The Nature of the Data Analysis 109

In this research project I seek to reveal the essence of meaningful experiences for participants on a wilderness journey, in this case the Franklin River. We are called by common sense, and a phenomenological approach, to privilege the first hand

accounts of meaningful experiences by the participants themselves through interviews, journals, observations and follow up emails. These first hand accounts are our data. The question next arises: how do we discover and describe what is within our data? Data analysis methods emerged and developed as the research evolved, guided by the overriding intention to uncover and describe the essences of participant’s meaningful experiences. At the centre of the process is the continual ‘mulling over’ of peoples’ recollection of lived experiences:

The essence of a phenomenon is a universal which can be described through a study of the structures that govern the instances of particular manifestations of the essence of that phenomenon. In other words, phenomenology is the systematic attempt to uncover and describe the structures, the internal meaning of structures, of lived experience (van Manen, 1997, p. 10).

To put the process metaphorically: it is akin to continually turning over the soil in a garden. As with the turning over of the soil, the process of mulling over the data can be both therapeutic and rewarding in itself.

The research seeks to explicate not only the meaningful experiences involved in wilderness journeys, but also the meaning of those meaningful experiences as they appear for us. What we are seeking will be multilayered. No matter how

comprehensive our resulting descriptions are, however, they will fall short of the actual lived experiences of participants. Though we are trying to do the impossible by fully explicating lived experience, there is a consolation in knowing that the organic nature of our descriptions entails an element of mystery and the unknown. By taking our time – by continually turning over the soil of our data – the research aims to achieve descriptions with a depth and complexity that reflects lived

Phenomenology uses lived experience as the starting point, the point of departure, for a journey towards the essence of phenomena (Seamon, 2000; van Manen, 1997). In order to uncover the universal internal meaning of structures of lived experience, there is initially a need to describe the structures of the phenomena as they appear for individuals. We must begin at the surface and turn our data over to a greater and greater depth, taking care not to dig deeper than the depth of our data allows.

4.8.1 Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis attempts to capture the whole by describing its experiential parts – its ‘themes’. Themes cannot fully describe a phenomenon, and are not definitive or real objects in themselves. They are a way of capturing, or trying to hold onto, the elusive meaning of a description of lived experience. Rather than saying a theme is

something it would be more accurate to say that a theme exists within:

“phenomenological themes may be understood as the structures of experience. So when we analyse a phenomenon, we are trying to determine what the themes are, the experiential structures that make up that experience” (van Manen, 1997 p. 79).

Thematic analysis, then, seeks to describe that which is recurrent within individual recollections of experiences. Ultimately, in the phenomenological sense, it is about describing the universal structures within a collection of recollections. It begins with the unique and journeys towards the collective.

This journey towards the collective, universal or essential quality of lived experience involves not only describing themes, but differentiating between what van Manen refers to as incidental and essential themes: “in determining the universal or essential quality of a theme our concern is to discover aspects or qualities that make a

phenomenon what it is and without which the phenomenon could not be what it is” (1997, p. 107). In other words, it is to differentiate between those themes that happen to be tangentially connected to a phenomenon, and those themes without which the phenomenon would cease to be what it is.

In determining essential themes, phenomenological researchers are able to use a process called free imaginative variation. This involves imagining a phenomenon in

the absence of a particular theme. Does the phenomenon remain what it was, or does the removal of that theme determine that the phenomenon can no longer be what it was? In this way it is possible to move towards describing the essences of a

phenomenon, or provoke the description of further themes.

4.8.2 The Emergent Nature of the Data Analysis

The data analysis process was emergent. The process was driven by an intent rather than a hard and fast set of procedures. What was done in analysing the data was enjoined by the intention to uncover and describe (both in the unique and the collective) meaningful experiences for participants on a wilderness journey.

Decisions were made as the data analysis progressed. In this way the process can be seen as a series of steps that continued to unlock what was within the data, based on what had previously been revealed. The data analysis was a slow multifaceted approach towards a descriptive explication of the essences of participants’ meaningful experiences.