Exploring Phenomenology

 One of the cultures of inquiry that I have struggled with the most has been phenomenology. Everything from the pronunciation of the word itself to grasping the underlying epistemology has been personally challenging. 

To wrap my head around this particular culture of inquiry, I started with its foundation. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), a German Philosopher, is credited as being the grandfather of phenomenology. There are earlier origins of this philosophy that can be traced further back to Kant and Hegel, but it was Husserl that really brought this culture of inquiry to the forefront after WWI. Essential to his philosophy was that he "rejected the belief that objects in the external world exist independently and that the information about objects is reliable. He argued that people can be certain about how things appear in, or present themselves to, their consciousness. To arrive at certainty, anything outside immediate experience must be ignored, and in this way the external world is reduced to the contents of personal consciousness. Realities are thus treated as pure 'phenomena' and the only absolute data from where to begin" (Groenewald, 2004)

To situate this philosophy as a research paradigm, my interpretation of Husserl's philosophy is that it is the experience itself that is the object of study.  Research questions are concerned with understanding "the experience of" a phenomena from the perspective of those who are experiencing the phenomena. 

References:

Groenewald, T. (April, 2004). A phenomenological research design illustrated. International journal of qualitative methods. 3(1).  Retrieved from https://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/3_1/pdf/groenewald.pdf

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