Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a
qualitative form of psychology research. IPA has an
idiographic focus, which means that instead of producing
generalization
A generalization is a form of abstraction whereby common properties of specific instances are formulated as general concepts or claims. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteri ...
findings, it aims to offer insights into how a given person, in a given context,
makes sense of a given
situation. Usually, these situations are of personal significance; examples might include a major life event, or the development of an important relationship. IPA has its theoretical origins in
phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
and
hermeneutics
Hermeneutics () is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretative principles or methods used when immediate c ...
, and many of its key ideas are inspired by the work of
Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
,
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
, and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
. IPA's tendency to combine psychological, interpretative, and idiographic elements is what distinguishes it from other approaches to qualitative,
phenomenological psychology.
Taking part
Sometimes IPA studies involve a close examination of the experiences and
meaning-making
In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.
The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especia ...
activities of only one participant. Most frequently they draw on the accounts of a small number of people (6 has been suggested as a good number, although anywhere between 3 and 15 participants for a group study can be acceptable). In either case, participants are invited to take part precisely because they can offer the researcher some meaningful insight into the topic of the study; this is called purposive sampling
.e. it is not randomised Usually, participants in an IPA study are expected to have certain experiences in common with one another: the small-scale nature of a basic IPA study shows how something is understood in a given context, and from a shared perspective, a method sometimes called homogeneous sampling. More advanced IPA study designs may draw together samples that offer multiple perspectives on a shared experience (husbands and wives, for example, or psychiatrists and patients); or they may collect accounts over a period of time, to develop a longitudinal analysis.
Data collection
In IPA, researchers gather qualitative data from research participants using techniques such as
interview
An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers.Merriam Webster DictionaryInterview Dictionary definition, Retrieved February 16, 2016 In common parlance, the word "interview" ...
, diaries, or
focus group
A focus group is a group interview involving a small number of demographically similar people or participants who have other common traits/experiences. Their reactions to specific researcher/evaluator-posed questions are studied. Focus groups are ...
. Typically, these are approached from a position of flexible and open-ended inquiry, and the interviewer adopts a stance that is curious and facilitative (rather than, say, challenging and interrogative). IPA usually requires personally salient accounts of some richness and depth, and it requires that these accounts be captured in a way that permits the researcher to work with a detailed verbatim transcript.
Data analysis
Data collection does not set out to test hypotheses, and this stance is maintained in data analysis. The analyst reflects upon their own preconceptions about the data, and attempts to suspend these in order to focus on grasping the experiential world of the research participant. Transcripts are coded in considerable detail, with the focus shifting back and forth from the key claims of the participant, to the researcher's interpretation of the meaning of those claims. IPA's hermeneutic stance is one of inquiry and meaning-making, and so the analyst attempts to make sense of the participant's attempts to make sense of their own experiences, thus creating a
double hermeneutic The double hermeneutic is the theory, expounded by sociologist Anthony Giddens, that everyday "lay" concepts and those from the social sciences have a two-way relationship. A common example is the idea of social class, a social-scientific category t ...
. One might use IPA if one had a research question which aimed to understand what a given experience was like (phenomenology) and how someone made sense of it (interpretation).
Analysis in IPA is said to be 'bottom-up.' This means that the researcher generates codes'' from'' the data, rather than using a pre-existing theory to identify codes that might be applied ''to'' the data. IPA studies do not test theories, then, but they are often relevant to the development of existing theories. One might use the findings of a study on the meaning of sexual intimacy to gay men in close relationships, for example, to re-examine the adequacy of theories which attempt to predict and explain safe sex practices.
[Flowers, P., Smith, J.A., Sheeran, P. and Beail, N. (1997). Health and romance: understanding unprotected sex in relationships between gay men. British Journal of Health Psychology, 2, 73-86.] IPA encourages an open-ended dialogue between the researcher and the participants and may, therefore, lead us to see things in a new light.
After transcribing the data, the researcher works closely and intensively with the text, annotating it closely ('coding') for insights into the participants' experience and perspective on their world. As the analysis develops, the researcher catalogues the emerging codes, and subsequently begins to look for patterns in the codes. These patterns are called 'themes'. Themes are recurring patterns of meaning (ideas, thoughts, feelings) throughout the text. Themes are likely to identify both something that ''matters'' to the participants (i.e. an object of concern, topic of some import) and also convey something of the'' meaning'' of that thing, for the participants. E.g. in a study of the experiences of young people learning to drive, we might find themes like 'Driving as a rite of passage' (where one key psychosocial understanding of the meaning of learning to drive, is that it marks a cultural threshold between adolescence and adulthood).
Some themes will eventually be grouped under much broader themes called 'superordinate themes'. For example, 'Feeling anxious and overwhelmed during the first driving lessons' might be a superordinate category that captures a variety of patterns in participants' embodied, emotional and cognitive experiences of the early phases of learning to drive, where we might expect to find sub-themes relating to, say, 'Feeling nervous,' 'Worrying about losing control,' and 'Struggling to manage the complexities of the task.' The final set of themes are typically summarised and placed into a table or similar structure where evidence from the text is given to back up the themes produced by a quote from the text.
