Phenomenological Research Guidelines

by Dr. Janet Waters

2000; revised 2016

Research Method:
The goal of qualitative phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a
phenomenon. As this is a qualitative analysis of narrative data, methods to analyze its
data must be quite different from more traditional or quantitative methods of research.

Data collection:
Any way the participant can describe their lived phenomenal experience can be used to
gather data in a phenomenological study. You can use an interview to gather the
participants' descriptions of their experience, or the participants' written or oral selfreport, or even their aesthetic expressions (e.g. art, narratives, or poetry).
Try to be as non-directive as possible in your instructions. Unlike a survey or
questionnaire, in a phenomenological study you would ask participants to describe their
experience of, for example, "riding on a BC Ferry", without directing or suggesting their
description in any way. However, do encourage your participant to give a full description
of their experience, including their thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories their stream of consciousness - along with a description of the situation in which the
experience occurred. You may need to ask for clarification of details on the self-report or
interview. If so, your follow up questions should again ask for further description of the
detail, without suggesting what you are looking for.

Data analysis:
The first principle of analysis of phenomenological data is to use an emergent strategy, to
allow the method of analysis to follow the nature of the data itself. For example, artistic
depictions of experience would have to be approached differently from narratives or
interview data. In all cases, however, the focus is on a deep understanding of the meaning
of the description. To get at the essential meaning of the experience, a common approach
is to abstract out the themes. These are essential aspects "without which the experience
would not have been the same", discovered through a thoughtful engagement with the
description of the experience to understand its meaning. The meanings can be implicit,
and need to be made explicit with thematic analysis.
In a narrative, consider aspects such as the physical surroundings, the objects, the
characters or aspects of the characters (e.g. their relationship), the social interactions
between the different characters (or groups), the type of activity, the outcome, the
descriptive elements, the time reference, and the emotions, beliefs, attitudes, plans etc. If
the narrative would keep its essential meaning even when various of these aspects are

changed, then those aspects are not part of the essential theme. Only those elements that
can't be changed without losing the meaning of the narrative contribute to the theme.
For example, in a description of "the experience of riding on a BC Ferry", some essential
themes (without which the experience would not be the same) might include shared
themes of spectacular scenery, stunningly awful coffee, expensive ferry tolls, late ferries
and long waits, tasteless but expensive ferry food, & brief but moderately strong boredom
relieved by the spectacular scenery. You couldn't substitute an Ontario ferry in Great
Lakes scenery, or riding on a cruise ship through B.C. waters (with the food in cruise ship
buffets) or even a plane trip & still retain the essence or meaning of the lived experience
of "riding on a B.C. ferry". Once you have fully abstracted & presented the themes you
see as essential to this experience (as described by your respondents), you will be able to
present the unique experience in a way that is understandable (& recognizable to anyone
who has had the experience). It would also be clear how this experience would differ
from other, similar experiences (for example, in the mid 70's I once took a Greek public
ferry not intended for tourists. The experience included similar themes of spectacular
scenery, awful food & boredom, but the profound differences between the toilet facilities
of the B.C. & the Greek ferries of that era make the experience of riding each very
different. Differences with other similar experiences would therefore need to be made
clear in any themes analysis).
Translate those specific elements which do contribute essentially to the meaning into an
abstract form of the concept (e.g. translate "Spirit of British Columbia" into "a B.C.
ferry", unless it has to be that particular ferry to convey an essential meaning). Try to
remain congruent with the meaning of the participant's description (For example, a ferry
from Vancouver to Vancouver Island would be different from the ferry to Bowen Island
or the Sunshine Coast, especially in length of time, so you would have to make it clear if
the experience is one that would be had on any B.C. ferry, or only on the Sunshine Coast
one).
In abstracting the themes from an artistic product, a similar process of reflection would
be used to determine what the art means, & what elements of the art, or statements or
behaviour of the participant are particularly significant, qualitatively, always in terms of
their meaning. Similarly, the abstract category of which these concrete elements are
particular examples would then be determined. (For example, depictions of volcanoes
erupting, explosions, violent figures, weapons, the colour red, etc. might all be concrete
examples of the theme of anger), in consideration of the participant's meaning making.
In the theme analysis, meanings do rely on socio-cultural & linguistic or artistic context;
often you must in a sense go beyond the words to the context "given with" the narrative
or art. However, don't interpret excessively. If the meaning isn't clear, you shouldn't read
into the description of the experience beyond the evident meaning. Avoid, for example,
psychodynamic interpretations of symbolism (for example, that the ferry trip represents a
"transitional state of consciousness, a journey across the surface of the Unconscious"),
unless the participant has explicitly told you this is part of their meaning or understanding
of the experience.
Usually, there are two types of themes, collective themes that occur across the group of
participants, as in the BC Ferry example above, & individual themes that are unique to
one or a few individual participants. For example, individual themes of riding on the ferry

