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All research is underpinned by various philosophical foundations based on assumptions about how the world is perceived, and how one can best come to understand that world (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b; Sparkes & Smith, 2014). These philosophical foundations are known as paradigms (Kuhn, 1962), which form an overarching set of beliefs that orientate how researchers view the nature of being and reality (ontology) and how this view affects various judgements about, and how to gain knowledge (epistemology) (Markula & Silk, 2011). As Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba (2011) and Sparkes and Smith (2014) note, different paradigms lead researchers to generate different questions, develop different research designs, use different data collection techniques, perform different analyses, use differing ways to represent their data, and judge the quality of studies against different criteria.

Paradigms therefore are fundamental as they guide all aspects of undertaking research, providing:

…the boundaries for the researcher’s ethics and values, actions in the social world, the control of the study (who initiates the work, and asks questions), the voices deployed in the accounts of the research and, indeed, the very basic and fundamental understanding of the world the researcher is investigating (Markula & Silk, 2011, p. 25).

68 Each paradigm can be understood in terms of certain ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Ontological assumptions give rise to epistemological assumptions, which in turn have methodological implications for the choices made regarding techniques of data collection, the interpretation of data, and how data are represented and written up. Table 3.1 outlines some of the basic assumptions of three key paradigmatic frameworks typically used in sport and exercise research.

Table 3.1 Basic assumptions of most commonly used paradigms in sport and exercise research (adapted from Lincoln et al., 2011)

Consideration Positivist Post-Positivist Interpretivist Ontology

Of these paradigms, positivism has traditionally been the prevailing choice in sport and exercise science research (Kerry & Armour, 2000), often resulting in the subordination of other paradigms. Positivism, is primarily based on etic, formal, and standardised research

69 employing quantitative methods to predict and control the research process, seeking an objective truth obtained through the rigorous testing of hypotheses. As such, a positivist epistemology is centred on controlled data collection, where researchers generally distance themselves from the phenomena under investigation, seeking a reality that is measurable and objective, devoid of their opinions construed as a universal truth (Markula

& Silk, 2011).

While this traditional positivist approach has without doubt been successful, one of its major limiting factors is positivism’s inability to engage with the more complex, interchanging, subjective and individuality of human nature (Markula & Silk, 2011). For those wishing to undertake this type of research an alternative approach is required. That approach is often the interpretivist paradigm.

The interpretivist paradigm stands almost in direct opposition to the objective and value-neutral positivist paradigm, underscored by very different ontological and epistemological assumptions as outlined in Table 3.1. It is a paradigm founded on the very idea that the social world is complex, where people, including researchers and research participants, ascribe their own meaning(s) to an event, experience or happening (Markula & Silk, 2011).

The aim of any interpretive project is therefore to gain an understanding of these meanings by gathering knowledge of multiple individual experiences (Markula & Silk, 2011) including beliefs, values, reasons and understandings (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Researchers as a result cannot be distant, disembodied, objective scientists (Gould & Nelson, 2005) but must allow, acknowledge and integrate subjective, embodied experiences into their research (Tillman-Healy & Keisinger, 2001).

The interpretivist paradigm has thus been dominated by qualitative methodological procedures, generally drawing on interviewing as a major method of data collection (Amis, 2005), allowing the researcher to explore the contextual nature of human interactions (Hammersley, 1989). As Denzin and Lincoln note, qualitative research is a:

…situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings and

70 memos to the self. At this level, qualitative research involves an interpretative, naturalistic approach to the world. This means qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a, p. 3).

In this respect, the ‘truth’ is not conceptualised as being universal and absolute, but as multiple, partial, and necessarily incomplete (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Qualitative research thus attempts to “recognise the fluid and intricate interactions between people and the socio-historical worlds in which they exist” (Silk, 2005, p. 5). The interpretivist, qualitative researcher’s main aim is therefore to study phenomena as far as possible in their ‘natural’

setting in order to understand the participant’s subjective experiences.

Based on this understanding of the interpretivist paradigm, and the aims of this study, the interpretivist paradigm would offer a logical choice for situating this research. However, as detailed in Chapter 2, this study engages with phenomenology and contrary to many research method texts (for example; Lincoln et al., 2011; Markula & Silk, 2011) phenomenology is not synonymous with, or even subsumed under, the interpretivist paradigm or ‘qualitative’ research approaches, as has been noted (Allen-Collinson, 2016;

Martínková & Parry, 2011).

Phenomenology differs radically from traditional interpretivist and/or qualitative research in that its main concern, as Gallagher and Zahavi (2008) emphasise, is not with a subjective account of experience, but an account of subjective experience. Phenomenology is therefore not simply a retelling of subjective experience but is more concerned with our experience of that experience. As Allen-Collinson (2016) further argues, to ‘qualify’ as phenomenological, a study must go beyond providing a description, however detailed and well-grounded, of the subjective experience of phenomena, as this latter would constitute phenomenalism, and phenomenology is not phenomenalism (see also Halák et al., 2014).

For Allen-Collinson (2016), phenomenology is thus not concerned with recounting the immediate, subjective experiences of a particular person/persons as lived in everyday life, but rather about fundamentally problematizing that ‘everydayness’, and seeking to ‘stand aside’ from the everyday flow of subjective experiences and taken-for-granted ways of

71 thinking and being, i.e. our ‘natural attitude’. A phenomenological researchers’ central concern is therefore to return to embodied experiential meanings, and to question how these come to be experienced. This process involves both rich description of the phenomenon or phenomena, and the researcher adopting the phenomenological attitude (Finlay, 2009) via what is termed the phenomenological epochē (see section 3.4).

Additionally, as noted in Chapter 2, phenomenology emphasises the link between mind and body and as such rejects the ontological extremes of both subjectivism and objectivism (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). Although tasked with investigating phenomena as they are experienced, experience is never purely subjective as the person having said experience is never isolated from the world around them. The same world is also never a fixed objective reality, to which we as humans have direct, pre-interpreted access. Thus, as Moran (2000, p. 15) notes, in phenomenology “subjectivity must be understood as inextricably involved in the process of constituting objectivity”. Phenomenology thus challenges the notion of subjective/objective dichotomies and such a position means that to study something phenomenologically means that it cannot be studied in an atomistic way (Webster-Wright, 2010). For some theorists, such a conceptualisation thus firmly places phenomenology as

‘another way’ distinct from the positivist or interpretivist paradigms.

Furthermore, whilst it is important for all researchers to be aware of the various assumptions that underlie their chosen research paradigm, researchers employing phenomenology must also be clear about which phenomenological tradition they are following, given the often-nuanced differences between some of the traditions. For example, a study that purports to be Husserlian, but does not engage with the epochē, would immediately raise concerns about its currency as phenomenological. For those who have taken some of the insights of philosophical phenomenology and tried to apply these to empirical studies of lifeworlds, phenomenology is not just a philosophical approach but also a methodology (Finlay, 2009; Kerry & Armour, 2000). A strong phenomenological study will therefore select methods that appropriately link to the phenomenological perspective being used.

72 In light of this, several attempts have been made to trace the general principles of the phenomenological process (for example Giorgi, 1985; van Manen, 1997). As part of this process Giorgi (1989, 1997) identifies description, intentionality, epochē, and essences as fundamental elements in many forms of phenomenological enquiry. It is this phenomenological method and these core characteristics that I now consider.