A phenomenological framework

As the central aim of this sociocultural research is to explore the meanings of BSL users’

experiences, it has a naturally interpretivist nature, and is not based in the positivist domain of the hard sciences. Furthermore, its focus on conflict among BSL users as a workplace phenomenon places the interpretive study under the branch of phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994). As a wide, theoretical approach, phenomenology is the study of experience and how people experience events from a subjective or first-person point of view. Phenomenology is interested in the structures of conscious experience, along with intentionality - the way an experience is directed toward a certain object in the world). It has its roots in the theoretical disciplines and methods of

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philosophy and psychology. This approach has developed from the work of notable scholars, largely Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer who study methodologies for understanding the structure of human experience as a phenomenon. Husserl, originally influenced by philosophers such as Plato, Leibniz and Brentano, believed that that thoughts could be understood as “intentional” phenomena and that our understanding of them can be revealed by attention to consciousness in the individual. This established early phenomenology as “the science of the essentials of consciousness” (Polkinghorne, 1983: 41), and moved research more towards a science of philosophy, i.e. a post-positivist approach. At the centre of a phenomenological approach is how a “lived experience” (p. 42) is defined, and the notion that

“phenomenological reflection does not produce factual statements or generalizations derived from particular experiences. Instead, it produces descriptions of what is essential or invariant to such-and-such a kind of experience.” (p. 42). It is for this reason, for example, that current generations can shed different light on a later interpretation of an earlier written text period. The challenge to phenomenology, then, is to study the lived experiences of people in context, bringing experience and consciousness together in order to arrive at a core description of the phenomenon, as Creswell (2013) notes:

“Individuals develop subjective meanings of their experiences – meanings directed toward certain objects or things. These meanings are varied and multiple…They also focus on specific contexts in which people live and work, in order to understand the historical and cultural settings of the participants.”

(Creswell, 2013: 8)

3.2.2.1 Descriptivist phenomenology

Phenomenology is broadly divided into two types: descriptivist and interpretivist.

Descriptivist phenomenology developed as a result of Husserl's formulation of a method of studying human experience and is also referred to as ‘realistic’ or ‘transcendental’

phenomenology. This level of research is based on the analysis of the intentional

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structures of mental acts in relation to both real and ideal objects. Transcendental Phenomenology is a method that explores the way people experience a certain phenomenon and discovers the essential features of the experience and the essence of what we experience (Sloan and Bowe, 2014). Descriptivist perspectives aim to explore the objects of human experience. When describing the experiences of participants, descriptivist phenomenologists set aside their own perspectives and reduce any level of researcher influence on the findings (referred to as ‘bracketing’) in order to give a level view of whatever is being researched. Giorgi (1997) describes this descriptive framework as a three-phase phenomenological process of reduction, description and findings.

Bracketing in phenomenological research, then, involves setting aside any researcher’s assumptions before extracting any further understanding of the topic (Fischer, 2009).

3.2.2.2 Interpretivist phenomenology

The addition of an interpretivist methodology for studying human experience came with scholars such as Heidegger (Polkinghorne, 1983). Building on Husserl’s earlier descriptive approach to phenomenology, Heidegger established a method of interpreting the phenomena being studied, alongside providing a rich description.

Polkinghorne (1983: 204) notes that this method of studying human experience focusses largely on human existence, and the nature of being in the world, known as ‘dasein’. The aim is to comprehend a person’s own level of consciousness of their place in the world, or what the world is according to their human perspectives. One of the central differences between descriptive and interpretive accounts of experience lies in the extent to which a researcher feels that they can bracket themselves from the data analysis. From Heidegger's interpretivist perspective, it is believed that the observer cannot separate him/herself from the world around them and so cannot have the detached viewpoint Husserl insisted upon. The researcher and the participants’

existence is a factor in the research process and the interpretivist method takes this existential effect into account. The differing methodologies are described clearly by Sloan and Bowe:

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“To compare the two versions of phenomenology; Husserl’s descriptive or transcendental phenomenology was so called because the observer could transcend the phenomena and meanings being investigated to take a global view of the essences discovered; i.e. settling for generic descriptions of the essences and phenomena without moving to a ‘fine-grained’ view of the essences and phenomena under investigation. This meant that there was an objectivisation of the meanings of human experiences…Heidegger was of the view that the observer could not remove him or herself from the process of essence-identification, that he or she existed with the phenomena and the essences. He or she would be required to bear that in mind during the phenomenological process, hence the alternative description.”

