The Descriptive Phenomenological Psychological Method

Transcription

1 jour nal of pheno menol ogical psych ology Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 brill.nl/jpp The Descriptive Phenomenological Psychological Method Amedeo Giorgi Saybrook University Abstract The author explains that his background was in experimental psychology but that he wanted to study the whole person and not fragmented psychological processes. He also desired a non-reductionistic method for studying humans. Fortunately he came across the work of Edmund Husserl and discovered in the latter s thought a way of researching humans that met the criteria he was seeking. Eventually he developed a phenomenological method for researching humans in a psychological way based upon the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This article briefly describes the method. Keywords phenomenology, human science, method, psychology, description Introduction My training as a psychologist was experimental, and more specifijically, psychophysical. Both of my dissertations were in the fijield of vision and I was considered to be an expert in the psychophysics of vision. Moreover, when I was a graduate student there were only two options: one became a clinician or a researcher. I chose to become a researcher and so I received rigorous training in natural scientifijic psychology. I knew natural science from the inside and I practiced it and taught it in the early years of my career. However, my reasons for choosing psychology as a fijield of study were that I wanted to understand the whole human person. I was motivated in part because I had read James s (1950) Principles. However, my graduate education rarely raised the question of how to study the whole person. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: / X632934

2 4 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 Human functions were separated from one another and were studied in isolated manners. Strong atomistic trends were popular because that was the strength of the natural scientifijic approach. After a few years of working in this fashion, I became restless and began searching for other ways of fulfijilling my vocation as a research psychologist. To make a long story short, I discovered that there was a Geisteswissenschaft tradition and I came across phenomenology. As I probed what the phenomenological philosophers were saying, especially Husserl, I began to see possibilities for developing a frame of reference for studying human experiential and behavioral phenomena that would be both rigorous and non-reductionistic. The spirit of science would be respected but it would be implemented with methods and concepts diffferent from the natural sciences because the subject matter human persons and relationships had characteristics diffferent from the object of the natural sciences things and processes. Consequently, in order to found another scientifijic approach that would satisfy my interests, I had to dialogue among the perspectives of psychology, phenomenology and science. However, since my training was in natural science and I wanted to implement a human science approach, I also frequently had to reject or modify the criteria of the natural sciences because as they were articulated they were not appropriate for the study of human persons.1 In any case, the result was the method that will be briefly described in this article and that is the subject of discussion in the subsequent articles. I think that the best way to introduce the method is to give a brief description of it and then to comment on each of the key words that describe the method. The researcher who wants to employ the descriptive phenomenological psychological method has to begin by assuming the correct attitude. First of all, she has to assume the attitude of the phenomenological reduction which means that she must resist from positing as existing whatever object or state of afffairs is present to her. The researcher still considers what is given to her but she treats it as something that is present to her consciousness and she refrains from saying that it actually is the way it presents itself to her. In addition, she refrains from bringing in non-given past knowledge to help account for whatever she is present to. She concentrates on the 1) A more detailed description of this process is described in Chapter Two of Giorgi (1985) and in Giorgi (2009).

3 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) given as a phenomenon and everything that is said about the phenomenon is based upon what is given. Since the analysis is intended to be a psychological one, she also assumes a psychological attitude toward the data. Finally, the researcher s adopted attitude must also include special sensitivity toward the phenomenon being investigated. A diffferent psychological sensitivity is required if one is studying guilt as opposed to learning. Thus, the attitude required for the analysis includes the adoption of the attitude of the phenomenological reduction, a psychological perspective and within that double perspective, special sensitivity to the phenomenon being researched. However, the reduction utilized in scientifijic research is not the transcendental phenomenological reduction that philosophers use. The transcendental reduction focuses on consciousness as such and not on human consciousness and it also considers the acts of human consciousness to be mere presences just as the objects to which the acts are directed are not existentially posited. Rather, what Husserl called the psychological phenomenological reduction is employed. With the latter reduction, only the objects of consciousness are reduced. The acts are considered to belong to actual human consciousnesses. Once the attitude described above is set, including the phenomenological reduction as described, the following steps are taken: (1) The researcher fijirst reads the whole description in order to get a sense of the whole. The phenomenological approach is holistic and so no further steps can be taken until the researcher has an understanding of what the data are like. (2) The researcher then goes back to the beginning of the description and begins to reread it. This time, every time she experiences a transition in meaning from within the aforementioned attitude, she makes a mark on the description. This is the process of constituting parts. Most descriptions are too long to be retained easily and so the constitution of parts helps in the analysis. These parts are called meaning units and they are arbitrary and carry no theoretical weight. They are correlated with the attitude of the researcher. It is assumed that diffferent researchers will have diffferent meaning units. (3) In the next step, the researcher transforms the data, still basically in the words of the subject, into expressions that are more directly revelatory of the psychological import of what the subject said. In other words the psychological value of what the subject said is made explicit for the phenomenon being studied. The use of the method of free imaginative

