustrative quotations

from participants’ concrete descriptions are a hallmark of phenomenological research because of

their capacity to maintain the groundedness of all knowledge claims. Finally, the findings may

be discussed with regard to 1) their impact on a knowledge field, e.g., bearing on previous

research and theory, 2) their practical applications, e.g., for professionals, policy makers, lay

public, and 3) their impact on participants in research which may have been problematic,

difficult, challenging, pleasant, useful and are often emancipatory.

An Illustration of Phenomenological Research in Psychology

Davidson, Strayner, Lambert, Smith, and Sledge (2001) conducted participatory

phenomenological research on the difficult problem of recidivism among people with

schizophrenia. Some distinctive variations present in this research are its program evaluative and

action-oriented goals, its inclusion of participants as active collaborators with the researchers, its

interview methods, and its limited—local level of generality.

The research problem. The context of the study was a program in an academic medical

center where outpatients were closely monitored for symptoms and in order to prevent relapse

provided early intervention including education, individual assessment of relapse patterns, and

individualized action plans. Twice-weekly relapse prevention groups took place first during
 26

hospitalization and then after discharge. Not one patient (of 36 eligible) returned to attend group

sessions after discharge. The readmission rate remained unchanged and the ineffectiveness of

the program became apparent. The researchers suspected that the program’s approach to the

problem of recidivism was limited by the clinical way the problem was defined, namely its focus

on the symptoms of disorder per se and its assumption that the return of the symptoms of

schizophrenia required the patients to be readmitted. The perspectives of various other

stakeholders, including family members and especially the patients themselves, had not been

taken into consideration, nor the larger social and material environment or the world and the

agency of the patient. The purpose of this research was to acquire knowledge of the problem of

recidivism by examining the actual discharge situation as lived through and experienced by the

patients themselves. The researchers were also interested in gaining knowledge of the meaning

and function of acute hospitalization for the patients.

Participants, constitution of data and situation. In this phenomenological participatory

action research, Davidson et al (2001) tracked twelve recidivist patients (defined as having had 2

rehospitalizations in the last year) “to elicit their experiences of rehospitalization, the

circumstances of this event, and the function it served in their lives” (p. 167). Data was collected

through open-ended interviews that encouraged participants to provide narratives of their life

experience leading up to, during, and following their most recent rehospitalization. Rather than

posing questions that the researchers presumed to be relevant, they allowed the descriptions to

provide access to meanings relevant to the participants. Interviewers also solicited descriptions

of the situations in which patients received the new relapse prevention interventions during

hospitalization and their discontinuation of the program after discharge.

 27

Analysis. After transcribing the audiotaped interviews, three researchers independently

analyzed the protocols and then met together to establish a consensus about findings. The

analysis attempted to understand the participants’ experiences independent of any prior views of

the researchers, focusing on experiences from the point of view of the participants without

considering how well they conformed or did not conform to the researchers’ preconceptions.

The researchers also involved the participants themselves in the process of elaborating the

meanings found in the described situations. Transcripts were analyzed directly within each

individual and across individuals. The team identified the themes of the experience in each

individual case and unified them in an edited synthesis of their understanding of each case in

narrative form. Researchers then compared the individuals, put aside statements that were

limited to individual cases, and retained only statements that were confidently based on the data

and, even if implicit, were present in all cases, culminating in a general structural synthesis.

Researchers discarded any assertions that appeared to be ungrounded speculation or inference

and integrated the strongly data-evident insights of the investigators within a single narrative. A

group of original research participants were then convened in order to read through and provide

feedback on the tentative findings. They were specifically asked to identify important areas that

were missed and to evaluate how faithful the narrative was to their experience. Finally, the

researchers collaborated with the participants to use the findings to design a new intervention.

Findings. The most striking finding was that the clinicians’ goal of preventing

rehospitalization was not found within the experience of participants. The hospital was

experienced as an attractive place of safety, food, respite, care, and privacy to which participants

appreciated being able to return as if “for a vacation,” a word used by several participants.

Perhaps the most important meaning of the hospital was “a place where people listen to you.”
 28

For one participant, the positive value of the hospital grew steadily in the course of three

hospitalizations, the third being “the best I think.” This meaning of the hospital was structurally

dependent on the context of a relatively impoverished community life, for instance in a homeless

shelter or, as one participant reported, “broke, unemployed, the same harsh feeling everyday.” In

contrast to the hospital, life in the community was characterized as socially isolated, without

supportive and caring others. One participant characterized himself as “popular” in the hospital

in contrast to being alone and abandoned outside it. The self outside the hospital was

experienced as powerless and lacking in control, not just in relation to symptoms but more

importantly in relation to employment and financial well being. Even the distress associated

with symptoms gave way to a numbness and apathy that one participant described as “becoming

cold…don’t care no more.” Here the personal body is lived in the mode of powerlessness, as an

“I can’t (travel, get a job, make friends)” and temporality is one of becoming colder, more numb,

closing off to the world. As this context became increasingly established in their lives, the

participants saw mental health treatments and programs as useless, not worth any effort, and

characterized the educational interventions designed to enable them to recognize symptoms as

idle exercises disconnected from their current lives. The only value of “the program,”

remembered within the hospital context, was the care shown by the “treaters” who were

experienced as the ones with power and competence. The participants saw no connection

between outpatient treatment, which was not worth the effort, and rehospitalization with its

plenitude of care.

