Phenomenography Phenomenography is a qualitative research methodology, within the interpretivist paradigm, that investigates the qualitatively different ways in which people experience something or think about something. It is an approach to educational research which appeared in publications in the early 1980s. It initially emerged from an empirical rather than a theoretical or philosophical basis. Phenomenography’s ontological assumptions are subjectivist: the world exists, and different people construe it in different ways and from a non-dualist viewpoint (viz., there is only one world, one that is ours, and one that people experience in many different ways). Phenomenography’s research object has the character of knowledge; therefore its ontological assumptions are also epistemological assumptions. Its emphasis is on description. Its data-collection methods typically include close interviews with a small, purposive sample of subjects, with the researcher “working toward an articulation of the interviewee’s reflections on experience that is as complete as possible”. Description is important, because our knowledge of the world is a matter of meaning and of the qualitative similarities and differences in meaning as it is experienced by different people. Emphasis on description The emphasis on description follows from an assumption that conceptions are formed from both the results of human action and from the conditions for it. Clarification depends on the meaning of the conceptions themselves. The object of phenomenographic study is not the phenomenon per se, but the relationship between the actors and the phenomenon. Distinguished from phenomenology Phenomenography is not phenomenology. Both phenomenography and phenomenology have human experience as their object; however, phenomenology is a philosophical method in which the philosopher is engaged in investigating his own experiences. Phenomenographers, on the other hand, adopt an empirical orientation, and they investigate the experiences of others. The focus of interpretive phenomenology is on the essence of the phenomenon, while the focus of phenomenography is on the essence of the experiences, and the subsequent perceptions, of the phenomenon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenography
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 11:50:59 +0000
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