4 6 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 variation is critical for the completion of this step. Step three is the heart of the method. (4) The direct and psychologically more sensitive expressions are then reviewed and with the help of free imaginative variation an essential structure of the experience is written. (5) The essential structure is then used to help clarify and interpret the raw data of the research. (Examples of the application of this method can be found in Giorgi, 1985; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2008; and Giorgi, 2009.) Description A large part of phenomenology is descriptive but this does not rule out phases where interpretations also take place (Husserl, 1970, ). Phenomenology does not dictate to phenomena but rather it wants to understand how phenomena present themselves to consciousness and the elucidation of this process is a descriptive task. Description is the use of language to articulate the intentional objects of experience. The process of describing is similar to what takes place when one interprets but in the former case the analysis takes into account noetic (acts) factors that are usually not referred to by interpretive theorists working in the realm of the social sciences (but they could be). One reason that the act side of the actobject relation is not noted in interpretation is that in straightforward perception the act is lived through but not noticed. It takes an act of reflection to detect the meaning-conferring or interpretive act and once it is detected it can be described. Another diffference between description and interpretation is that in description there is an acknowledgement that there is a given that needs to be described precisely as it appears and nothing is to be added to it nor subtracted from it.2 Interpretation is a polyvalent word so the sense in which I am diffferentiating it from description has to be clarifijied. In this context what I mean by interpretation is the adoption of a non-given factor to help account for what is given in experience (e.g., a theoretical stance, an hypothesis, an assumption, etc.). For example, I may want to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream so I describe it with the use of psychoanalytic terms initially rather than fijirst providing a naïve description of 2) Given is placed in quotation marks because strictly speaking even the given is constituted by consciousness but it happens at a level much lower than that at which we are speaking.

5 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) the dream with a subsequent psychoanalytic interpretation. Again, in Husserl s view, the meaningful object requires a meaning-conferring act which is lived through but discovered only in reflection. Thus while experiencing provides interpretations regarding our world, they are lived, and it takes an act of reflection to describe the role of such acts. Let s take an example. A person was asked to describe a situation in which he learned something. He picked the time when he learned to drive a car. Part of his description is as follows: The car seemed like a giant boat. I had visions of it going out of control or of my crashing into another car. As I went on to the road and in with trafffijic I felt that my car was all over the road that I took up all four lanes. This certainly appears to be a description of the phenomenal world of a learner. Now we want to understand this moment of the experience, written from the perspective of the Lifeworld, in a psychologically more sensitive way. So we assume a phenomenological, psychological and learning sensitive attitude toward the data (more will be said about psychology below), and with the help of free imaginative variation, we would like to understand what is the essential psychological insight contained in this moment of the experience. Within a psychological perspective I can say with confijidence that the learner experienced the car to be larger than it actually was while at the same time being aware that his perception of it may have been exaggerated. The car seemed to take up more space than it should; it was as though it dominated the road. The learner was also worried about his ability to control the car adequately. He imagined an extreme negative possibility that was correlated with his insecurity about controlling the car as needed. Thus I would say that the psychological expression of this segment of the description would be: In the process of acquiring mastery of driving a car, S is aware of distorted perceptions of the vehicle and the environment while simultaneously being aware that the distortions are distortions. He is also aware that his control of the vehicle is tenuous as he nevertheless continues to perform adequately. The learner has given us a straightforward description of an experience. He is presenting us with objects bestowed with meanings. Even though the description is from another, a researcher can reflect on the presented meanings contained in the description and perceive their unity and come up with an understanding of the world of the other. This is a description of the world of the other, not an interpretation. The kind of interpretation that I am diffferentiating description from would be if I posited that the

