paidia

A key aspect of the phenomenological approach is the use of interviews (e.g, Holstein & Gubrium, 1998). I am a assuming that individuals are able to describe their experiences through language, but I realize that this description is actually of previous experiences and because an individual’s description of events is recalled, it is actually a description of what they now imagine happened. I am assuming that this ‘translation’ into spoken explanation is a reasonable approximation of both material and imagined experience and that I may imagine these experiences from their language-based descriptions because of an assumption that language is shared and is a basis of creating meaning anyway. As Thompson explains:

The stories consumers tell about their everyday experiences create temporal trajectories in which a past event is relived in relation to present concerns and projected towards an envisioned future. This temporal ordering creates relationships between a consumer’s contemporary understanding, his or her personal history, and a broader field of historically established meanings. (1997:442)

Hence these recalled experiences represent a process of broader ‘sense making’ by participants which renders them satisfactory as a basis for understanding their lived experiences. An implication however is that although there might be considerable consistency between my understanding of language and any other individual’s, anything I subsequently write about what they have told me is a mix of their and my imagination.. This seems very different from a presentation of some ‘objective’ truth. I am in effect simply trying to give the reader something new to imagine about the nature of experiences of those who engage in digital play. For Carroll and Tafoya (2000) this focus on meaning ‘contained’ in language brings phenomenology close to the project of the post-structualists but with an important difference. They argue that the ‘problem’ with post-structuralism is that it dismisses the idea of ‘self’ in favour of a system of language and this focus on the discourse (which they feel can lead to a new type of formalism), distances the interpretation from the wife-world of individuals. So although the focus is on the language used to describe events, the idea is to ‘conjure up’ an experience based on these descriptions.

In order to create a ‘close translation’ of the experiences of the individuals that I talk to there are practical steps that I may take. Perhaps most importantly I need to be aware of my own views and experiences. This is referred to as ‘bracketing’ in Husserl’s terms; the deliberate suspension of the researcher’s ontological assumptions so that they avoid interpreting the lived experiences of participants in terms of what they themselves consider to be ‘correct’, or ‘normal’ (Thompson et al, 1989). Heidegger and Gadamer later modify what this means in practice however, recognising that complete suspension of pre-understanding, or traditions is not possible because you can never think outside of ideas that are so taken for granted that they are not normally reflected on. Traditions ‘condition’ our experiences, such that we don’t seek to understand our tradition, but rather we understand with it. However tradition is not fixed, but rather is enacted through lived experience and is therefore filtered through the present and it is this filtering of the whole (history) by the present moment of experience that produces a hermeneutic ontology. In questioning our own understandings we could never be sure that traditions are fully suspended, but may be able to see phenomena from different perspectives (Dahlberg et al, 2001). Carroll & Tafoya further explain this as similar to the notion of theatrical ‘suspension of disbelief’, highlighting that:

From the phenomenological reconstructed point of view, all phenomena are left open to an investigation into what makes them phenomena, what makes them phenomena of a particular sort, and what makes them count as real, meaningful objects for ordinary experience (2000:7)

The researcher attempts to minimize the impact of their own experience on the translation of the experiences of others. Linked to this, Dahlberg et al (2001) warn the researcher to be suspicious of the feeling that an interview ‘went well’. In such circumstances a researcher check that this feeling was not produced by satisfaction that the respondent said the ‘right’ things. Further, interviews that do not ‘go well’ might indicate a greater distance from the interviewers own pre-understandings.

Thompson et al (1989) explain the nature of a phenomenological interview and subsequent analysis of the data generated. In analyzing the recordings of such interviews the interviewer takes a hermeneutic approach where individual aspects of the interview are related to an overall picture of the life-world of the participants in an iterative movement between whole-part-whole. Group interviews are problematic as individual life-worlds may be lost in the group dynamics and although the related technique of conversation analysis would allow for the collection of naturally occurring conversation, I have already suggested that the infrequency of such discussion also renders this approach impractical.

