INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS (IPA)

Underpinning IPA is phenomenology: the study of a phenomenon. Phenomenology emanates from different schools of philosophy. Husserl (1936–1970) believed that rather than sanitising an experience and tying it up in a neat package, he believed that we should try to focus on every component of the experience. Descriptive phenomenology emanates from the Husserlian tradition and focuses on identifying the very centre or essence of a phenomenon using bracketing whereby we put to one side the taken-for-granted world. In other words, we bracket it. In so doing we can then concentrate on our perception of that world. He considered that our personal experience is ‘first-order.’ We should step outside our everyday life and reflect on that life: “Adopting a phenomenological attitude involves and requires a reflexive move, as we turn our gaze from…objects in the world, and direct it inward, towards our perception of those objects” (Smith et

al, 2009. p 12). As an influence on IPA, Husserl’s notion of the importance of reflexivity is

significant. In this approach “the analyst interrogates the description produced through a number of existential givens of the lifeworld e.g. selfhood, embodiment, temporality, spatiality” (Langdridge, 2007. p 55).

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Another phenomenological philosopher was Heidegger (1889–1970) who was a student of Husserl. Whereas Husserl was interested in individual psychological processes such as awareness and perception, Heidegger was more interested with the nature of Dasein, of ‘there-being’ or existence itself. He believed that as human beings we are in the world, thrown into the world, a world of people, objects, relationships and language and that our being in the world is always relative to someone or something else. In this milieu we make sense of things, we begin to interpret. In the early 1960s, Merleau-Ponty contended “all my knowledge of the world…is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world” (Smith et al, 2009. p 18) believing that our body is a means of communicating with the world and not merely an object in the world. Each of our experiences belongs individually to our own embodied experiences. Therefore, we can never fully engage with or share another’s experience. Merleau-Ponty’s influence on IPA is that whereas, I, as researcher, can never fully capture the lived experience of being a male general student nurse in the female world of nursing, such an experience cannot be discarded. Sartre (1905-1980) contended that we are always becoming, always developing the self, always continuing to uncover ourselves. Our perception of the world is, in his view, mostly shaped by others in that world or by the absence of certain other people or things in that world. IPA is about our encounters in the world, about our experiences and our reactions to those experiences in this world of others whether absent or present.

The main aim of phenomenology is a description of the “total structure of the lived experience, including the meaning that these lived experiences have for the individuals who participate in them” (Omery, 1983. p 50). Phenomenology aims to explore the shared meaning of a phenomenon: perceptions, thoughts and meanings. The ‘shared experience’ is important in phenomenology and I aimed to hear the experiences of a number of different people who shared a common experience, that is, they were all male general student nurses. They shared a point in time in that they all

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commenced the general nursing programme in 2005 and 2006 and undertook the internship from January to September 2009 and January to September 2010. The interaction of me as the

researcher with the participants was crucial and in terms of what I wanted to study, they cannot be isolated from each other. Interconnected with phenomenology, interpretation is key in IPA.

Hermeneutics is the theoretical underpinning to interpretation. Heidegger believed that we cannot bracket ourselves from the world and that our way of being, of existing, needs to be not only described but also interpreted Gadamer (1900–2002) significantly influenced the concept of hermeneutics in phenomenology. Like Heidegger, Gadamer considered we are thrown into the world and in that world we create meaning. He believed that the world is “where all possibilities are already experienced interpretations” (Langdridge, 2007. p 43). This interpretation is gained through language but not simply a language that tells us what another feels or thinks but a language that brings our very self into the story. Therefore, our understanding derives from our own prejudice and history that needs to be understood. Ricoeur (1913–2005) like Gadamer, considered the importance of us speaking from somewhere, a somewhere that is influenced by culture and history in our understanding of being in the world.

IPA was developed by Jonathan Smith, a UK psychologist, in the 1990s and it is “probably the most widely known approach to phenomenological psychology among psychologists in the UK today” (Langdridge, 2007. p 107). It is an approach with greater emphasis on interpretation than is

apparent in descriptive phenomenology. IPA has its focus on what a particular experience means to a person. The emphasis on what an experience means for a person is at the very core of what is a phenomenological study. The participant interprets the meaning of the experience on him. But the researcher, rather than merely affording a description, also engages in interpretation. Thus the term ‘double hermeneutic’ whereby the researcher interprets what the participants interpret from their lived-experience. IPA is a methodology that endeavors to understand how a person makes sense of

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a life experience. Firstly, it is phenomenological in that it considers the experience in its own terms and facilitates the participant to tell it as it is. Intrinsic to telling the story about an experience is the process of reflection whereby the participant can start to reflect on the experience and its meaning. Therefore, interpretation occurs whereby the participant draws meaning from the experience. Such interpretation is informed by hermeneutics, which is the theory of interpretation. But when the participant tells the researcher his interpretation of the experience, the researcher then needs to interpret what is said in order to get close to understanding the experience. Thus the concept of a double-hermeneutic in IPA: “the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of what is happening to them” (Smith et al, 2009. p 3). But the researcher can only have access to the experience second-hand through the participant’s account of that experience.

IPA aims to understand and interpret other’s lived-experience in the world. IPA involves both an understanding of a phenomenon and an interpretation of that phenomenon. I needed to try and understand the lived experience that is specific to the individual in the world. Through a process that needed to be dynamic and organic, I needed to obtain from the male general student nurses a subjective account of their experiences as they relate to the female-dominated world of nursing as opposed to an objective account. By the very nature of the research questions’ I aimed to access the personal and professional world of the study participants. IPA embraces the concept that “access depends on and is complicated by the researcher’s own conceptions…required in order to make sense of that other personal world through a process of interpretative activity” (Smith et al, 2009. pp 218-219). Central to IPA is affording the participant the space and time to think, to reflect, to speak and to be heard. There are many examples in the literature of where IPA has been used to understand feelings and emotions. In a study by Eatough, she explored “anger and anger-related aggression in the context of the lives of individual women” (Eatough et al, 2008. p 1767). Her research looked at women’s subjective experience of anger with the women contextualized world

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from which they make sense of what is going on. My own research was likewise about a homogenous group of people who were trying to make sense of their “subjective conscious experiences” (Eatough et al, 2008, p 1773) of being a man in a female world of nursing.