could include for some of your participants visits to the children's section, the gift shop,
or video games. Some individuals might enjoy ferry food, or find the trip to be like a
cruise. If so, note these individual differences.
As well as a theme analysis, you could also do a content analysis of the narrative or the
art. (See the guidelines for content analysis for further information).

Presentation of your results:

Although your results could be presented in other ways, it is also possible to use the
standard APA style lab report to present the results of your phenomenological study. As
usual, in the Introduction, briefly review past research & theory in your topic question
(e.g. summarize current research on your topic of travel experiences). Use APA
referencing style to cite your sources. Then in the Method section, present a general
description of your participants (number, mean ages, gender, occupation, etc.) in the
Participants section, any materials or equipment you may have used in the Materials
section (though usually that would only be the question you asked your participants, or
any art supplies you may have provided), & in the Procedure section, note that your
general research strategy was a qualitative or phenomenological study.
In the Results section of the report, present your findings, that is, the themes of the
descriptions of the participants' experience. Label & define your theme, with examples of
narratives that illustrate your theme. You may wish to directly quote from the narratives
for each theme to illustrate it.
In the Discussion section, relate to theories presented in the Introduction, or develop your
discussion from the themes you have found. As your goal in phenomenological research
is to describe the essential meaning of your participants' lived experience, in this section,
you can expand on the themes & relate them to similar experiences you have found
discussed or described by your sources. Of course, phenomenological data & your theme
analysis is subjective, so your ability to generalize is limited.
Janet Waters

Note In this Sept. 2005 revision of lecture notes I created several years ago, I have quoted
extensively from two reviews published in Vol 5, No. 2 of the online journal Gestalt!, one by
Arie Cohen and the other by myself. (This was an expedient for getting the revision done very
quickly the night before I needed to upload it.) The Phenomenology Links page at this site is up
do date and a gateway to a wealth of resources and information.

LECTURE ON PHENOMENOLOGY
Outline:
A. Overview and Philosophy of Phenomenology
B. Phenomenological Methods and How to Use Them
C. Examples of Phenomenological Research
D. Additional vocabulary
E. Experience, Communication, and Society