Phenomenological interviews require that participants are allowed maximum leeway to talk about what interests them and therefore involve broad and open questions. Thompson et al (1989). During the interview the researcher constantly attempts to get the participant to reflect on and then talk in detail about actual experiences. Direct ‘why’ questions are problematic because they ask participants to rationalize, or abstract their behaviour, or feelings in a way that moves the discussion away from lived experience and instead asks the respondent to behave as a ‘naïve scientist’ attributing one aspect of the experience as a cause of the recalled behaviour (Thompson et al, 1989). Instead, phenomenology wants to know a detailed account of life as it is directly experienced. So rather than ask ‘why do you play videogames?’, the phenomenologist focuses on accounts of specific experiences. Similarly Dahlberg et al (2001) draw from Benksson to highlight an objection to ‘idle talk’ which is again not grounded in experience, so the researcher needs to probe claims that ‘things are just like that, or just happen’ with requests that the participant recalls actual experiences. Thompson et al (1989) also highlights a need to get respondents to talk about their ‘whole life’ in order to develop a hermeneutic approach to analysis. So for example when Thompson et al (1989) seeks to understand married women’s experiences of choice, they report two separate interviews, one where there is a focus on the whole ‘live-world’ of participants and another where the focus in specifically on experiences of choice. Although separating interviews like this may be desirable it is probably not essential however.

A phenomenology seeks to reveal patterns of experience or ‘global themes’ that are built through a hermeneutic process of first relating each theme to the whole of an individual interview, then relating these patterns to others generated from other interviews. In this way claims to patterns are supported by direct references the reported experiences and as a result the analysis remains closely tied to the specific data generated, or as Thompson et al (1989) explain, analysis remains in the ‘emic’ world of the respondent. One implication of this is that external verification of the data is impossible and it is important that the researcher consciously dismisses, or ‘brackets’ their own view of the world, including their theoretical understanding of the experience they are writing about, at least during the initial stages of analysis. The hermeneutic process means that individual experiences are understood in terms of a whole – the ‘life world’ – which in turn is modified with each experience until a point where clear themes are generated, or as Hirschman & Holbrook (1992) explain this is a ‘coming together’ of the text and the researchers understanding of that text.

Once this is achieved for each interview, the task is then to consider themes across different interviews. Here as Thompson et al (1989) note, similarities in ‘global themes’ are understood as similarities in how different individuals might experience different events. In their example, ‘restriction in choice’ may be experienced as a consequence of a lack of time with one participant, but a lack of money for another. Although the experiences are different the theme of restriction is experientially similar.

At this point Thompson et al (1987) note that the researcher is creating a story about the respondents’ lives that is one of many possible stories. This doesn’t present problems as long as the account is grounded in the actual data, but it does mean that different researchers may produce quite different phenomenologies from the same data so that the research is a rich interpretation rather than reductionist, or final, ‘truth’. If the task was to produce theory, this would be significant problem (how could many different theories be produced from the same data?). But the task is rather to produce an analytical account that explains the lived experience of respondents. The ‘success’ of such a task lies in whether or not the themes produced mean something to a reader. In a sense then a phenomenology breaks down some of the assumed differences between scientific ‘truth’ and works of fiction (for example see Thompson, 1997). Accepting this, issues relating to the reliability of the research or its validity seem redundant and instead the focus is on the care and rigor with which interviews and analysis are undertaken. As Schwandt (1998) explains, the researcher makes no truth claim, but rather their interpretation is just part of their hermeneutical existence and they offer the reader the text so that it might become part of theirs.

Once the themes are identified and articulated it is then possible to re-engage with historical and theoretical discussions of the phenomena in order to move from the ‘hows’ to the ‘whats’ and even the ‘whys’. Strictly, these later stages move beyond phenomenology to what Holstein & Gubrium (2005) refer to as interpretive practice. A purpose of such projects might be more than simply to describe behaviours, but rather to add to the reflexive resources of society whereby in recognizing that it is possible to experience the world in different ways, or though different ‘discourses in practice’ individual might change their discursive practices and hence the nature of the socially constructed world. This positions the researcher as someone who encourages readers to see the world slightly differently, recognizing that simply doing so changes its construction, which might be to see the process of presenting research as a specialist form of discourse which creates an aesthetic drama (as articulated by Turner,1982 and Scechner,1986) in which the researcher identifies a breach (a gap in our understanding), articulates this such that it is a crisis, then moves the reader through the process of redressive action until the gap is closed by the transformation in the understanding of the reader. The result is a joining of the researchers hermeneutic process in accounting for their research and the hermeneutic experience of the reader.