(Sloane and Bowe, 2014: 6)

In Finlay’s (2009: 6) discussion of which type of phenomenological approach is suited to a particular study, six questions are posed that aid the researcher’s task of deciding on an appropriate methodology for answering the research questions:

“(1) How tightly or loosely should we define what counts as phenomenology? (2) Should we always aim to produce a general (normative) description of the phenomenon or is idiographic analysis a legitimate aim? (3) To what extent should interpretation be involved in our descriptions? (4) Should we set aside or bring to the foreground researcher subjectivity? (5) Should phenomenology be more science than art? (6) Is phenomenology a modernist or postmodernist project, or neither?”

Interpretivist theories of research developed also in the work of Gadamer (2004).

Gadamer’s theory of interpretation, a reader-response theory, focuses on the meaning of a text, which is dependent not only on the position of its author but also influenced by the position of the receiver of the text, and by the historical situation of the interpretation. According to Gadamer, human understanding of the present is an interpretation of the past, alongside the present-day ways of being. Such personal

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biases, Gadamer claims, come from the inability to detach ourselves from our past, and the need to interpret texts and actions based our own historical situation.

3.2.2.3 Critical hermeneutic phenomenology

The interpretivist method of phenomenology is often referred to as ‘hermeneutic’, that is, a method or theory of interpretation. Building on Heidegger’s understanding of interpretivist phenomenology, and largely expounded by Gadamer, hermeneutics involves attempting to interpret the world as the participants experience in order to understand the situational meaning of being human in the world. This approach enables a study to reflect on lived experiences, with interpretations drawn by the researcher.

According to Schleiermacher (1977) ‘hermeneutic sensitivity’ is a skill that every social researcher should have. Hermeneutic sensitivity comes from the researcher’s ability to be aware of their limitations, to understand the participants’ positioning as a way of establishing an equal relationship in the methodology.

The intention of this study of BSL users in the workplace is to understand the participants’ experiences and the causes of shared workplace experiences, and a phenomenological approach enables the research to accomplish this in the pilot and the extended studies. From a more specific perspective, then, an interpretive phenomenological approach is taken, and this is found in the theoretical foundation of hermeneutic phenomenology. According to Matua and Van Der Wal (2015) phenomenology has developed from mainly descriptive accounts of phenomena (with very little researcher influence) to the hermeneutic approach that permits the researcher to interpret the data (adding their own understanding of the phenomena to the descriptive account). Langdridge (2008) notes that there is some overlap between the descriptive and the interpretive levels of phenomenological research, as interpretive analysis must also seek to provide descriptions of the phenomena. For this study, the hermeneutic nature of the approach means that the data analysis and the findings are also subject to the researcher’s interpretation and, as such, alternative researchers may draw alternative conclusions from further analysis.

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In addition to the hermeneutic approach, this study also aims to identify areas of concern in relation to the presupposed divide between Deaf and hearing BSL users, hence a critical approach is also taken. Critical hermeneutics stresses the need to expose individuals to the meanings that they cannot see themselves (Thompson 1990).

Gadamer is credited with helping to extend philosophical hermeneutics to critical hermeneutics by stressing the importance of tradition, background and history in our ways of understanding (Annells, 1999; Byrne, 2001). Due to the conflict nature of the problem statements underlying this study, presented in section 1.1.2, a critical approach is necessary. It is only through this critical hermeneutic approach that the true meaning of how BSL users experience workplace conflict, the focus of research question one, and the causes of intergroup conflict, at the centre of the second research question, can be understood. According to Gadamer (2004), this critical approach involves prejudgement – the notion that one's preconceptions or prejudices (or horizons of meaning) are part of our linguistic experience and make understanding possible; and universality – the idea that the persons who express themselves and the persons who understand are connected by a common human consciousness, makes understanding possible.