A. OVERVIEW AND PHILOSOPHY

GOAL OF PHENOMENOLOGY: To try to help us get at the world that exists prior to our
conceptualizing it. The "LIFE-WORLD" of experience as lived by them. We begin with the
"NAIVE," PRE-THEORETICAL, PRE-THEMATIZED, PRE-REFLECTED UPON world of the
subject.
Here are a few words of orientation from one of the reviews mentioned above:
For those not familiar with the phenomenological approach, the term refers to a particular group
of perspectives and methodologies for carrying out qualitative investigation. These perspectives
existed for some time in philosophy before psychological investigators developed a set of
methods to go with them. Amodeo Giorgi has termed these methods a "human science"
approach, in contrast with the dominantly behavioral and analytically cognitive "natural science"
approaches favored by academic psycholology. These two sets of attitudes and methods in regard
to psychological investigation, one oriented toward "predicting and controlling behavior," in
John B. Watson's words, and the other toward studying consciousness as it is experienced, in
oneself or in someone else, are quite different epistemologies.
Clinical epistemologies are another different matter yet, and themselves differ sharply from one
another. Dominant on the American scene is the analytic/diagnostic epistemology that represents
a mixture of Freud and the medical tradition, while another quite different approach is the
existential-phenomenological epistemology represented by such figures as Rollo May, James
Bugenthal, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and William Glasser. ...As we will see below, Gestalt
therapy and person-centered therapy fall into this latter class of existential-phenomenological
approaches. In short, these epistemologies present several fundamentally different ways of going
about the matter of comprehending human behavior and exprience.
DEFINITIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY:
(1) A description of the givens of immediate experience.
(2) An attempt to capture experience in process as lived, through descriptive analysis. It studies
how things appear to consciousness or are given in experience, and not how they are in
themselves, even if it is known that the given contains more than or is different from what is

presented. (For instance, assault victims may experience fear for months or years after the
assault, even when no apparent danger exists. What does this fear mean? Where does it come
from? How is it experienced? The answers bring us closer to the phenomenon that is lived.
(3) A method of knowing that "begins with the things themselves, that tries to find a 'first
opening' on the world free of our perceptions and interpretations, together with a methodology
for reducing the interference of our preconceptions.
(4) A method of learning about another person by listening to their descriptions of what their
subjective world is like for them, together with an attempt to understand this in their own terms
as fully as possible, free of our preconceptions and interferences.
In ordinary life, we "capture" and conceptualize everything, using our
preconceptions to turn everything into something other than it actually is,
one or two steps removed from direct unfiltered experience. Phenomenology
strives to clarify our receiving abilities and rediscover the actuality of what is.

THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION: Phenomenology is a way of unfolding the dimensions of

human experience&emdash;how we exist in, live in, our world. It examines:
a. What is distinct in each person's experience
b. What is common to the experience of groups of
people who have shared the same events or circumstances

Existence: from the greek word ekstere: means "to stand out toward." Existentialism focuses
on reflecting the deepest structure of human experience. Phenomenology developed as a method
for exploring that experience.
THE BASIC DATA: EXPERIENCES are the basic data with which the phenomenologist
works. The experiences of another can be known. Our job is to make them "visible" and true to
the subject's own ways of living them.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH: Says that we need to continually examine and
reexamine our biases and presuppositions. The attitude is, "I want to understand your world
through your eyes and your experiences so far as possible, and together we can probe your
experiences fully and understand them.
In this sharing of experiences, in this dialogue, is the "betweenness" we're looking at in
phenomenology. It is based on the fact that the experience of others is somehow accessible to us.
We can enter into it, into an intimate dialogue. A theme that runs through it is that of
interconnectedness.
THE POINT OF VIEW in phenomenology is always the experiencing person (subject, coinvestigator.)
BEHAVIOR AND EXPERIENCE: There has been historic controversy in psychology whether
the subject matter studied should be consciousness (the internal viewpoint) or behavior (the
external viewpoint.

Reacting against William James and the Structuralists, the behaviorists

viewed personal experience as so unreliable and variable that it wasn't even
worth including in psychology. Some others viewed this as throwing the baby
out with the bathwater.

Husserl, around the turn of the century, designed phenomenology as a kind

of philosophical foundation for all the scientists who had anything to say
about what it means to be human. It involved paying attention to our own
experience in such a way that you can describe it as fully and completely as
possible.

In phenomenology there is no rigid dichotomy. It sees both behavior and

consciousness as necessary to psychology. Both are seen as different aspects
of the same phenomenon--the world as lived by our subject. This is a very
different alternative to the modernist, positivist notion of science that most of
us grew up with, namely that there are two ways to deal with
anything&emdash;a subjective way (not worth much, in the positivist view),
and an objective way (real truth, in the positivist view.)

