Toward an adequate understanding of phenomenological and <scp>hermeneutic‐phenomenological</scp> nursing research

Abstract

One of the main issues in phenomenological studies is in the diverse approaches to data collection, especially with the use of semi-structured or structured interview questions and the creation by researchers of interview guides. Within this article, the authors attempt to respond to the challenge by addressing the variability in the philosophies of phenomenology and hermeneutics. By means of the fundamental philosophy of hermeneutics (interpretation) with attention to the meaning of the hermeneutic circle, they have attempted to present a way to integrate the interview guide and structured interview questions into phenomenological and phenomenological-hermeneutic studies. Over the last 50 years, the phenomenological movement and research approaches have developed and evolved within the scientific community of nursing in conjunction with other qualitative research methods, such as description, ethnography, ethnonursing, and grounded theory, to name a few (Beck, 2013, 2021; Corbin & Strauss, 2015; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018; Creswell & Poth, 2017; Giorgi, 2018; Leininger, 1985; Morse, 1994; Morse, 2017; Moustakas, 1994; Munhall, 1994; van Manen, 1990, 2014). Phenomenology, a descriptive philosophy of being of the world, focuses on the transcendental ego, intentionality, and the idea of absolute consciousness—the perceptual NOW (past, future, and present all at once) introduced by Husserl, a European philosopher, in the early 20th century. Descriptive phenomenology relates to the question of how is knowledge manifest in us (Brough, 1977; Husserl, 1931; Husserl, 1970a, 1970b). Phenomenology is the rigorous science of the meaning of the lived world of experience, that is, direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced without theories about causal explanation, and is as free as possible from unexamined presuppositions (Sokolowski, 2000). The phenomenological attitude as opposed to the natural attitude (taking things as they are) is called transcendental subjectivity or “the going beyond” such that in the process, transcendental reduction or the idea of leading away is a turn toward the ego as the agent of truth (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 50). When entering into the phenomenological attitude, philosophers/researchers suspend beliefs or bracket the things in the world (epoché), and focus on the thing or phenomenon of interest itself. “Any truth that we achieve is always surrounded by absence and hiddenness, by mystery [which can account for the spiritual], since the thing we know is always more than we can know, the reference is more than the sense” (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 176). Sokolowski (2000) remarked that, “We [phenomenologists] look at what people normally look through” (p. 50). Overall, the aim of descriptive phenomenology is to describe experience as it is lived with a focus on the prereflective, the prepredicative life of human existence as we are living it, seeking the location of meaning as it is immediately given and in original experience (Husserl, 1970a, 1970b; Sokolowski, 2000; van Manen, 1990, 2014). Husserl's ideas changed slightly over time; they were further advanced by other philosophers, each with a slightly different derivative, such as Heidegger (the ontological-the Dasein or being in the world; to be is to care), Stein (problem of empathy), Merleau-Ponty (the study of essences and lived body, lived space, lived time, lived human relations), Dilthey (we understand when life understands itself), Scheler (we are empathically able to experience other minds), Sartre (being and nothingness), Levinas (intuition of evidence/primacy of ethics), Arendt (political theory), Gadamer (the theory of understanding—all understanding is self-understanding), Ricoeur (hermeneutics/interpretation of the self; human language and action which display a sense of meaning as well as reference) (Luft & Overgaard, 2014), and van Manen (human life needs knowledge, reflection, and thought to make itself knowable t