Anexo B: Extractos de la declaración ministerial de Hernández

‘transcendental/descriptive phenomenology’ and defined it as the ‘study of the essence of conscious experience’. He posited that in order to engage with phenomena in the world, it was necessary to put aside, or transcend, ones’ own personal

experience or content of consciousness, putting one’s usual understanding of the world aside. He named this usual state of mind as the ‘natural attitude’, which he described as a ‘mindless’ state in which people are concerned about everyday assumptions about how things are. Through the use of thought experiments and exercises, Husserl described how there could be a more reflexive move away from this natural attitude in order to attempt to understand things as we experience them.

He called this a ‘Phenomenological Attitude’. He also talked about how it was possible to engage in ‘bracketing’ off past knowledge, culture, context and history in order to access the essence of a given phenomenon as it presents itself to

consciousness. Here, biases and prejudices about the world, along with rules and expectations are put aside, with the aim of focusing on immediate experience. Spinelli (1997) termed this as ‘un-knowing’, where interpretations of experience would

therefore be more adequate.

48 2.3.4. Hermeneutics. Heidegger (1889-1976) disagreed with Husserl’s

reductionist stance (which maintains that complex phenomena are best understood by analysis which breaks the phenomena into their fundamental, elementary aspects) on the study of consciousness, arguing that it is not possible to separate oneself from the world one is in and that there is an ‘essence’ or phenomena to know or uncover in a positivistic (objective and observable) sense. Heidegger posited that the only

observations that can be made are from one’s own position, and that the best that one can manage in research is an interpretation of the phenomena.

Heidegger developed hermeneutic/existential phenomenology with a focus on Hermeneutics (theory of interpretation) and an emphasis on “worldliness”, which is concerned with relatedness to the world and relationships within it. He posited that in order to understand something we have to interpret it first. It is therefore necessary to understand what our personal experiences and our “embeddedness” in the world brings to the interpretation. Heidegger called these our “fore understandings” (also referred to as “conceptions”). An awareness of these preconceptions or fore-understandings can be developed through the reflexive process throughout the research. IPA utilises the Heideggerian approach to reflexivity by adopting the

concept of the Hermeneutic Circle (Figure 1, Godamer, 1975) to describe the iterative process through which a new understanding of a whole reality can be developed by means of exploring the “detail of existence”.

49 Figure 1. Hermeneutic Circle Diagram, adapted from Godamer, 1975).

It is posited that the researcher always brings their fore-conceptions to the encounter and that the phenomenon is seen in light of these. Fore-understandings might not become apparent to the researcher until they are presented with “the new”

and so IPA encourages researchers to remain open to preconceptions emerging during the process. Fore-understandings will therefore be continually revised in this cyclical process as new understandings of the phenomena emerge. There is also an idea that there is a dynamic relationship between the part and the whole, where the meaning of the part might only become clear in the context of the whole. This is evident in the process of analysis, for example, in analysing a single word embedded in a sentence, or an extract within a complete text and so on (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2009). In engaging with the participant and their understanding, the researcher facilitates the process of bracketing, through becoming more aware of their own pre-conceptions.

Here, a ‘double hermeneutic’ process occurs, where the researcher is making sense of the participant making sense of the phenomena being explored.

Encounter with the new, i.e., participant's account of experience

Interpretative revision of

fore-understanding

Fore-understanding of the reader/researcher

50 IPA’s connection to hermeneutics and its’ description of phenomenology as an interpretative activity is what defines it as an interpretative phenomenological

approach. In attempting to tackle the notion of bracketing, Smith et al. (2009) describe it as ‘something that can only be partially achieved’ and as a ‘cyclical process’. They suggest that in order to develop a phenomenological attitude, the researcher must adopt an ‘open attitude’ where they are open to a shift in

understandings, and open to their own preconceptions being obliterated. The

researcher must also respect others’ ‘truths’ as they are told, and respect the fact that we can never really fully understand another’s experience.

In order to enable the researcher to be conscious of their own preconceptions about the subject and the data, a reflective journal was used in the current research as an aid when the researcher was making interpretations. As Ortlipp (2008) points out:

“Rather than attempting to control researcher values through method or by bracketing assumptions, the aim is to consciously acknowledge those values.

Keeping self-reflective journals is a strategy that can facilitate reflexivity, whereby researchers use their journal to examine “personal assumptions and goals” and clarify “individual belief systems and subjectivities”. (p.695) The researcher will present excerpts of her reflective diary throughout this paper to provide the reader with some insights into how the researcher developed an awareness of her fore-understandings, how these may have impacted how the research was conducted and thoughts and interpretations about the data gathered.

2.3.5. Idiography. The idea of “Idiography” within IPA is concerned with the