A DEEPER LOOK
In the review published together with Arie Cohen's, I tried to get into the world of the
phenomenologist as follows:
"Edmund Husserl, generally considered the founder of phenomenology, who argued that we can
study experience 'rigorously and systematically on the basis of how it appeared to
consciousness.' Husserl began with "the phenomenon itself." A later phenomenologist, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, spoke of a "first opening" on things, before any intervening screen of concepts
and ideas appears. Developing this ability to let go of our mental chatter, our conceptual
categories, and all else that is spinning around in the vortexes of our minds is the goal at which
Zen Buddhist training aimsa direct encounter with reality, and nothing more, such as:
"The frog jumps from the lily pad into the pond. Plop."
"But what does it mean?" someone asks.
"Don't you see? The frog jumped. The water splashed, making a sound. Ripples radiated outward
from the spot. The frog disappeared. Period."
". . . Husserl also included another element in his phenomenology. In his view, experience
includes both those concrete particulars of this situation here now, experienced as naievely as we
can experience them, and the categories of meaning to which its things and events belong. A Red
Delicious and a Fuji, for example, share the category of meaning that we might call "appleness."
(Shades of Plato's pure forms!) These categories of meaning are "structures" in consciousness
that are invariant and essential. Husserl used the term "essence," for them, setting the stage for
Jean-Paul Sartre's famous existential dictum that "existence precedes essence." Apparently
unknown to Husserl, Tibetan Buddhists for hundreds of years had been observing and recording
such operations of the mind in a rather sophisticated fashion. In Open Secrets, Walter Truett
Anderson (1979) has provided a marvelous summary of this work."
COMMUNCIATION AND EXPERIENCE
The possibility of describing was viewed by some as essentially identical to the process of
communicating. Describing something implies the faith that you can communicate it. (A
criticism of that view is that it leaves out the nonverbal dimensions of communication.)
This view that communication is implie in any act of expriencing or knowing something. This
led Husserl to the notion of "inter-subjectivity" as a fundamental component of human existence.
This can be seen as the other side of Ortega y Gassett's concept of "radical solitude."

The notion that ultimately there is nothing we can communicate but our own
experience, even if it is an experience of looking at a phenomenon through a
technological instrument and interpreting it, is a very different way of looking at
social reality from the modernist view.

The process of paying attention implies a process of communicating, and therefore there is a sort
of fundamental existential/social quality to everything we experience. Our experience is based on
a faith, as you will, in the possibility of communication. This was a fundamental influence on the
development of existential philosophy and psychology in Europe and Humanistic psychology in
the U.S.
As events unfolded, existentialism came to be used primarily as a
description for an attitude and orientation toward one's own personal
experience, (and also, secondarily, toward that of others.) Phenomenology
became primarily a set of methods and attitudes for the study of the
conscious experience of others. Phenomenology is more purely
epistemological and methodological, while existential philosophy and
psychology in their various incarnations have a spectrum of other
philosophical dimensions.
B. THE METHODS

PRACTICAL QUESTION: How do you apply the idea of phenomenology, of appreciating

things in an unbiased manner, in concrete situations?
THE RESEARCH APPROACH INCLUDES THESE PRINCIPLES:

Don't test hypotheses

Don't use a theoretical model to determine the question. "PRIMACY OF THE

LIFE-WORLD" means that our approach to understanding is "pre-theoretical."
(Yes, in a sense of course this is a contradiction because we are describing a
theory. But the theory includes methods to minimize its impact on The nature
of the data obtained.)

Try to come as close as you can to understanding the experiences being lived
by the participants as they do.

There is no claim that phenomenological results are predictive or replicable.

Several studies that probe the same phenomenon may discover similar
meanings, each describedfrom a unique perspective. These perspectives may
also lead to the discovery of new and different meanings.

DESCRIBE, DESCRIBE, DESCRIBE is a key part of the phenomenological orientation. The

people in question tell their own story, in their own terms. So "fidelity to the phenomenon as it is
lived" means apprehending and understanding it in the lived context of the person living through
the situation.

