Space and place

Yi-Fu Tuan is a human geographer and philosopher who caught my attention for the first time last summer when I picked up his 1997 book "Space and Place: the perspective of experience" in the Open University library. As I've been considering the experiences of my mentor research participants in terms of spaciality in the context of the lifeworld existentials, this seemed an important text for me to study, and it didn't disappoint.

The play between emotion and cognition have never been far from my mind, and in this book Tuan provides a comforting, very simple, model for understanding how these "ways of knowing" help us to make sense of the world. I like the way he said that "emotion tints all human experience, including the high flights of thought" (p8). And likewise, physical sensations such as pleasure pain, heat, or cold are qualified by thought.

The orientation of the human body can also be significant when thinking about the experience of space and how time comes into the picture. Tuan said "on a temporal plane frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past." (p40) . He goes on to talk about dignity being signified at the front and the human face commanding respect. In this one idea concerning the orientation of the human body, one can see the convergence of spatiality, temporality, corporeality and relationality. One really needs to take a pause for thought here at the interconnectedness of this human geography perspective with lifeworld studies. I have found so many useful ideas in the book. Another idea that resonates well for me in terms of understanding the place of spaciality in lived experience, is this "The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires and cramped when it frustrates them" (p65). I know that I've heard many tales of frustration in the process of data collection, so this provides another way of understanding and expressing feelings of frustration. There are other elements of space and place that I know I'll find useful in my thesis, including the experience of distance and intimate experiences of place.

In his Dear colleagues section of his personal website Tuan said recently 'No matter how miserable or happy I am, someone “out there” has not only experienced it but has written it down and published' (http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm). In many ways, this sums up why I'm doing my research - to be able to write down and publish the lived experience of being a mentor for student nurses so that others can read it and know that they're not alone in their experience (which is a mixture of happy and miserable and much more, of course). It's the same, too, in my teaching role. I've recently recorded an audio resource in which students share their experiences of writing essays, and my main aim was to make the everyday, usually private activities of student writing open to others.

Husserl and Heidegger

Something that's bugging me at the moment is the idea that the rhetoric mostly assumes that if you go with Husserl you follow one discrete path and if you go with Heidegger you follow a completely different path, and so on. However, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, but rather as giving two different sides of the story. So, in the context of my PhD looking at the lived experience of mentors, I could use a Husserlian perspective to say what mentoring students is (and isn't - I have some data where the participants have talked about other mentoring activities that are different) and to describe the lifeworld. Perhaps this is getting at the essence of the experience. Then, taking a Heideggerian approach, I can then get into what it means to be a mentor.

I'd always thought I would take a Heideggerian approach, or at least a hermeneutic or interpretive approach, which then brings me to Gadamer too. I've made heavy use of Max van Manen, who seems quite eclectic in how he draws on the different philosophers.

I've been reading Dan Zahavi's book "Husserl's phenomenology" which seems to be very clear in setting out how Husserl's thinking has progressed and where misrepresentations are sometimes made with regard to the transcendental nature of Husserl's phenomenology. The idea of transcendence comes in useful when talking about self and Other or objects, and moving from there to intersubjectivity. It is also useful for accounting for phenomena such as empathy. Surely when it comes to interpretive and hermeneutic phenomenology, transcendental intersubjectivity is part of the world we describe and interpret.

A way I sometimes use for myself to make sense of the different approaches is to say that with Husserl we are asking the question "how can I know the world" and with Heidegger it is more about "What is it like to exist or 'be' in the world ". My research question addresses the latter, but surely the path to finding this out is also to pay attention to the former.

I've used a number of different approaches to data collection - up to three interviews per participant, in which they lead on the description of their experiences mentoring, reflect on events they have written up (and/or drawn a picture of), guided by me, and reflect on an initial draft of themes. I've also applied a well-being measure in the form of a mood questionnaire for work, mentoring and the events.

I've done quite a bit of work mapping the data and ideas to the four lifeworld existentials temporality, spaciality, corporeality and relationality, and this does create a convenient way of thinking about the mentor lifeworld. But the whole notion of lifeworld seems to cross the boundaries between the different disciplines in phenomenology, so this also leaves me feeling slightly adrift when trying to nail my colours to the mast.

Reading about Husserl at the hairdresser

I've been trying to understand where Husserl is coming from, because until I've done that I'll find it difficult to explain how Heidegger and the existentialists differ. Even Husserl's transcendental philosophy is not as clear cut as I thought it was, having so far only really read research papers that skate in a fairly perfunctory way over the philosophical distinctions between Husserl and Heidegger.

