ABSTRACT
Phenomenology is “a specific type of reflection or attitude about our human capacity for being conscious” (Varela, 1996, p. 336; see also Chapter 2, this volume). To involve yourself in this kind of reflection, you must find a way to fundamentally problematize your “everydayness” and taken-for-granted ways of thinking and constructively draw on prior as well as current phenomenological descriptions. It is my experience that many qualitative researchers new to the domain of phenomenology are a bit overwhelmed by the seemingly double challenge of how to apply relevant methods to “put” this type of reflection “to work” and how to find a way to deal with the very rich and nonhomogeneous philosophical tradition of phenomenology. My purpose in this chapter is to describe how you can deal with both of these challenges. I will do that by providing an overall guide for what to consider, as well as specific advice and examples of how a phenomenological analysis can be done. I will also touch on how different choices might lead the analysis towards different interpretations of why qualitative researchers should choose to incorporate phenomenology into their research. With explicit references to Chapter 2, the first section of this chapter deals with how phenomenological analyses are construed. In the succeeding two sections, how to perform a phenomenological analysis is specified by presenting considerations and tools to employ in the processes of generating and analyzing rich descriptions of practitioners’ experience. It should, of course, be noted that the process of generating rich descriptions of experiences already involves an implicit form of analysis, as one chooses to describe something over something else. Thereafter follows an example of how a phenomenological analysis can be performed in the case of elite sports dancers, before I end the chapter with some additional considerations.