Practical Consequences. The design of an alternative program followed these findings.

The revised program no longer focused on teaching participants to recognize the symptoms of

schizophrenia and to act on them but on addressing participants’ isolation and loneliness by
 29

helping them establish a sense of community of care in which they belong outside the hospital.

The new program also addressed the sense of powerlessness pervading participants’ self by

helping them achieve mastery over the conditions and problems that they themselves initially

identified as significant and worth the effort. The new program invited participants become

social agents—decision makers and care givers involved in something larger than themselves to

which they belonged. Finally, the researchers attempted in the new program to make the benefits

of treatment more salient from the point of view of former patients. The new program, which

was implemented by former patients who thereby became consumer-providers, included such

elements as easy transportation, friendships, lunches, fun outings to places decided by

participants, who became agents in planning and activities that had tangible impact on their

future. In the context of this thoroughgoing restitution of a fuller life-world intentionality in

“after care,” staying out of the hospital became a byproduct of a more meaningful, socially

satisfying, and free life. Compared to a matched control group three months after discharge, the

readmission rate of those who participated in the new program was reduced by 70% and total

days in the hospital reduced by 90%.

Commentary

The key phenomenological elements of this research are 1) suspending scientific

assumptions about the nature of the patients’ problems along with assumptions about the causes

of recidivism, e.g., uncontrollable symptoms of disease, 2) gaining descriptive access, through

interviews, to the life-world situations within and outside of the hospital as they were

experienced by former patients in the course of their own lives, 3) an analysis of the meanings of

situations inside and outside the hospital and the psychological processes that gave rise to them,

and 4) imaginative variation through which the essentials of the life-worldly experience was
 30

grasped first at the level of each former patient and then at a more general level that held for all

former patients. There was no claim to universality in these findings but only to generality

within the context of the program investigated in this study. It is easy to imagine other former

patients for whom the hospital is a virtual “prison to be avoided at all cost” and is a place one

returns to only involuntarily, in the hands of more powerful others like the police. But this

different type of meaning of the hospital is not a part of the essence of recidivism as experienced

by those in the program under investigation; for them the hospital was an attractive and welcome

refuge. If a study aimed at greater generality beyond this type of recidivism, other persons

possibly from other hospitals, with other kinds of life experiences would have be selected as

participants. A study of different participants would most likely yield different context-bound

or empirically contingent essential characteristics. Perhaps there are universal truths in the

psychology of recidivism, but this was not the most fruitful level of analysis for the present study

and might be too high flown and consequently trivial for psychology as a discipline because its

subject matter is essentially quite variable and bound by its different contexts.

Similarities and Contrasts with Other Approaches

The sharpest contrast between the phenomenological and other approaches to

psychological research is in its philosophy. Its bracketing of presuppositions and commitment to

description distinguish phenomenology from positivist, postpositivist, constructivist, critical and

relativistic approaches. Phenomenology is more hospitable, accepting, and receptive in its

reflection on “the things themselves” and in its care not to impose order on its subject matter.

Phenomenology does not form theories, operationalize variables, deduce or test hypotheses, or

use probabilistic calculations to establish confidence as do positivist and neopositivist

approaches. Phenomenology holds that psychological reality—its meanings and subjective

 31

processes—can be faithfully discovered. Psychological realities need not be constructed; they

have essential features that can be intuited and described by the research scientist.

“Interpretation” may be employed, and may be called for in order to contextually grasp parts

within larger wholes, as long as it remains descriptively grounded. Although phenomenology

can provide culturally critical and emancipatory knowledge, it is not ideologically driven and

does not subordinate its grasp of human experience to any ideology; phenomenology dwells with

and openly respects persons’ own points of view and honors the multiperspectivity found in the

life-world. Phenomenology is a low hovering, indwelling, meditative philosophy that glories in

the concreteness of person-world relations and accords lived experience, with all its

indeterminacy and ambiguity, primacy over the known.

Phenomenological research shares many procedures with other approaches to qualitative

research. The following methods used by phenomenologically oriented psychologists may be

found in other approaches: writing down one’s preconceptions prior to carrying out the research,

keeping a research journal of reflections and insights, including participants and other

nonprofessionals in any and every phase as co-researchers, interviewing in depth, naming themes

in data, analyzing linguistic expressions, interpreting within broad contexts, deconstructing taken

for granted realities, studying individual cases, presenting narratives, critiquing culture, and

applying resolutions in action. Some of these procedures, such as in depth interviewing, are quite

generic. The value of these generic procedures is phenomenologically justified when demanded

by the nature of subject matter. Nevertheless, because they are not relevant for every research

problem, they are not to be considered essential ingredients of phenomenological research

method. Moreover, when utilized in phenomenological research, such procedures must be used
 32

in distinctive ways, as for instance interviews must take place within the phenomenological

reduction and remain genuinely descriptive rather test hypotheses.

