Human Science Research Page: Research as Writing

From the back cover:

Researching Lived Experience introduces a human science approach to research methodology in education and related professional fields such as counselling, nursing, psychology, health science. This methodology takes as its starting point the “everyday lived experience” of human beings as they find themselves in the world and as they give active shape to their world. Rather than rely on generalizations and theories in the traditional sense, the author offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation.

Researching Lived Experience offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself to human experience and how to construct textual questions which evoke a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material which forms the basis for textual reflections in the production of interpretive insights. The author also discusses the part played by language in human science research, and the importance of pursuing human science critically as an ongoing and radically reflective process. Special attention is paid to the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in human science research, and approaches are offered for structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied. Finally, van Manen argues that the choice of research method is itself an ethical commitment that shows how one stands in life.

From the new Preface to the 2nd (Canadian) edition:

PREFACE

Researchers in professional domains such as education, nursing, medicine, law, psychiatry, counselling and psychology increasingly are becoming aware of the importance of interpretive models that place human situatedness central and are based on the belief that we can best understand human beings from the experiential reality of their lifeworlds. How do we experience the lifeworld? On the one hand it is already there; on the other hand we take part in shaping and creating it. In other words, the world is given to us and actively constituted by us: reflecting on it phenomenologically, we may be presented with possibilities of individual and collective self-understanding and thoughtful praxis.

Although this second edition remains unchanged, this new preface allows me to make a few comments about questions that have been raised by readers of this text. Some questions are related to the difficulty that hermeneutic phenomenological method does not offer a procedural system; rather, its method requires an ability to be reflective, insightful, sensitive to language and constantly open to experience. Other questions are prompted by the interests of different research perspectives.

The field of research is susceptible to cycles. When this book was written, ethnography, biography, content analysis, feminist history, gender studies, action research, constructivism and critical theory were dominant in the field of qualitative research; and poststructuralism, psychoanalytic readings of contemporary culture, media studies, cultural studies, deconstructionism, and narrativity were about to become de rigueur amongst a broader contingent of qualitative researchers. As we turn the millenium, some of these approaches are now on the wane and others have been incorporated into existing methodologies.

Many of the sustaining contributions of these developments have their roots in the tradition of human science and attest to the vitality of concerns with reflective interpretation, experience sensitive understanding, the textualilty of meaning, and humanistic impulses. For example, deconstructionism has demonstrated the complexity of refractive relations between meaning and text; (auto)biography brings home the value of the uniqueness of personal experience and the priority of the self; narrative inquiry has shown the power of story to shape personal and collective history; feminism and cultural studies prove the importance of contextualizing interpretive meaning; and poststructuralism makes us more pointedly aware of the subjective and intersubjective roots of meaning. Thus, seemingly divergent inquiry models serve to make us aware of enduring and shared human science concerns.

Questions prompted by the influences of poststructuralism, gender studies, and so forth are legion. Some show that we need to radicalize more profoundly themes such as the subjectivity of understanding, the complexity of the lifeworld, the importance of otherness, the commitment to truly listen to the voices of the vulnerable, and that we need to guard against polemical moral self-rightousness. Themes that often emerge have to do with the uniqueness of experience, the assumptions of essentialism, the (in)commensurability of cultural and gender studies, and the relation between language and experience. I will touch briefly on each of these issues below.

The theme of uniqueness. This text offers a method that begins with a turn to the lifeworld and requires that we approach experience in a manner that is as unbiased as possible-we must dislodge and confront our unexamined assumptions. But what is this experience to which we turn? And how do I know that I experience things in the same way as does someone else? Is each of our experiences not unique, even though we may use the same words to describe those experiences? To be sure, there is no guarantee that our subjectively felt experiences are identical to those of other people. For example, if I experience pain or anxiety, then it seems as if this inner experience is so special and so undeniably mine that no other person could possibly understand and describe exactly what I have undergone. Adjectives fail to capture the way in which I experience this anxiety. Even for myself I can never fully give an account of what I experience in a particular moment or place. What belongs to my inner life seems quite beyond words. The most carefully crafted poem falls short. No one can quite feel what I feel. No one can quite see what and how I see, no matter how hard he or she may try. This means that in any particular situation we may not understand things as does the person next to us. And yet, within certain cultural limits and contexts we use the same words and the same language to describe our experiences. What, then, does language describe?

One answer is that language is simply inadequate in describing experience. Ultimately words miss the fullness and the uniqueness of our private worlds. Words fall short because language is essentially social. It is only through the collectivity of language that we can access experience, the experience of others as well as our own. And so the essentially unique and private qualities of inner experience will ultimately be beyond our linguistic reach. But while our spoken or written words may never coincide with the actual sensibility of our lived experiences, it may still be possible and worthwhile to try to emulate our prereflective life by means of lifeworld-sensitive texts. In this sense human science can practice the paradox of theorizing the unique.