6 8 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 learner was a high anxiety type of personality and that was why he was experiencing so many distortions. However, there is no evidence in the description that that was the case. That would be bringing in an interpretive assumption in order to help account for the data rather than merely describing it. In a larger sense, of course, the psychological analyses we perform are interpretations. They are psychological interpretations of life-world events that are broader than the psychological understandings we bring to them. However, these analyses are done by means of a descriptive method. The method is descriptive because the researcher posits that there is a specifijic expression that will satisfy the problem with which he is confronted (a good psychological description of the participant s lifeworld expression) but he does not yet know what it is. That is, the intentional object (the desired expression) is lacking; the act is empty or unfulfijilled. He or she begins the process of imaginative variation, examining various possible expressions, and then the researcher comes across a description that fijits precisely the intentional act he or she was seeking to fulfijill. The fulfijilling expression is then precisely described. Psychology Psychology is a discipline whose precise meaning is still not an historical achievement. There is a vague awareness concerning its subject matter but mostly it is defijined by theoretical perspectives that are strong in certain areas but less than adequate in covering the full range of phenomena with which psychology must deal. So what can it possibly mean for a phenomenological researcher to assume a psychological perspective? Must he choose a limited perspective or must he refrain from doing psychological work until the defijinition of the fijield is clarifijied? Neither of the above options is satisfactory. Instead, I project the possibility of an integrated, well-defijined psychology based upon the rather primitive notion that psychology has to do with subjectivity in all its forms and so I seek the presence of subjectively dominated moments that the individual expresses in the description. When we are rational or objective, subjectivity is efffaced and objects appear to us as they really are. When subjectivity dominates an interaction with the world, or is not sufffijiciently present, that is when psychological phenomena manifest themselves. In other words, psychological

7 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) phenomena are para-rational, para-objective or para-normal events. Thus, the learner in the brief example given above had to resist the exaggerated appearances of the car and the environment and stay grounded in the objective givens that were co-present with the exaggerations. The approach taken here may not be the fijinal understanding of psychology but it is hard to imagine subjectively based achievements being missing from the fijield. Phenomenology Phenomenology in the contemporary sense of the term is the philosophy initiated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. Basically, phenomenology is interested in the activities of consciousness and the objects that present themselves to consciousness. Husserl realized the essential relationality of consciousness, that is, consciousness is basically a medium between a person and the world. Husserl, based upon the teachings of his professor, Brentano, elaborated the notion of intentionality, which is a characteristic of many acts of consciousness, and it means that certain acts of consciousness are intrinsically directed towards objects and the objects may be transcendent to the acts or immanent to them. In either case, an object is correlated with an act of consciousness and it can be examined in relation to the act with which it is correlated. While Husserl started with the relationship between consciousness and world, as his thought developed he expanded his analyses to include the body as partaking of consciousness and so more generally, one could say that there is a relationship between embodied subjectivity and world. This is the theme that existentially leaning thinkers such as Heidegger (1962) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed in their own ways and so phenomenology became diversifijied. Other variations emerged with the writings of Scheler (1973), Sartre (1956) and Ricoeur (1976). However, the method being articulated in this article is largely based upon the work of Husserl, and to some extent, on the thought of Merleau-Ponty that is consistent with Husserl s program. Thus, the method is described as descriptive, not interpretive, and since it deals with human consciousness, it is a pretranscendental and not a transcendental method. It is important to emphasize again that Husserl s philosophical method is a transcendental one, which means that he is interested in the qualities of consciousness as such, not necessarily human consciousness. However,

