3.2 Introduction of Phenomenography
3.2.2 First and Second Order Perspectives
Marton (1981) argued that in the phenomenographic context, the first order
perspective of the world referred to ‘a statement about reality’; whereas the
conception of reality’ (p. 178, emphasis added). Marton (1981) explained that
any answer to the question ‘Why some children succeed better than others in
school?’ could be considered as from the first order perspective; while that of
‘What do people think about why some children succeed better than others in
school?’ could be considered as from the second order perspective. In other
words, from the first order perspective, ‘we orient ourselves towards the world
and make statements about it’; whereas from the second order perspective, ‘we
orient ourselves towards people’s ideas about the world (or their experience of it)
and we make statements about people’s ideas about the world (or about their
experience of it)’ (Marton, 1981, p. 178).
For example, if we are trying to explore the relationship between FL learners’
affective experiences and their performances from the researcher’s point of view,
the statements are made from a first order perspective. On the other hand, if we
explore such a relationship between from the learner’s standpoint, the statements
are made from a second order perspective.
When I published parts of the research findings from this doctoral study in
conferences and journals, three questions were frequently raised by researchers
who were interested in this work. The first question is, how can we distinguish
whether the participants and the researchers have the same knowledge of what an
emotion is? In other words, what if the participants’ self-reported emotion should
be categorised as another type of emotion if taking a different method to obtain
the data, such as via the objective physiological indicators? Second, how are the
learners but actually they exist at that time? The third question is, how are the
researchers able to know if the learners are reporting exactly what they have
experienced?
The first question refers to the issue of knowledge and the validity of the
conceptions of the reality. More broadly conceived, this question actually asked
the position of phenomenography between natural science (neuroscience which
applies objective physiological indicators) and social science (traditional
education psychology paradigm from the first order perspective). The second
question refers to the awareness of the world. This question concerns the
relationship between awareness and under awareness. The third question refers to
the reliability of the conceptions of the reality.
So here comes to another question before answering the above. In the
phenomenographic context, what is a reality? Uljens (1996) argued that reality
was ‘considered to exist through the way in which a person conceives of it’ (p.
112). More specifically, Marton (2000) distinguished between the world and the
reality:
‘There is only one world, a really existing world, which is experienced and
understood in different ways by human beings. It is simultaneously objective and
subjective. An experience is a relationship between object and subject,
encompassing both.’ (Marton, 2000, p. 105)
Moreover, Marton (2000) also argued that people’s ways of understanding the
specific group of people. That is, one person’s reality may differ from that of
another person. Let me give an example to elaborate these terms. Some people in
Tanzania believe that red clay is edibile and can be nutritious and healthy to their
wellbeing. However, I moved the same topic to my colleagues and asked them
about their perceptions of eating red clay. None of my eight colleagues held the
thought that red clay was either eatable or that they would try to eat it sometime
in the future. In this example, ‘the red clay –as –experienced’ represents the only
one world. Rather than being separated from the object, the experience is ‘as
much an aspect of the object as it is of the subject’ (Marton, 2000, p. 105). The
combined perceptions of eating red clay together represents the phenomena. And
‘red clay is eatable’ is the reality to the specific group of people in Tanzania. In
the meantime, ‘red clay is not eatable’ is also the reality to my colleagues. Both
realities are knowledge created by different groups of people as they experience
and understand the world in different ways. Moreover, such awareness of the
world internally relates to the both people and the world from a
phenomenographic point of view. Reality exists because of a specific group of
people’s awareness of the world. The world is not separated from people from a
phenomenographic perspective.
Furthermore, a producer, named Abisae Maeda videoed two local persons in
Tanzania to explore their views of eating red clay in 2012. One conception is ‘I
feel fresh when eating soil because it is tasty’; and another conception is ‘It is
nothing strange of eating red clay, the clay is very special’. Therefore, from a
phenomenographic view, for this video clip, the combination of the two
As can be seen from the example above, toward the same world, two realities
exist between two different groups of people. Marton (1981) explained that both
realities ‘may be true independently of the other’s truth or falsehood’ (p. 178).
From a second order perspective, the reality of ‘red clay is eatable’ exists through
the way in which two persons in Tanzania conceive of it. Their conceptions of
the phenomenon about eating red clay are different. There is a difference
between reality and conceptions of reality (Marton, 1981). The first person’s
conception focuses on the taste of the red clays; whereas the second person’s
conception focuses on the speciality of the clay. Such a difference might reflect
the differences of their knowledge structures, social status, or their awareness of
what people outside their group might think about eating clay.
