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).

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.

Concepts for interviewing

What's challenging me at the moment is pitching the interviews right. As I wait for official confirmation from the R&D departments of the organisations in which I am recruiting, I'm refining my interviewing technique by practising on colleagues and reflecting on what worked well and what didn't. I've tried a number of different ways of framing interview guides, topic guides and am moving towards the idea of a concept guide. Although the idea of phenomenological interviews is to allow the participant to lead the way through a conversation, it is probably also true that going into an interview situation naively could result in data that is less useful than if the researcher was able to steer the participant through the conversation in a way that would enrich the data. I'm thinking here of getting myself into a position where I am able to probe emotional states, emotional labour, identity talk, motivation, job satisfaction and so on. Without being conversant in aspects of these concepts that I suspect to be applicable to the mentor experience, I'm not sure whether I might miss opportunities to pick up on these in conversation.