Well, I'm working my way through Dan Zahavi's book "Husserl's Phenomenology" for which I have high hopes that it will reveal to me in plain English what so far has proved elusive: what are the ideas of Husserl's phenomenology based on, and why is bracketing as a technique applied in the epoche thought to be so fundamental to discovering the essence of an experience?

While I was at the hairdresser, I pulled out the book and resumed my place in the chapter covering Husserl's turn to transcendental philosophy. According to Zahavi, Husserl himself pointed out that "it is quite a puzzle how consciousness can be something absolute that constitutes all transcendence, including the entire psycho-physical world, and simultaneously as something that appears as a real part of the world" (p48) There is a distinction made between psychological reflection and transcendental reflection. The former is a kind of mundane self-consciousness in which one interprets an act as a psychical process occurring in the world, whereas the latter is not immediately available to us in our everyday thoughts. Transcendental reflection involves stripping a subjective awareness of its contingent interpretations. Basically, this is the process that is carried out in the epoche for the reduction to get to the essence of a phenomenon.

This still doesn't make complete sense to me, but there is much more to read yet.

Mapping intersubjectivity

I'm creating an "intersubjectivity map" at the moment. The eventual aim is to show changes over time in the mentor lifeworld - different people, groups of people or entities (e.g. organisations) and the different feelings, attitudes or values expressed by participants during the interviews and in the diaries.

It's all going into a table for each interview, with the headings

Focus (who are they talking about)

Narrative (what's the story - transcript extracts)

Past-present-future (saying which)

Feelings, attitudes, values (transcript extracts)

Relationality

Corporeality

Temporality

Spatiality (ticking these if they apply)

At the moment, in order to stay close to the data, I'm putting an edited down version of extracts from the interview transcripts into the table cells, although a short summary of what they said would make a neater table. It's a very long-winded process, but feels productive.

Using Rich Pictures

The idea of asking participants to create “rich pictures” developed from a general assumption that artwork can be a rich source of qualitative data.

Rich pictures are a technique used in technology that originated in Checkland’s 1981 Soft Systems Methodology as a way of identifying multiple viewpoints of a situation. They allow people to engage with problem solving or creative thinking “because our intuitive consciousness communicates more easily in impressions and symbols than in words” (Open University, 2005). In the systems context, a rich picture is used according to a well-defined framework of elements: pictorial symbols, keywords, cartoons, sketches, symbols, title. The conventions are that elements are chosen to represent a situation, using as many colours as are necessary, adding connections (e.g. with lines and arrows) and avoiding too much writing commentary. It would appear that the most benefit in creating rich pictures can be obtained with the support of a set of guidelines and in group situations (Open University, 2005). Rich pictures are becoming established in many educational contexts, where a university teaching environment seems ideal for teaching and supporting the technique. Campbell Williams and Dobson (1995) used rich pictures, along with encouraging exploration of novel metaphors, as an adjunct to learning journals with students pursuing a course of business computing and found it opened up new ways for students to express and represent themselves. As a tool for reflection, rich pictures have also been used with the purpose of promoting deep learning, which is said to be characterised by seeking meaning and establishing relationships between areas of knowledge (Horan, 2000; Vanasupaa et al., 2008).

The techniques of “rich picture” have evolved along a separate path from “artwork”. However, they share the fundamental aim of facilitating and encouraging potentially untapped wells of human experience by by-passing the everyday route of verbal expression that is shackled by a combination of vocabulary constraints, cultural backdrop and the natural limitations of self-awareness and self-expression. Rich pictures were appealing for the mentor study in the sense that they provided an opportunity for participants to acknowledge the different players and entities that they interacted with, and to focus on the relationships between them. One of the drawbacks of using the technique is that there was limited time to explain the rationale and guidelines for creating rich pictures, and the instructions had to be given amid a discussion of the event diary as a whole. Participants would be in a situation of having to take in a number of different instructions for completing their event diary, which they would be doing possibly in the course of a day’s work, and out of immediate contact with the researcher. The use of samples was identified as a quick way of passing on information about what a rich picture could look like and how one might be constructed. For this purpose, sample rich pictures were created by the researcher.




Introducing rich pictures to participants
Where an event is primarily constituted by people and interactions between them, the elements of pictorial symbols, keywords, cartoons, sketches and symbols can feel obscure and difficult to represent (drawing on personal experience of thinking and reading about rich pictures). Therefore, I set myself the challenge of creating a rich picture of a telephone conversation, where the only significant physical component was the telephone, but where there was an obvious emotional dimension to the event. I aimed to complete the picture in ten minutes and stopped after that time, so that I would feel able to present the task to participants as being manageable in that space of time. I decided not to use colour, due to the time constraints and because of the spontaneity of capturing the moment. I later created a second rich picture (also restricted to 10 minutes) of a more mundane situation, a meeting at work, which captured a completely different type of scenario (and incidentally revealed new insights for me into how people contribute and interact in meetings). I was subsequently able to take these two samples to the research interviews and use them as tools for introducing and explaining the rich picture.