Another answer is that language creates and describes an intersubjective lifeworld. By learning a language we learn to live in collective realms of meanings. This means that language has implications for our experiential possibilities. A person who is at home in several languages knows that one can say some things in one language that one cannot quite say in another language. Thus, we recognize differentiated possibilities of meaning that adhere to the socio-cultural context to which a given language belongs. Moreover, our lifeworlds are made up of different experiential regions that border each other, partially overlap, and are nested within each other. Wittgenstein tried to show that these different forms of life have their own circumscribed regions of meaning. Through phenomenological language we explore these experiential possibilities and we navigate lifeworlds and their hermeneutic horizons.

A third answer is that language lets us know what is experienceable. Through language we discover our inner experiences just as we can say that through experiences we discover the words to which they seem to belong. It is true as well that certain words or certain expressions may hold personal meanings for an individual that no one else can ever fully grasp. In these senses hermeneutic phenomenology employs a heuristic of discovery: we discover possibilities of being and becoming.

A fourth answer is that hermeneutic phenomenology employs modes of discourse that try to merge cognitive and non-cognitive, gnostic and pathic ways of knowing. By these terms we mean that not only do we understand things intellectually or conceptually, we also experience things in corporeal, relational, enactive, and situational modalities. Thus, hermeneutic phenomenological method tries to “explicate” meanings that in some sense are implicit in our actions. We know things through our bodies, through our relations with others, and through interaction with the things of our world.

Phenomenological research/writing succeeds when we can make these meanings recognizable.

(for more see the Preface of Researching Lived Experience (Canadian edition/Althouse Press)

A HUMAN SCIENCE APPROACH TO RESEARCH AND WRITING:
Action Sensitive Knowledge for a Reflective Pedagogy

• 4 I. Human Science
• 7 Why Do Human Science Research?
• 11 What Is A Phenomenological Human Science?
• 14 Human Science is Rational
• 21 Problems or Questions?
• 24 Description or Interpretation?
• 27 Research--Procedures, Techniques, and Methods
• 31 Methodical Structure of Human Science Research
• 37 II. Turning to the Nature of Lived Experience
• 37 The Nature of Lived Experience
• 41 Orienting to the Phenomenon
• 44 Formulating the Phenomenological Question
• 47 Explicating Assumptions and Pre-understandings
• 53III. Investigating Experience as We Live It
• 53 The Nature of Data (Datum: thing given or granted)
• 54 Using Personal Experience as a Starting Point
• 56 Tracing Etymological Sources
• 59 Searching Idiomatic Phrases
• 61 Obtaining Experiential Descriptions from Others
• 63 Protocol Writing (lived experience descriptions)
• 69 Interviewing (the personal life story)
• 71 Observing (the experiental anecdote)
• 73 Experiential Descriptions in Literature
• 74 Biography as a Resource for Experiential Material
• 78 Art as a Source of Lived Experience
• 78 Consulting Phenomenological Literature
• 80 IV. Phenomenological Reflection
• 80 Conducting Thematic Analysis
• 82 Situations
• 89 Seeking Meaning
• 91 What Is a Theme?
• 93 The Pedagogy of Theme
• 95 Uncovering Thematic Aspects
• 97 Isolating Thematic Statements
• 100 Composing Linguistic Transformations
• 101 Gleaning Thematic Descripts from Artistic Sources
• 103 Interpretation through Conversation
• 106 Collaborative Analysis:the Research Seminar/Group
• 106 Determining Essential Themes
• 108 V. Phenomenological Writing
• 108 Attending to the Speaking of Language
• 109 Silence--the Limits and Power of Language
• 113 Anecdote as a Methodological device
• 119 The Value of Anecdotal Narrative
• 120 Varying the Examples
• 123 Writing Mediates Reflection and Action
• 127 Writing is the Measure of Our Thoughtfulness
• 130 Writing Exercises the Ability to See
• 131 To Write is to Rewrite
• 134 VI Maintaining a Strong and Oriented Relation
• 134 The Relation Between Research/Writing and Pedagogy
• 141 On the Ineffability of Pedagogy
• 148 The Pedagogic Practice of Textuality
• 152 Human Science as Action Research
• 157 VII. Balancing the Research Context, Parts and Whole
• 157 The Research Proposal
• 158 Effects and Ethics of Human Science Research
• 159 Plan and Context of a Research Project
• 165 Organizing Writing
• 175 Glossary
• 190 References