Certainly, this study is not a piece of social anthropology work. The purpose of
giving the above example is to distinguish different terms in the
phenomenographic context. As Marton (1981) argued, ‘we consider that to find
out the different ways in which people experience, interpret, understand,
apprehend, perceive or conceptualize various aspects of reality is sufficiently
interesting in itself, not least because of the pedagogical potentiality and
necessity of the field of knowledge to be formed’ (p. 178). In phenomenography,
rather than exploring which reality is more ‘real’, the researcher’s aim is to
categorise the participants’ descriptions (Marton, 1981, p.2001).
To move back to the first question, how can we distinguish whether the
participants and the researchers have the same knowledge of what an emotion is?
Three issues relate to this question, namely, the issue of knowledge, the validity
and social science. Regarding the first issue, a difference in knowledge might
exist between participants and researchers. This suggests that the participants’
emotion, such as anxiety, might not precisely match the researcher’s anxiety. Via
objective physiological indicators, a researcher can give a certain emotion a
meaning; however,this meaning might not be shared by the participants. This
first question itself has a problem of mixing the first and second order
perspective of the world. In this phenomenographic study, the research aim is to
explore emotions-as-experienced from the second order perspective. The
researcher’s role is to provide scientific descriptions of the participants’ emotions
as they are described, rather than justifying the knowledge biases between the
participants and the researcher. Therefore, when the participants give answers to
questions, such as ‘how do you feel’, the researcher’s role is to investigate the
participants’ world of reaching the answer, such as ‘I feel anxious’ from their
standpoint. The second validity issue requires an elaboration of the researcher’s
role, phenomenographic interviews and coding validities. These methodological
concerns of phenomenography will be illustrated in detail in Section 3.4.
Regarding the third issue, as Marton (2001) argued, ‘phenomenography occupies
a space somewhere between natural science (disciplines that deal with what we
hold to be true about the world) and traditional social sciences (which seek to
discover laws of mental operations and social existence)’ (p. 145). Therefore,
from a phenomenographic point of view, I am going to investigate the learners’
emotions as they are described from the learners’ standpoint, rather than from my
Regarding the second question, how are the researchers able to know if the
learners are aware of their emotions? In other words, is there a possibility that
some emotions might not be known by the learners but actually they exist at that
time? This question addresses the learner’s awareness of the world. As
previously state, ‘there is only one world, a really existing world, which is
experienced and understood in different ways by human beings’ (Marton, 2000,
p. 105). From a phenomenographic point of view, the learners’ awareness of the
world is the only world they are able to communicate with (Prosser & Trigwell,
1999). Therefore, if the emotions can be expressed by the learner, the awareness
issue is self-evident. The learners’ emotions under investigation in this study are
emotions-as-experienced. They exist ‘through the way in which a person
conceives of it’ (Uljens, 1996, p. 112).
So what is awareness in the phenomenographic context? Marton and Booth
(1997) defined that an individual’s awareness was ‘the world experienced by the
person’ (p. 108). Furthermore, they provided an example to elaborate the
meaning of experiencing things in a certain way. To experience something in a
certain way, people need to gain knowledge about the world which involved
‘qualitative differences across the populations involved in it’, and such
qualitative differences referred to ‘the way things are experienced (understood,
conceptualized, apprehended, etc.) —as phenomena, situations or learning itself’
(Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 86). The example is that we could identify a deer as a
deer rather than something else, such as a UFO, in the woods, is because we both
see the parts of the deer, such as its head, its forequarters and so on, and the
for the deer is its standing in the woods, not flying in the air. From the above
example, Marton and Booth (1997) pointed out that an experience had two
aspects, namely, meaning and structure, which were ‘intertwined and occur
simultaneously when we experience something’ (p. 87).
The structural aspect of experiencingthings in a certain wayhas twofold,
‘discernment of the whole from the context’ and ‘discernment of the parts and
their relationships within the whole’ (Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 87). As from the
above example, we discern the deer (the whole) from the woods (the context or
the environment); we identify the deer’s contour from its surroundings. In the
meantime, we also discern the deer’s head, its forequarters and so on (the parts)
and how they connected to each other as a whole (the parts’ relationships within
the whole). On the other hand, the meaning aspect, or the referential aspect of an
experience, when we discern the structural aspect of the deer, simultaneously, we
‘assign it a meaning’ (Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 87), which equals to a particular
thing, here means a deer. The two aspects of an experience intertwined and
occurred simultaneously. ‘Structure presupposes meaning, and at the same time
meaning presupposes structure’ (Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 87).
Regarding the third question, how are the researchers able to know if the learners
are reporting exactly what they have experienced? This question concerns about
the reliability of the conceptions of the reality. This is also a methodological
concern of phenomenography. Moreover, the reliability of subjective reports is
also considered as a potential weakness for all of the qualitative studies that