Other approaches may use procedures that are distinctively phenomenological and

essential to its approach. In some cases, other approaches to qualitative research have been

derived from or built on the work of phenomenologists, as is the case with some interpretive,

critical, collaborative, and action research. In other cases, “phenomenological” procedures have

been independently discovered and employed by other approaches. This is to be expected if the

principles and practices developed by phenomenologists are necessary and required by the

demands of scientific rigor as they interact with the nature of psychological subject matter. Any

researcher who 1) sets aside pervious theories (the epoché of sciences), 2) secures descriptive

access to the immanent meanings within psychological life as it occurs in natural contexts (the

epoché of the natural attitude--the psychological phenomenological reduction), 3) analyzes the

complexities of these meanings utilizing reflection on the psychological processes that constitute

them (intentional analysis), and 4) gains insights about what is essential to the psychological

processes under study (intuition of essence, the eidetic reduction) is employing core

phenomenological elements in psychological research whether it is acknowledged or not.

It is not necessary for researchers to have philosophical training or to deliberately employ

phenomenological procedures in order to be phenomenological. Action research on the infant’s

experience of birth by the French obstetrician Frederick Leboyer, who had formal training in

neither philosophy nor psychology, brilliantly describes and uses photographs to illustrate the

newborn’s expressive lived experience in a fully phenomenological way (Wertz, 1981).

Probably the most outstanding example of such protophenomenology is William James’ (1902)

classic study of religious experiences. Although unaware of Husserl’s work, James deliberately
 33

bracketed natural science, prior theories and naïve preconceptions of religion and employed the

procedure Husserl named the “phenomenological psychological reduction” without calling it by

any name other than simply “psychology.” James performed extensive and intensive intentional

analyses with rigorous imaginative variation and a consistently penetrating intuitive grasp of the

essential constituents and types of religious experience.

“Phenomenological” procedures are required and employed by any genuine psychology.

Had psychology not been dominated by the natural science approach and instead founded itself

as an autonomous discipline by rigorously describing its subject matter and developing

procedures demanded by it, psychology would have been phenomenological from the beginning,

and no specifically “phenomenological” movement would have been needed. Had James’ turn

of the century investigation of religious experience been recognized as fulfilling the demands of

science, appropriated by the discipline of psychology as a good example of rigorous science, and

set the standard for research in the young discipline, psychology would have been an early leader

rather than a tardy follower in 20th Century qualitative research. If someday psychology accepts

the contributions of the phenomenological movement and appropriates them as a normative part

of its methodology, even without any recognition or acknowledgement of the historical

movement of phenomenology, then the unwieldy descriptor “phenomenological” would no

longer be called for and these practices could simply be called “psychological research.”

Until such a time when phenomenological contributions are incorporated into the

standard operating procedures of psychological researchers, the approach may be understood as a

relatively distinct historical and ongoing movement. As such, there are eight distinctive features

that make this movement worthy of study and relevant for researchers in the field of counseling

psychology: 1) Its continuous and multiple lines of development over a 100 year period; 2) Its
 34

sophisticated and still evolving philosophical foundation; 3) Its concepts and methods specially

designed for the discipline of psychology; 4) Its development across all basic disciplinary areas

such as learning, perception, language, cognition, personality, and social life; 5) Its formalization

of qualitative research methods and methodology with justification and norms concerning

reliability and validity (Giorgi, 1992, 1989a, 1989b, 1988, 1986a, 1986b & 1970; Wertz, 1999 &

1986b); 6) Its long standing and diverse contributions in specific areas of mental health and

counseling; 7) Its employment in graduate education including the development of a complete,

APA approved curriculum (at Duquesne University) incorporating philosophy of science,

clinical praxis, and training in qualitative research; 8) Its lively dialog with other disciplines,

with other schools of psychology, and with other approaches to research in psychology.

The phenomenological movement has expanded the conceptual foundation and practice

of science in order to include the descriptive study of subjectivity and the full human person. The

phenomenological approach emphasizes the importance of returning to psychological subject

matter with an open attitude and evoking fresh, detailed descriptions that capture the richness

and complexity psychological life as it is concretely lived. This approach provides researchers

with well established methods capable of securing sensitive insights into the human meanings of

situations and the processes that engender them. This approach is especially suited for

counseling psychologists, whose work brings them close to the naturally occurring struggles and

triumphs of persons. Counseling psychologists require high fidelity knowledge of persons that

maximally respects the experience and situational contexts of those they serve. Informal

phenomenological inquiry can be seamlessly integrated with counseling practice, and formal

phenomenological research can compliment other scientific methods, both quantitative and

qualitative, as well as provide rigorous practices and knowledge in its own right. I hope that
 35

researchers in counseling psychology will find increasing value in the phenomenological

approach that has developed steadily through the last century as the field enhances itself by

incorporating a new methodological pluralism in the 21st century.

 36

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