8 10 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 psychologically, we are interested in specifijically human consciousness, and because of that limited interest the method being referred to in the following articles is a pretranscendental one. We are interested in how a human consciousness relates to a specifijically human world. Finally, we should say a few words about method and the notion of science. There is often a tension in psychology between the demands of science and the goals of practitioners. Usually, scientifijic research is conducted under well thought out conditions, with many variables controlled and the theme of the research well articulated. Practitioners often have to make spontaneous decisions based upon incomplete data which is usually complemented by past practical experience. The two situations are obviously not parallel and so the argument is often made by practitioners that the scientifijic model is not appropriate for psychologists whose main goal is praxis and the very idea of method is rejected. I would say that the argument has some validity if the natural science model is the one being challenged. However, if a human science model is adopted and a method based on its values is being sought, then it is possible for most of the tension between the two situations to disappear. One has to generalize the understanding of science so that both natural phenomena and human phenomena are included in its purview. Phenomenological philosophy makes this generalization possible. Briefly, for Husserl (1980, 37) science is an infijinity of systematically connected truths explorable in systematic unity and naturally truths that do not lie at hand but rather are discovered only as fruits of arduous investigation. Since science requires arduous investigations, systematic ways of investigating, or methods, are required. In other words, because secure knowledge requires grounded validations (Husserl, 1970, 64) and systematic coherence in the theoretical sense (Husserl, 1970, 62, italics in original) how the knowledge is obtained is equally important as what is gained, and again that implies methods. For Husserl (1970, 66), a method means a systematically regulated progress from one bit of knowledge to another. It should be obvious that the above characteristics of science are so general that they can be implemented in many ways, depending upon what the object of study is. Far too often, general characteristics of science are described on the basis of the existing natural sciences which developed in dialogue with objects of nature. However, when human phenomena are

9 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) the objects of science it can be argued that the characteristics of science are diffferent even though the same goals of science are being sought. Of course, this diffference depends upon one s philosophical anthropology. If one is a believer in naturalism, then human phenomena are no diffferent from the objects of nature and so the characteristics of science would remain the same. However, if one believes that human phenomena are not reducible to natural phenomena, the conduct of science would not be excluded. It would involve thinking about validated groundings, theoretical coherences and methods in diffferent ways. That is the opening that a phenomenological approach gives the human sciences. Throughout the above presentation I have used psychology as an example to show how a phenomenological approach can be used. That is because I am a psychologist and that was the discipline with which I worked out the development of the phenomenological psychological method. However, I want to make clear that the phenomenological method is generic enough to be applied to any human or social science sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, etc. The only diffference is that one assumes the attitude of the discipline within which one is working: pedagogical if it is pedagogy, sociological if sociology, etc., instead of a psychological attitude. One would then have a pedagogical or sociological phenomenological method. References Giorgi, A. (Ed.) (1985). Phenomenology and psychological research. Pittsburgh PA. Duquesne University Press. Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modifijied Husserlian approach. Pittsburgh PA. Duquesne University Press. Giorgi, A. & Giorgi, B. (2003). The descriptive phenomenological psychological method. In P. M. Camic, J. E. Rhodes and L. Yardley (Eds.) Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design. ( ). Washington D.C. American Psychological Association. Giorgi, A. & Giorgi, B. (2008). Phenomenology. In J. A. Smith (Ed.) Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. (26 52) 2nd. Edition. London. Sage Publications Inc. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. (Tr. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson) New York. Harper & Row, Publishers. (German original, 1927). Husserl, E. (1970). Logical investigations. (Tr. J. N. Findlay) New York. Humanities Press. (German original, 1900).

10 12 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 3 12 Husserl, E. (1980). Phenomenology and the foundations of the sciences. Book Three of Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. (Tr. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl) The Hague. Martinus Nijhofff Publishers (German original, 1971). James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology. New York. Henry Holt & Co. (Originally published, 1890). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. New York. Humanities Press. (French original, 1945). Ricoeur, P. (1976). Interpretation theory: Discourse and the surplus of meaning. Fort Worth, Texas. Texas Christian University Press. Sartre, J-P., (1956). Being and nothingness. New York. Philosophical Library. (French original, 1943). Scheler, M. (1973). Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of values. (Tr. M.S. Frings & R. L. Funk) Evanston IL. Northwestern University Press. (German original, ).