BRACKETING is suspending or setting aside our biases, everyday unerstandings, theories,

beliefs, habitual modes of thought, and judgments. Part of the larger process of epoche.
Since bias is an inevitable part of the study of human beings,
phenomenologists deal with it by putting it completely in the situation, by
attemping to become aware of theiir preconceptions and biases before
beginning the study and while the study is occurring, and then "bracketing"
or suspending them so as to be as open as possible to what the subject
wants to share.

EPOCHE: Learning to look at things in a way such that we see only what stands before our
eyes, only what we can describe and define.
FACTICITY: a belief in factual characteristics of real objects. In phenomenology, by bracketing
our facticity, we transfer our focus from assumed things "out there" to our experience.
"FIRST OPENING": (A direct experience of a person, object, or event, before any of our
mental screens of filters change it.)
"PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION" is (1) an attempt to suspend the observer's
viewpoint. (2) Hearing another person's reality and focusing on the central, dominant, or
recurring themes which represent the essential qualities or meanings of that person's experience.

FOUR APPROACHES TO PHENOMENOLOGY ARE:

INDIVIDUAL PHENOMENOLOGY: Researchers use their own actual and imatinary
experiences and others' factual and fictional written accounts and theories to develop a thematic
description of a phenomenon. This involves INTROSPECTION: a method of inner observation
which involves assuming an external viewpoint toward oneself, stating the facts about oneself as
others might if they could observe what the introspector observes.
EMPIRICAL PHENOMENOLOGY: the researcher examines descriptions written by the coresearcher, and thematizes after collecting the descriptions. In "Empirical and hermeneutic
approaches to phenomenological research in psychology," (2001), Serge Hein and Wendy Austin
write about the use of bracketing in empirical phenomenology:
"Any time a preconception or personal reaction surfaces, the researcher brackets it, sets it aside,
and tries to comprehend the person's experience as it is for that person. In this process of
"phenomenological reduction," the researcher tries to suspend his or her conceptions of any
world other than the subjective world of the person who is being studied. Afterward, the
researcher goes through and extracts major themes that are repeated again and again. Then the
researcher may or may not discuss these themes with the "co-researcher" for verification or
amplification. ("Co-researcher" is a term often used instead of "subject" in phenomenological
research.) Finally, the researchers look to see what common themes occur among the various
participants in the study, or whether there are clusters of one kind of theme in one group and
another kind of theme in another group."
Arie Cohen (2001) describes the steps in this approach as follows:
The steps of analysis involve in this approaches are:
1. Immersion in the data which requires reading the transcript several times.
2. The statements that are relevant to the phenomenon are identified and thematized.
3. These excerpts and themes are used to develop an exhaustive description of the participant
experience of the phenomenon. This description is often referred to as " situated structural

description" (SSD). If there are more than one participant, then additional SSDs are made for
each participant, and they are compared in order to identify shared themes and a synthetic
general structural description.
The characteristics of the empirical phenomenology are:
1. Emphasis on commonality that is present in the many diverse appearances of the phenomenon.
2. Reliance on the actual words of the participants
3. Explicitness about the design and the steps taken to obtain the findings.
4. These characteristics leads to verifiability and ability to be replicable.
5. Stressing more on rigor of the approach than on its creative aspects.
6. Acceptance that hermeneutic activity (interpretation) is intrinsic process of research
THEMATIZING is examining the central and subsidiary themes that recur in the report of the
co-researcher.

Part of the method is to try to uncover the LAYERS OF MEANING in

phenomenology.

Seemingly irrelevant contents in the interviews which were originally

overlooked may be later seen as important clues to themes and feelings that
were not initially perceived. This may include observed behaviors, and
tensions and gaps in the interview that Giorgi has pointed out can indicate
hidden meanings.

