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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In an earlier article, Edwards (1991) tried to establish that the Duquesne Phenomenological Research Method (DPRM) was simply a particular type of Case Study research method (CSRM) and he also reproached users of the DPRM for not developing theory. This article rebuts both of Edwards's theses. DPRM is radically different from CSRM in logic and in execution and the article demonstrates that the development of theory is not at all the intent of DPRM. The basic difficulty is that Edwards attempts to understand DPRM from an empirical philosophical perspective whereas a phenomenological philosophical perspective is required to understand DPRM correctly.
Keywords
phenomenological psychology, phenomenological method, case study method, description, theory
Phenomenology is primarily a philosophy that was initiated by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) at the beginning of the 20th Century. Husserl was a mathematician and logician who was concerned about the skeptical attacks being made against human beings' efforts to establish secure knowledge. Thus he (Husserl, 1970) wrote a two-volume work entitled Logical Investigations in 1900 with the intention of demonstrating the possibility of gaining stable knowledge and this project included a critique of many of the psychologistic theories of logic that were prevalent at the beginning of the 20th Century. Psychologism is the theory that logical truths are dependenr upon human modes of thinking understood from the perspective of psychology as a naturalscience, but Husserl argued for the independence of logical truths from specifically human modes of thinking although human consciousness had the capability to access such logical truths. In the process of tackling these logical problems, Husserl developed a new perspective towards philosophical problems that he came to call phenomenology. He continued to develop this philosophy until his death, but even that event did not put an end to its development because Husserl had left some 40,000 manuscript pages of concrete analyses and theoretical developments that his successors had to edit and publish. The point of this introduction is to make clear that the phenomenological method that Husserl also initiated has to be understood within the context of his entire philosophy. The method cannot be detached and examined from the perspective of an alien philosophy. Yet, this is what Edwards (1991) did, and this article is a response to his misunderstood effort, however sympathetically it may have been motivated.
Before proceeding, I should speak to the issue of the name assigned to the method. Edwards (1991) calls the phenomenological psychological method he is discussing the Duquesne Phenomenological Research Method (DPRM) and he (Edwards, 1991, p. 53) acknowledges that the method was pioneered by me. At the time that I initiated and developed the method I was a faculty member in the Psychology Department of Dusquesne University, which was a department that at that time was wholly committed to the phenomenological perspective in psychology, and since many graduate students and some other faculty also used the method, it has gotten to be called the "Duquesne Method." However, I want to make clear that the phenomenological method was initiated by Husserl (1983) and its development pre-existed me by a long shot. All I did was adapt a pre-existing philosophical method in such a way that it could be used for studying psychological phenomena within a scientific context. In order to make that adaptation, I also drew from some of Merleau-Ponty's (1962) insights.
I also have to state that some faculty members and graduate students took the basic idea of the method and then applied it with variations that I would not consider sound from either a research perspective or phenomenologically (Giorgi, 2006a; 2006b). Consequently, some of the criticisms that Edwards (1991) makes of the application of the method used by others may be based on variations of which I would also not approve. That is why it is important to understand the phenomenological philosophical context from which the method developed.
The purpose of this article is to rebut the major theses that Edwards (1991) proclaims in his article. He has two major points, both of which are erroneous from a phenomenological perspective: (1) He wants to see DPRM as a special type of CSRM. In attempting to achieve this task he notes certain similarities, not identities, between the two methods but he ignores the differences. (2) He faults DPRM for not developing theory sufficiently and for not meeting certain empirical criteria that Edwards (1991) posits but which are not goals or tasks that a phenomenological approach wants to pursue. In other words, Edwards (1991) ignores the self-understanding of the phenomenological approach and judges it in terms of alien, empirical criteria. There are several other important distortions of the phenomenological approach that Edwards makes, and we shall deal with some of them, but the main focus will be upon the two major theses that Edwards attempts, but fails, to establish. We shall focus on the misrepresentations and misinterpretations that Edwards makes concerning the phenomenological method, and we shall also, wherever possible try to state the correct understanding.
Case Study Research Method
Edwards (1991, p. 60) makes the claim that DPRM "can be understood as a special class of Case Study Research Method (CSRM)" because "it has many features in common with CSRM." However, Edwards (1991) does not discuss the differences that DPRM has with CSRM; he only sees the problems that DPRM has that he believes CSRM can help solve although he does concede that DPRM can be slightly helpful to CSRM as well (Edwards, 1991, p. 66). By completely omitting any discussion of the phenomenological philosophy that inspired the phenomenological psychological method, Edwards (1991) misrepresents and misinterprets the DPRM. DPRM brings with it its own context, perspective and philosophy, but Edwards ignores its developmental history and instead attempts to attach an empirical philosophy to the method. To understand the differences between Edwards' interpretation of the phenomenological psychological method and my own, one has to appreciate the fact that Edwards is not a phenomenologist, although he does not explicitly state this fact in his article. Consequently, he judges the phenomenological steps and principles from an empirical perspective, and of course, in the light of empirical criteria, phenomenology comes out secondbest. Edwards (1991) neither acknowledges nor respects any of the phenomenological features of DPRM. It's as though they never existed. My own evaluation of DPRM is based upon a phenomenological philosophical perspective which is more comprehensive than an empirical perspective. But before we can argue that DPRM is not an example of CSRM, we have to understand what CSRM is.
Actually, Edwards (1991, p. 54) himself states that "in CSRM attention is focused on a single case which is examined in depth." That alone would be sufficient to differentiate CSRM from DPRM because I never recommend that a single case be used for phenomenological studies in psychology. The reason is that a single case does not have a sufficient number of variations independent of the individual whose description is being analyzed. The purpose of the method I developed was to clarify the nature of the phenomenon I was studying, in the traditional normative, scientific sense. My research was in the following vein: What does it mean psychologically to learn, to remember, to perceive, to imagine, and so on? What are the achievements and what are the obstacles to achievement for such phenomena as they appear in the stream of our experience? Because the interviews in which the data are collected are usually lengthy and because the analysis is laborious since many differentiated meanings need to be discovered and integrated, few subjects are used in such studies within the context of theses and dissertations. But never just one. I always recommend at least three. But, of course, if one had a grant and was receiving remuneration for the time spent doing the analyses, then more than three participants could be used. But still, the criterion used with probability theory--at least 30 participants--would probably not be applicable because I believe that there would be significant diminishing returns as one approached the thirtieth description. In any case, the difficulty with using only one participant with the phenomenological method is that a tremendous burden is placed on the imagination when it tries to distinguish the single individual's particular way of living the phenomenon from a more general way that belongs to a type rather than to an individual. With three descriptions such a discrimination is much easier to make.
One has to remember that all psychological research depends upon the presence of individuals who are undergoing the experience. If there are no individuals, then there are no phenomena. But the research interest does not have to be on the individual experiencer. It can be on the general char-acteristics that define the phenomenon regardless who the individual is. For such a purpose, the study of a single individual is not the most fruitful approach. Studying a case history may have other benefits, but then these benefits would have to be specified.
Now it is quite possible that the DPRM could be used to study an individual's particular way of living through a phenomenon. But even in such a...
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