The analysis
In IPA, a good analysis is one that balances phenomenological description with insightful interpretation and anchors these interpretations in the participants' accounts. It is also likely to maintain an idiographic focus (so that particular variation are not lost), and to keep a close focus on meaning (rather than say, causal relations). A degree of transparency (contextual detail about the sample, a clear account of the process, adequate commentary on the data, key points illustrated by verbatim quotes) is also crucial to estimating the plausibility and transferability of an IPA study. Engagement with credibility issues (such as cross-validation,
cooperative inquiry, independent audit, or triangulation) is also likely to increase the reader's confidence.
Applications of IPA
Due to an increased interest in the constructed nature of certain aspects of illness (how we perceive bodily and mental symptoms), IPA has been particularly recommended for its uses in the field of health psychology.
[Smith, J.A. (1996)"Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology". Psychology & Health, 11(2), 261-271] However, while this subject-centered approach to experiencing illness is congruent with an increase in patient-centered research, it has also been suggested that IPA may have been historically most employed in health psychology due to the fact that many of its initial supporters operated careers in this field.
[Brocki J.J.M, Wearden A.J. (2006). “A critical evaluation of the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in health psychology”. Psychology and Health, 21(1), 87-108]
With a general increase in the number of IPA studies published over the last decade
[Smith, J.A. (2011). "Evaluating the contribution of interpretative phenomenological analysis". ]Health Psychology Review
''Health Psychology Review'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed medical review journal covering health psychology. It was established in 2007 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the European Health Psychology Society, of which it is the of ...
, 5(1), 9-27 has come to the employment of this method in a variety of fields including business (organisational psychology ), sexuality, and key life transitions such as transitioning into motherhood
[Smith, J.A. (1999). "Identity development during the transition to motherhood: An interpretative phenomenological analysis". Journal of reproductive and infant psychology, 17(3), 281-299] and living with cancer as a chronic illness
[McGeechan, G.J., McPherson, K.E., Roberts, K, (2018). "An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experience of living with colorectal cancer as a chronic illness". Journal of clinical nursing, 27(15-16), 3148-3156]
See also
*
Action research
Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in the social sciences. It seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical refle ...
*
Emic and etic
In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic () and etic () refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values ...
*
Ethnography
Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...
*
Existential phenomenology
Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condi ...
*
Hermeneutic phenomenology
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, ''phainómenon'' "that which appears" and λόγος, ''lógos'' "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded i ...
*
Jonathan Smith (psychologist)
Jonathan Alan Smith is a psychologist currently based at Birkbeck, University of London. He has been very prominent in promoting qualitative research within social psychology and health psychology. In particular, he has developed and promoted a par ...
*
Participatory action research
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to action research emphasizing participation and action by members of communities affected by that research. It seeks to understand the world by trying to change it, collaboratively and following ...
*
Phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
*
Triangulation (social science)
In the social sciences, triangulation refers to the application and combination of several research methods in the study of the same phenomenon. By combining multiple observers, theories, methods, and empirical materials, researchers hope to overc ...
Notes
References
* Brocki J.J.M, Wearden A.J. (2006). “A critical evaluation of the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in health psychology”. Psychology and Health, 21(1), 87-108
* Heron, J. (1996). ''Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the human condition.'' London: Sage.
McGeechan, G.J., McPherson, K.E., Roberts, K, (2018). "An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experience of living with colorectal cancer as a chronic illness". Journal of clinical nursing, 27(15-16), 3148-3156 Flowers, P. & Larkin, M. (2005)
Exploring lived experience The Psychologist 18,'' 20-23.
* Shaw, R. L. (2001). Why use interpretative phenomenological analysis in Health Psychology? ''Health Psychology Update, 10,'' 48-52.
* Smith, J.A. (1996) "Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology". Psychology & Health, 11(2), 261-271
* Smith, J., Jarman, M. & Osborne, M. (1999). Doing interpretative phenomenological analysis. In M. Murray & K. Chamberlain (Eds.), ''Qualitative Health Psychology.'' London: Sage.
* Smith, J.A. (1999). "Identity development during the transition to motherhood: An interpretative phenomenological analysis". Journal of reproductive and infant psychology, 17(3), 281-299
* Smith, J.A. & Osborn, M. (2003) Interpretative phenomenological analysis. In J.A. Smith (Ed.), ''Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods.'' London: Sage.
* Smith, J.A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory Method and Research. London: Sage.
* Smith, J.A. (2011). "Evaluating the contribution of interpretative phenomenological analysis".
Health Psychology Review
''Health Psychology Review'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed medical review journal covering health psychology. It was established in 2007 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the European Health Psychology Society, of which it is the of ...
, 5(1), 9-27
External links
IPA website at Birkbeck, University of London
{{DEFAULTSORT:Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Phenomenological methodology
Qualitative research