When the group of respondents is large enough, a researcher may pay

explicit attention to whether there are subgroups who cluster around certain
themes and others that cluster around others.

DIALOGICAL PHENOMENOLOGY linvolves interview of the co-researcher, and involving

the co-researcher in thematizing during the interview. The researcher may explicitly pay attention
to and refer to observations of the co-researcher's behavior as well as to the co-researcher's
descriptions of experience. Since my descrption of this process in the aforementioned review is
clearer than the previous one in this lecture, I insert it here:
A major phenomenological method which their article leaves out, dialogical phenomenology, is
of particular interest here for two reasons. One is that it is the easiest to incorporate into a class
or training program, and the other is that it is closer to clinical or counseling intervention than
either empirical or hermaneutical phenomenology. One person interviews the other while
bracketing his or her own personal reactions as fully as possible, and then after the interview,
goes back over the interview notes and involves the co-researcher in the thematizing process. I
have found that this usually works marvellously, and often has a profound effect on participants,
even when done as a class exercise. The minimim practical time is an hour, although longer is
better. The researcher interviews the co-researcher about some matter important to the latter,
while bracketing her own feelings and trains of personal association, for twenty minutes. Then
the researcher involves the co-researcher in the thematizing process, right there on the spot. After
that they reverse roles. (It can also be done as an outside-class task with no time pressure.) In
their subsequent writeup, each person describes the co-researcher's experiential world as it was
articulated, identifies the major themes, and describes how the process was for him or her,
including any difficulties encountered.

In the class assignment to carry out a dialogical (based on the word "dialogue") interview, the
interviewee or "co-researcher" chooses a subject of sufficient interest that he or she will be able
to talk about it for half an hour. The interviewer or "researcher" then listens to the co-researchers
comments and takes notes. Notes may be taken about verbal content and also about emotional
expression and body language that amplifies the verbal meaning. The central tool that the
researcher will use during the interview is bracketing. Some people can do this easily and others
really struggle with it. When something the co-researcher is saying evokes a reaction in you, "put
brackets around it and set it aside" for the time being, because your goal is to comprehend the coresearcher's ways of thinking and feeling as fully as possible, and your reactions are likely to get
in the way of that.
It is OK to ask questions, or to use Rogerian reflection of content or feeling, but do so sparingly
and don't be afraid of a minute or two of silent reflection. If your reaction validates something
the co-researcher is saying, a very brief, one-line self disclosure saying something like, "That
happened to me with my mother too," is OK, but no more than that. KEEP THE SPOTLIGHT
ON THE CO-RESEARCHER. Don't shift it to your reaction even when it's a validating one.
Then after the interview, you will go over the interview together with the co-researcher. You will
look for and identify themes in your notes, articulate them, and your co-researcher will say
either, "Yes, that's just right," or "Not exactly..." and will help you rephrase the theme to get it as
accurate as possible. There will probably be several principal themess that recur again and again
in the transcript. Follow the instructions in the assignment in preparing your writeup of the
interview.
HERMANEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
Cohen states, "Hermeneutic phenomenology is concerned with understanding texts. In this
approach the researcher aims to create rich and deep account of a phenomenon through intuition,
while focusing on uncovering rather than accuracy, and amplification with avoidance of prior
knowledge. In using this approach we accept the difficulty of bracketing. To overcome this
difficulty we acknowledge our implicit assumptions and attempt to make them explicit. In
addition, we accept the notion that there may be many possible perspectives on a phenomenon,
like when we turn a prism, one part becomes hidden and another part opens. Hermeneutic avoids
method for method' s sake and does not have a step by step method or analytic requirements. The
only guidelines are the recommendation for a dynamic interplay among six research activities:
commitment to an abiding concern, oriented stance toward the question, investigating the
experience as it is lived, describing the phenomenon through writing and rewriting, and
consideration of parts and whole."
My review added, "Heidegger's phenomenology took a hermaneutical turn. In a sense, he denied
the possibility of a naive "direct grasp" of the phenomena themselves, arguing that we
necessarily interpret everything in terms of our language and experience. And so, in trying to
understand another person, I need to look at my own preconceptions and be as explicit about
them as I can. I may move back and forth between someone's description of her experience and
my own, and refer to literature and what others have written about similar experiences. This
dialectical interplay of sets of experiences is what is called 'hermaneutical.'
A Hermaneutic approach can be added to the Individual Phenomenology method and can enrich
it.
C. EXAMPLES OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

