IPA is a relatively recently developed and rapidly growing approach to qualitative inquiry that is committed to examining and exploring in detail how people make sense of their experiences in their personal and social world and the meanings they attach to those experiences to interpret and make sense of them (Smith & Osborn, 2008; Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009; Smith, 2010;
Braun and Clarke, 2013). However, IPA also acknowledges that access to
experience is reliant on what participants tell researchers about their
experiences, so researchers are unable to access a participant’s world directly and needs to interpret the participant’s account in order to understand their experience (Smith et al., 2009), meaning it involves a dual interpretative process. This research seeks to understand participants’ experiences of how their resilience is supported in school; therefore, an IPA approach is
appropriate.
IPA is shaped and underpinned by three main philosophies of knowledge:
phenomenology, hermeneutics and idiography (Smith et al., 2009). These principles will now be explained in terms of their origin and assumptions.
3.5.1 Phenomenology
According to Willig (2013) phenomenology is concerned with how human
beings experience the world in specific contexts and at specific times and offers us a rich source of ideas about how to explore and understand lived experience.
Phenomenology is an approach that was developed by Edmund Husserl who was interested in the relationship between a given phenomenon and the person experiencing and observing it. He was interested in finding out how an
individual may come to accurately know their own experience of any given phenomenon and argued that by focusing on the essential qualities of that experience and ‘going back to the things themselves’ (Smith et al., 2009, p12) these qualities may then shed light on a certain experience for others too.
Husserl alsoacknowledges that there are many obstacles that can get in the way of us knowing our experiences and emphasises the importance of setting aside the assumptions that we have about the world around us. By doing so, Husserl believes that an individual can see the object of consciousness from different perspectives which then enables the individual to see the essence of that experience or phenomena (Smith et al., 2009).
Other philosophers, Heidegger, (1962) Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Sartre (1956/1943), are individuals in phenomenological philosophy that built on developing Husserl’s work in contributing to a notion that people’s experiences and perceptions are embodied, entrenched and immersed in the world in a particular social, historical and cultural context (Smith et al., 2009; Frost, 2011).
They moved the idea of phenomenology from a descriptive transcendental
philosophy that sees us as beings that can transcend our own experiences of the world to see it as another person might towards a practical and interpretive worldly position that focuses on our involvement in the lived world, which is personal to each of us but also related to our relationship with the world
(Langdridge, 2007). Thus, it is assumed that our understanding of experience is unique to the individual’s relationship with the world and in IPA research, our efforts to understand other people’s relationships to the world are interpretive and focus on their attempts to make meaning out of the things that happen to them (Smith et al., 2009). This thesis examines the experiences of NG staff in how school supports their resilience and aims to explore and describe how they make sense of their resilience and support in school.
3.5.2 Hermeneutics
The second theoretical underpinning of IPA comes from hermeneutics, which is the theory of interpretation. Hermeneutics informs the interpretative aspect of IPA and looks at whether it is feasible to uncover an author’s original meaning or intentions and the relationship between a text’s historical origin and the interpretation of it in the present day (Smith et al., 2009). Hermeneutics was developed by three key philosophers; Schleiermacher (1988), Heidegger (1962) and Gadamer (1990/1960).
Schleiermacher (1998) suggested that there is something unique about the intentions and techniques of an author, which in turn will impress a certain meaning upon the script they produce. This meaning is open to interpretation by the reader but must also be held within the wider context within which they were produced. For Schleiermacher, the aim of interpretation is to understand the writer as well as the script (Smith et al., 2009).
Despite phenomenology and hermeneutics being developed as separate philosophical movements, Heidegger (1962) offered hermeneutics as a
prerequisite to phenomenology. The argument behind this is that interpretation is an essential part of phenomenology because phenomenology is looking for a meaning which might be hidden by the object’s way of appearing to us.
Heidegger (1962) believed that every interpretation had previously been contextualised in a previous experience within a certain context because
Heidegger supposed that human existence is related to the world as we exist within a particular historical, social and cultural context. Therefore, our
understanding of objects or events in the world are always mediated and limited by existing knowledge (Frost, 2011). This is referred to as ‘fore-conception’ and acknowledges that an individual (or in this instance, a researcher) brings prior experiences, preconceptions and assumptions to their encounters. Heidegger suggests that while fore-conception is always there and can present itself as an obstacle in interpretation, priority should be given to the new object and not one’s preconceptions. Therefore, interpretation can be seen as an interplay between the object of interpretation and the interpreter (Smith et al., 2009).
With regard to interpretation, Gadamer (1990/1960) emphasised the importance of history and the effect that culture and tradition has on the process of
interpretation. Gadamer also explored Heidegger’s concept of fore-conception and considered that individuals may only know their preconceptions once interpretation is underway. While our preconceptions are present, there is a dialogue that exists between what the text brings to us and what we bring to the text (Smith et al., 2009). Gadamer also agrees with Schleiermacher that an author does not automatically have interpretative authority over the meaning of a text but argues that it is important that we understand the meaning of what is being said before understanding what the author means.
As noted before, IPA assumes that in research participants are interpreting the experiences they had, and the researcher is interpreting the data they have collected based on the interpretations offered to them by the participants. This is known as the double hermeneutic (Braun & Clarke, 2013). Due to the
researcher’s involvement within the research, it is not possible to gain the direct access to the participant’s world and experiences, so any analysis is an
interpretation of that participant’s experience (Willig, 2013). Through the process of IPA, this research reflects the meaning of experiences for the NG staff and the meaning of these experiences for the researcher.
One concept that is accepted by most hermeneutic writers is known as the hermeneutic circle, which is interested in the relationship between the part and the whole on different levels. To understand a given part (a word) you look at the whole (a sentence) and to understand the whole, you look at the parts. For
example, the meaning of a word becomes clear when it is seen in the context of a sentence and at the same time, the meaning of a sentence rests on the
collective meaning of the words within that sentence. Approaches to qualitative analysis are usually described in a linear, step by step method and is also relevant to IPA. However, a key principle of IPA is the back and forth movement between different ways of thinking about the data (Smith et al., 2009).
According to Smith et al. (2009) by moving back and forth through the analysis, IPA allows for the researcher to think about their relationship to the data and the way it shifts within the circle.
3.5.3 Idiography
The third main influence on IPA is idiography. Idiography focuses on the particular and is a contrast to the nomothetic approach to enquiry which is concerned with looking at a wide range of data from individuals and then making claims at the group or population level (Smith et al., 2009). The
fundamental principle of an idiographic approach is to explore and examine the detailed experience of each case before moving on to producing any general statements (Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2012). Thus, IPA is idiographic as it is committed to analysing each individual case in detail. To be able to examine cases in this much detail, IPA makes use of small, purposefully selected samples of participants. Sometimes, this may involve writing up a single case study but more commonly, IPA is concerned with analysing single cases and then searching for patterns across the cases, highlighting shared themes and identifying how the themes play out for individuals (Smith, 2011). This research takes an idiographic perspective as it focused on the individual experiences for a few NG staff in considerable detail and compared certain elements of
meaning in each case before moving to producing generalised claims about the support for resilience that NG staff have experienced while still allowing one to retrieve particular claims for any of the participants involved (Smith et al., 2009).