Phenomenography

Synonyms

Perceptions of experiences

Definition

Phenomenography is an empirical research tradition that was designed to answer questions about teaching and learning, particularly in the context of educational research. The aim of a phenomenographic study is to identify the different ways in which a group of people experience, interpret, understand, perceive or conceptualize a certain phenomenon or aspect of reality – and to do so from the perspectives of the members of the group. From its Greek etymological roots (phainomenon, meaning “appearance,” and graphein, meaning “description”), phenomenography is, literally, a “description of appearances.”

Theoretical Background

Focus. The central aim of a phenomenographic study is to identify the different ways in which people experience, interpret, understand, perceive, or conceptualize a certain phenomenon. According to Ference Marton (1986, 1994), one of the original developers of phenomenography, there are a limited number of qualitatively distinct ways a particular group of people can conceptualize or experience a given phenomenon; the goal of the phenomenographer is to identify and categorize these different conceptions. These conceptions are not judged for their “correctness”; rather, they are seen as interesting and useful in and of themselves.

Phenomenography adopts a non-dualist, second-order approach. The approach is non-dualist in that conceptions are viewed as being the product of an interaction between humans and the world around them. Specifically, conceptions result from a human being’s thinking about his or her external world. The approach is second order in that phenomenographers do not examine a phenomenon itself (a first-order perspective), but people’s ideas about or experiences with that phenomenon – their “conceptions” of the phenomenon.

The focus of a phenomenographic study is on the variety of conceptions within a group. Phenomenographers describe the variation in conceptions across the group and do not focus specifically on the commonalities in group members’ conceptions. They focus on the variation in the conceptions of a particular group and not on individuals’ conceptions. As such, detailed descriptions of the individuals in the group are not typically included in phenomenographic studies. Additionally, because the focus of a phenomenographic study is on the conceptions that a particular group of people have for a given phenomenon, researchers’ conceptions of that phenomenon are not usually a focus of such a study. Instead, researchers attempt, as much as possible, to act as “neutral foils” for the ideas expressed by the participants of the study.

Ultimately, the goal of phenomenography is not only to identify people’s conceptions about or “ways of experiencing” a given phenomenon, but to organize those “ways of experiencing” into conceptual categories. These categories are called “categories of description” and can be thought of as a map of the collective mind of the group being examined. Furthermore, in most cases, logical relationships will exist between the categories of description, such that a hierarchy can be established between categories of description. The ordered and related set of categories of description is called the “outcome space” of the phenomenon being studied.

Methods. There are many data sources that can reveal a person’s understanding or conception of a particular phenomenon, including observations, writings, drawings, and interviews. However, as many phenomenographers agree that conceptions are most accessible through language, the method of discovery in phenomenography is usually an open and deep individual interview. “Open” indicates that there is no definite structure to the interview. While researchers may have a list of questions or concerns that they wish to discuss during the interview, they are also prepared to follow any unexpected lines of reasoning that the interviewee might address as some of these departures may lead to fruitful new reflections that could not have been anticipated by the researcher. The openness of the interview also allows the participants to express their conceptions from their perspectives, which is critical in phenomenographic studies. “Deep” indicates that the interview will follow a certain line of questioning until it is exhausted: until the participant has nothing else to say and until the researcher and participant have reached some kind of common understanding about the topics of discussion.

The aim of an interview is to have the participant reflect on his or her experiences and then relate those experiences to the interviewer in such a way that the two come to a mutual understanding about the meanings of the experiences (or of the account of the experiences). The process is an explorative dialogue between participant and interviewer.

The experiences and understandings are jointly constituted by interviewer and interviewee. These experiences and understandings are neither there prior to the interview, ready to be “read off,” nor are they only situational social constructions. They are aspects of the subject’s awareness that change from being unreflected to being reflected (Marton 1994, p. 4427).

Because the aim of phenomenographic research is to identify the variation of experiences within a group, samples are chosen to maximize the possible variation. Data collection continues until no new ways of experiencing a phenomenon are revealed through additional interviews. In other words, data collection often continues until “saturation” is reached.

Because both conceptions and categories of description should emerge from the data in a phenomenographic study, analysis begins with immersion in the data. In the most common case in which interviews are the main data source, data analysis starts with a verbatim transcription of the interviews. Transcripts are read multiple times, from multiple perspectives, in order to identify the different ways of experiencing the phenomenon under study. They are first examined individually in order to contextualize participants’ utterances. Then, they are examined as a group, in a more decontextualized manner, in order to identify the variety of conceptions the group has for the phenomenon under question.