1. THE ASTHMA STUDY

This study by Frank Siroky used empirical phenomenology, the analysis of interview
transcripts.
"We break it down into the particular meaning units.

Again and again the asthmatics used the words 'alone, apart, separate, suffocating, don't.'
We began to ask, "Is asthma the cause of all this? Or is there a style of life that is deeper? We
might spend several hours going over one interview.
"Comparing two transcripts, we find that one woman says, 'The asthma governs my life.' Another
person talks about her life, of which asthma is one dimension.
We begin to discern how people STRUCTURE THEIR EXPERIENCE --patterns that hang
together.
2. ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING
(Frank Siroky)"As a consultant, I began using the methods of traditional industrial psychology.
Make changes in the workingplace, and as a result, motivation and productivitgy will increase. It
was a nice model, paid well, and it didn't work.
In Scandanavia, I visited institutes that viewed making changes as a DIALOGUE. A dialogic
relationship among all the people in their workingplaces. QWL and industrial democracy. Critics
said, "You're preaching socialism." They replied, "No, we're preaching democracy."
Now, on the pages of every business magazine we find such models, written about as new ways
organizations can develop to become moree competitive, etc.
New models: How we can help people in the workingplace to change their own lives.
When I use phenomenology in consulting, I spend time walking around the plant talking to
people asking them what their experience of their working life is. Then we combine that wifrom
different levels and parts of the organization have a chance to share their experiences."
Focus groups: another kind of applied phenomenology. David Van Nuys has done a lot of these
for corporate clients.
3. CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION (Wertz, 1985)
(Read from separate notes.)
D. OTHER VOCABULARY

meaning: Lies in the relationship between a person and his or her world of
objects.

noema: the appearance of an object or or item as the perceiving subject

apprehends it.

noetic: harboring a meaning or meanings of some sort.

noesis: How beliefs are acquired; how it is that we are experiencing what we
are experiencing.

ontology: the study of our mode and process of being and existing in the
world

intentionality: consciousness actively reaches out toward the object in a

directed way.

world-design: the all-encompassing pattern of a person's mode of being in

the world.

verstehen (German for "to understand"). Through influence and empathy

people can understand each other. Experience is not just hidden inside the
person, but appears in the words, on our faces, and in our language.

Umwelt, mitwelt, and eigenwelt: Umwelt: biological or physical

surroundings or landscape. Mitwelt: the human environment; Eigenwelt: the
person himself or herself, including the body and inner psychological reality.

intersubjectivity: The process of several, or many people, coming to know

a common phenomenon, each through his or her subjective experience, and
relating their experiences to each other.

objectivism: positing the procedures of the natural sciences as THE

procedures for establishing objectivity and conducting science.

E. PHENOMENOLOGY AS A BASIS FOR SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

(From dialogue with Art Warmoth.) The notion is that social reality is always composed of
persons in society, as though that were a single word. Not as if persons are clumped together
in society, but rather it is a way of describing a fundamental structure of social reality. People are
always in some sense in a society, and are also always in a situation.
Closed and open attitudes. Closed: an approach of constant narrowing or zeroing in on a
phenomenon. Open: Consists of gaps as well as "filled" sections, and we remain open to notice
what happens and evolves. Social psychologist Milton Rokeach studied this in detail.
It's important to pay attention to our experience, and especially to others'
experience because in a sense that's the main source of data available to us.
Sometimes it's about all we've got.
In order to begin the study of any situation or social issue, it is fundamental to try to
understand the experience of the people who are caught in the situation you are
concerned with. This includes thoughts, feelings, sensations&emdash;the whole
thing. Studying people's behavior is important but it is not enough, because it
leaves out important dimensions of experience and meaning that lead to that
behavior.

