Bracketing and interviewing

I've gone back to Linda Finlay's writing to try to unravel my ideas about bracketing and what exactly phenomenological methods can tell us. Whereas Schutz seemed to be saying that ontological judgements about the nature and essence of of experiences can be bracketed and suspended leaving the researcher free to examine the lifeworld in an uncontaminated way, Finlay reminds you that there is no question of setting our preconceptions aside. Moreover, if we make ourselves more transparent as researchers we can begin to disentangle the fused horizons (using Gadamer's language) between our own experiences and those of our participants. The key to all of this seems to be that the researcher should be continually and reflexively aware of how s/he is responding to the data and the literature and their own 'knowledge' of the phenomenon.

Strategies to do this successfully must include writing up one's understanding so far of theoretical concepts that influence one's thinking, relating this to the phenomenon being studied, and being very cautious (and reflexive) about its influence in the data gathering process. I think my priority in doing the interviews is to be led by the accounts being offered up and only to probe the theoretical concepts I have been studying if they appear in the conversations anyway. These concepts are, however, broadly based, in the sense that I'm not making any particular assumptions about the kind of emotions people will express - only that I'm interested in getting people to talk about their 'emotion experience' in the life world of being a mentor. My interpretivist assumption is that emotions are not material but are constructed, or perhaps negotiated, by people during interactions with others. Emotion is mediated to a large extent by language and therefore may be constructed in the interviews as well as in other aspects of the lifeworld. Perhaps the key is to focus on probing devices rather than have a head full of concepts. I feel myself going round in circles.