Once the different conceptions or ways of experiencing the phenomenon are identified, the phenomenographer seeks to organize them into categories of description. The process of defining categories of description is an iterative one. The phenomenographer identifies attributes of a potential category of description, attempts to define the category, and supports the category with appropriate quotations from the transcripts. He or she then tests the category through additional readings of the transcripts. At this point, categories and their descriptions are modified and retested. This process of modification and data review continues until the modified categories seem to stabilize and be consistent with the interview data.

There are three main criteria for category development:

That each category in the outcome space reveals something distinctive about a way of understanding the phenomenon

That the categories are logically related, typically as a hierarchy of structurally inclusive relationships

That the outcomes are parsimonious – i.e., that the critical variation in experience observed in the data be represented by a set of as few categories as possible (Akerlind 2005, p. 323)

Once the categories of description are stabilized, the phenomenographer then searches for logical relationships between them in order to create the outcome space of the study. The logical relationships between categories of description are specific to each study, but, as an example, categories of description might be ordered from more basic to more complex, where a more complex conception – correct or incorrect – might presuppose knowledge evidenced in a simpler conception. Thus, since the more complex category “includes” the simpler category, the more complex category might be ordered hierarchically “above” the simpler.

Applications of Phenomenography. As a qualitative theoretical framework, phenomenography has been used to examine three major topics:

• Students’ approaches to learning

• Students’ understandings of specific academic concepts/content

• People’s approaches to and understandings of phenomena they experience in their day-to-day lives

As originally conceived, phenomenography was developed to answer questions about teaching and learning. Phenomenographers do not identify their results as being “true” or judge the conceptions they have identified in their studies as being “correct” or “incorrect.” They do, however, claim that the results of phenomenographic studies are useful. From an educational perspective, Marton (1986) claims that “a careful account of the different ways people think about phenomena may help uncover conditions that facilitate the transition from one way of thinking to a qualitatively ‘better’ perception of reality” (p. 33). Thus, phenomenographic information about the different conceptions that students hold for a particular phenomenon may be useful to teachers who are developing ways of helping their students experience or understand a phenomenon from a given perspective.

Important Scientific Research and Open Questions

There have been several criticisms of phenomenography. First, phenomenography has often been criticized for its lack of specificity and explicitness concerning its methods of data collection, its methods of data analysis, and its theoretical underpinnings (Richardson 1999). Recent reports have addressed the methods of data collection and analysis in phenomenographic studies (see, for example, Akerlind 2005), but the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenography have yet to be clearly established.

A newer extension of the phenomenography described in this entry – initially called “new phenomenography” and currently known as “variation theory” – shifts to more theoretical concerns by examining the nature of different ways of experiencing a given phenomenon. Both classical and new phenomenography focus on the key concept of “variation.” In new phenomenography, it is assumed that there are critical aspects of a given phenomenon that learners must simultaneously be aware of and focus on in order to experience that phenomenon in a particular way. Discernment of a critical aspect of a phenomenon results from experiencing variation in dimensions that correspond to that aspect. The goal of variation theory is to identify the critical aspects of a given phenomenon from a learner’s perspective.

Another of the criticisms of phenomenography is its tendency to equate participants’ experiences with their accounts of those experiences. Saljo (1997) reports that, at times, there appears to be a discrepancy between what researchers observe of a participant’s experience with a particular phenomenon and how the participant describes his experience with the phenomenon. Richardson (1999) claims that phenomenographers do not skeptically examine the effects of a student’s background, a student’s culture, the interview environment or of socially accepted linguistic practices on what is reported by the students.

In order to avoid equating experiences with accounts of experiences, Saljo (1997) suggests that phenomenographers refer to studying people’s different “accounting practices” of phenomena, which are public and accessible to study, instead of referring to studying people’s “experiences.” Researchers must keep in mind, however, that such accounting practices may be socially and environmentally influenced.

Finally, there have also been questions about the validity, reliability, and repeatability of phenomenographic studies. Since phenomenography makes no claims about the “truth” of its results, external measures of validity may be irrelevant. Instead, researchers suggest that phenomenographic studies should meet two other validity criteria: communicative validity (have appropriate research and interpretation techniques been applied?; are the results an accurate description of the data?) and pragmatic validity (are the results useful and meaningful to the intended audience?) (Akerlind 2005).

Akerlind also (2005) suggests three ways in which researchers can establish the reliability of their results:

• 1. Carrying out a coder reliability check, in which a second coder uses the researcher’s categories of description to code the transcripts

• 2. Carrying out a dialogic reliability check, in which two researchers discuss both the data and research results, coming to a common understanding of the former and an agreement about the latter

• 3. Maintaining and making explicit an “interpretative awareness” (Sandberg 1997), in which researchers make their interpretive steps clear to readers by explaining their presuppositions and conceptions about the data or the phenomenon in question and outlining how they have taken a critical attitude toward their interpretations of data in order to counteract those presuppositions and conceptions

Cross-References

Qualitative Research Methods

Variation Theory