This is very different from placing our primary emphasis on measuring objective
behavior. What's happening with reinforcers and discriminative stimuli do not tell us
all there is to know about a situation, or the person's history in regard to it.

Some examples of this from the family therapy literature. In some families, for
instance, there is no room for the expression of real emotion if it does not fit the
prescriptions of the family's dominant emotional theme or themes. If what's allowed
is only anger, assertiveness, or a deadpan front, the overt expression of tenderness
or affection may not be allowed. Paying attention only to the behavior can leave out
centrally important dimensions of people's inner experience. Similar dynamics occur
on the larger social stage. Or take another example&emdash;"crossing generation
boundaries." In this case the child is often made to feel as if he or she is responsible
for the adults' feelings and well being. Again, there is much more than observable
behavior going on. This is not to deny the importance of behavior, but to emphasize
that it is not the whole story.

We could make the interesting observation that the dynamics observed in

dysfunctional families are directly correlated with a set of dysfunctional
assumptions about the relative values of subjective and objective truths. We can
trace this back to the start of the moder period in the 17th and 18th century,
starting with Descartes' argument that mind and body are distinct and separate,
rather than interrelated.

The realms of subjective knowing and objectively measurable knowing are largely
different realms of reality, and the upshot of the development of this kind of dualism
ended up being a distinct preference for looking at objectively observable
behaviors, whether we are paying attention to organizational, political, or family
systems. This has, however, led to a number of significant dead ends, and now is
beginning to change.

In more traditional cultures, there tends to be a widely shared set of assumptions about the
meaning of various behaviors. This is less true in the pluralistic western industrial cultures of
America and Northern Europe which have a high degree of social and cultural mobility. With no
implication of relatively good or bad, right or wrong in this case, in traditional cultures there is
more of a shared history of common experience and shared meanings. A "community of
meanings" is taken for granted by most of the members of the society. But speaking about some
of the shared experiences that are involved may be forbidden, such as in cultures where women
are severely repressed.
In areas like physics and chemistry, objective science and the techbnology built on it is highly
appropriate in a broad variety of circumstances. But we have tended to apply this model also to
the social sciences where it fits some phenomena and situations and not others, and partly as a
result have ended up creating a lot of organizational systems that are pretty dysfunctional in
terms of their ability to meet human needs.
In some quarters there appear to be substantial restructurings going on, in which we realize that
listening to peoples' subjective experiences in regard to the conditions society is creating for
them is extremely important. Part of this involves looking at questions of value and values as a

central issue for investigation, instead of dominant social groups blindly and automatically
assuming that their own values will produce good lives and experiences for everyone. In this
view, the right way to do psychology is to look at what's going on in people's experience as well
as how they behave, and before you run out trying to change anything, and especially social
policies that everyone has to live with, you make sure you understand as fully as possible the
history of events that led people to their present behavior, positions, and experiences of the
world. You find out what they're thinking and feeling.

In a polarized situation where people are in conflict, there are two general choices:
Decide that your side is in fact correct and retreat to a position of might
makes right, that war or violence of some sort is a legitimate way of resolving
the issue. This is basically taking a win-lose position--that "my side has gotta
win."

An alternative is to assume that we're dealing with an incomplete

understanding of the situation, and find out how it looks to those on
the other side, what their experience of the situation is. Notice the
profound difference between "We have an incomplete understanding of the
situation," and "We have a correct understanding of the situation." There is
the ever-so-common tendency (to which I still fall victim sometimes myself)
to hear one person tell about a situation, and then move toward action
without taking time to listen to the other side or sides. Phenomenology
reminds us to do our best to understand the other person's experience,
rather than jumping to a conclusion based on incomplete information.