In the interviews themselves, at the time I was explaining the event diary, I made sure that I had covered the event description and the feelings questionnaire thoroughly and checked that the participant had understood before moving onto the rich picture. It felt at the time that talking about pictures presented the danger of cognitive overload, given the other demands. I was also aware that participant responses to a request to draw tended to be laced with coyness or reticence, so I was keen to emphasise that the diary was quite acceptable without a picture, and that a picture was an optional, albeit desirable, extra. I played down the need for any particular skill in creating a rich picture, and for that reason approached the “rules” for rich pictures with a very light touch. The emphasis was on capturing the moment in whatever way they could.

Making the research accessible

Consideration needs to be given to how the researcher can do justice to the experience under study in order to communicate the findings to the appropriate audience. This communication should be at both intellectual and personal level, especially with phenomenology, where the described experience by necessity must connect with and speak to those who are part of the nurse-mentor lifeworld. As phenomenology historically has problems being accepted into mainstream psychology, for example, (Halling, S. 2002; Giorgi, A. 2008) it is important that the value of the phenomenological approach is made clear. However, in immersing oneself in the language and tradition of phenomenology, the research can easily become impenetrable to the ordinary person. By telling the story of the research, the process of discovery, readers can be taken along and helped through the rather dense concepts that have to be addressed when using phenomenology. In order to bring the reader into a close relationship with the subject matter, it is necessary also to include well-chosen examples and quotes. This has been part of the driving force of the data collection: obtaining a range of descriptive accounts that can illuminate the experience under study. One use of descriptions and examples is in the creation of anecdotes. Anecdotes (van Manen, M. 1997) appear to be an essential methodological device. Van Manen explains that the anecdote is a social product, a special kind of story that makes comprehensible abstract ideas that may be difficult to articulate. In my own research, I might, for example, look for an anecdote that can effectively illustrate the concept of frustration that participants frequently express either when faced with students don’t seem to grasp what nursing is about, or who don’t seem to take ownership of their learning, or other sources of frustration such as having to accept the constraints of limited time to teach and support. Or, an anecdote might illustrate the difference between the rewards of helping someone to learn and the rewards of getting the work done by the end of the shift. As a biographical incident, an anecdote can reveal something particular about a person’s character. For example, I might find I can use an anecdote derived from the transcripts to illustrate the participant’s profile on the ‘Trust’ trait.

Data collection issues

I've been conducting some interviews for my PhD. I'm hoping to interview each of my particiants three times, so that the first interview is very open and exploratory, and subsequent interviews are more reflective (hermeneutic), even with jointly constructed reflection. That feels so much more of a challenge, and is something I'm struggling to do well. I'm taking this approach from the work of van Manen, whose work has been influential in helping me to visualise how the data collection will work. I also keep returning to Cohen, Kahn and Steeves 'Hermeneutic Phenomenological Research: A Practical Guide for Nurse Resarchers', which offers very good practical advice for carrying out interviews to meet different research needs. They talk about a different questioning approach according to whether you are asking about retrospective experiences or prospective (or ongoing) experiences. I feel I am doing both in my study, which can be a source of confusion for me when justifying my interview techniques.

One thing that is clear is that any time I have tried to experiment with questioning that is at all derived from hunches, say, from the last thing I read (I'll just throw it in and see what happens), it has really killed the flow of the interview and, I think, done some damage to the researcher-participant relationship. I think this is to do with asking a question that the participant cannot answer. It is a good lesson to learn early on. I must keep on telling myself that the best interview data is that which is meaningful and important to the participant. The interpretation and sense-making will be all the richer when participants are free to talk about their experiences on their own terms.

Another thing that I have stumbled over is how to get real narrative and 'anecdote' if participants have a tendency to talk in more abstract ways: 'what I tend to do is this, and sometimes that happens, and it makes me feel....' These are descriptive accounts in terms of general behaviour, but it calls for drilling down for examples. Sometimes, I don't know when to stop asking for examples, and I did push too hard on one occasion. If people are talking energetically, it can be difficult to keep track mentally of what has been illustrated in passing, and calling for further illustration might make it look as though you haven't been listening. I sometimes think I'm trying too hard.

Between the first and second/third interview, I'm asking participants to keep an event diary - just three events that occur in relation to being a mentor. I'm asking for a description of the event and a score on well-being scale. I hope that this will maintain a focus on feelings that can be reflected on in a subsequent interview. I'm also trying out rich pictures as a way of facilitating emotional expression (awareness and articulation).