PSYCHOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Three. Phenomenological Research Methods PSYCHOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Research methods are plans used in the pursuit of knowledge. They are outlines of investigative journeys, laying out previously developed paths, which, if followed by researchers, are supposed to lead to valid knowledge. These paths are drawn on maps based on assumptions about the nature of reality and the processes of human understanding. The map developed for Western science during the past three centuries is based on the notion that reality consists of natural objects and that knowledge is a description of these objects as they exist in themselves. The purpose of the paths laid out on this map is to eliminate the distorting influence of personal perspective and the subjective properties of researchers.

Phenomenological research methods are drawn on a different map. It is a map developed in the first half of this century by Edmund Husserl and subsequent members of the phenomenological movement. The phenomenological map is not antithetical to the mainstream natural science map, but it marks different features of the terrain. It locates geological features of human awareness and reminds us that the research journey needs to attend to the configurations of experience before moving on to assumptions about independent natural objects. Because the descriptions of natural objects are derived from experience, experience itself must be clear-

R. S. Valle et al. (eds.), Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology ly understood before a firm foundation can be established for the sciences studying the natural world.

The approach of Western science includes the commonsense assumption that experiencing is unproblematic and consists of sense data reflecting the objects of the world along with subjective bias and feeling. These subjective elements can be sifted out through methodological techniques that recognize only those experiences consisting of directly perceived objects on which there is inter-subjective agreement. In this model of experience, the knower is a passive recipient of reflective sensations from natural objects. Phenomenological philosophy, however, calls this assumption into question. It holds that experience involves the operation of active processes that encompass and constitute the various contents that become present to awareness. These contents include not only the objects of perception but also those of memory, imagination, and feeling.

Phenomenological Philosophy

The phenomenological map refocuses inquiry, concentrating not on descriptions of worldly objects but on descriptions of experience. This requires a change in the attitude or attunement of the researcher from a natural perspective to a phenomenological perspective. In the phenomenological perspective, questions about the existence and character of the objects that are experienced are put in abeyance while the researchers attend, instead, to what is present or given in awareness. This suspension or reduction (also called the first or phenomenological epoche [bracketing]) of the commonsense thesis that an independent reality "explains" experience locates the research in the phenomenological realm. It removes the distraction, the need to look outside of awareness for sources that "cause" experience.

In the return to the investigation of experience itself, phenomenological philosophy has produced an understanding of experience that undercuts some of the commonsense assumptions that inform Western science. The form and continuity of experience are products of an intrinsic relationship between human beings and the world. The error of the traditional approach is the result of separating mind and body into two independent spheres. This separation has produced two contradictory pictures. On the one hand, the world is understood to be made up of the random buzzing of electrical particles, and it is mind that imposes the notions of form and substance on this confusion. On the other hand, the world itself is understood as ordered and structured, the mind making no special contribution to experience and merely passively mirroring the natural order. The phenomenological correction holds that experience consists of the reception of worldly objects by the processes of consciousness to constitute what presents itself in awareness.

In awareness, objects appear as something. That is, things appear as "chairs," "tables," and so forth; they do not appear as mere sense data. The notion of independent sense data is derived from a secondary abstracting process that constructs out of an originally given whole perception a deficient mode of seeing. Experience, as it is directly given, occurs at the meeting of person and world. For example, as I experience two objects, one appears nearer to me than the other. The seeing of the one thing as nearer than the other requires both that the object exists in the world and that a person exists who is the locus of the experience. Understanding experience merely as a mental projection onto the world (the idealistic fallacy) or as a reflection of the world (the realistic fallacy) misses the necessity of the person-world relationship in the constituting of experience. Experience is a reality that results from the openness of human awareness to the world, and it cannot be reduced to either the sphere of the mental or the sphere of the physical.

The realm of experience consists of both particular occurrences and the meanings of which they are instances. The commonsense approach assumes that the real is only particulars-that is, that individual things make up the hard-core facts of reality. For example, things like this particular pencil I am holding are ultimately what make up reality. But this particular is also an instance of "pencilness," a category of meaning. Phenomenology recognizes the experiential reality of meanings as well as concrete particulars. A meaning remains constant in spite of factual variations in the experience of