Transcript Document

Interpretative Phenomenological
Analysis
Dr Carol Greenway
M5 Year 2
14.02.14
Phenomenological- Understanding
experiences
• Learning from the insights of the experts-research
participants themselves
• To answer RQs:-What is it like to experience
exclusion from school? How does working in a
special school affect male teachers’ sense of
identity? What is the experience of Somali mothers
bringing up children in a particular UK context? How
do ELSAs make sense of their role in relation to CIC?
• A focus on the uniqueness of an individual’s
thoughts and perceptions of their experiences.
What is unique about IPA as method?
• It enables the researcher to engage with a research
question at an idiographic (particular) level from the
‘bottom up’ (inductive). That is it is not testing
hypotheses or prior assumptions (deductive) but the
meanings participants assign to their experience.
• Participants are recruited because of their expertise
(‘lived experience’) in the phenomenon being
explored. This is called a homogenous sample.
How is IPA interpretive?
• The researcher must attempt to make sense of the
participant’s experience in a way that addresses the
particular research question
• This is a subjective and reflective process
• Inferences are made from the data (interview
transcripts) to the participants as embodied and
encultured beings in a given context.
• The researcher makes sense of the participants’
sense making against a range of theoretical
perspectives and an understanding of their context.
In some sense they share a context.
Three key theoretical features of IPA
• Phenomenology-detailed examination of the participant’s
life-world staying as close to the language participants use as
possible.
• Hermeneutics- a questioning and empathetic approach,
involving a two stage process of interpretation:i)The participants are trying to make sense of their world
ii)The researcher is trying to make sense of the participants
trying to make sense of their world.
This is defined as a double hermeneutic.
• Idiography- a painstaking analysis of cases rather than
jumping to generalisations or conclusions by ‘bracketing off’
one’s own preconceptions i.e. to suspend them and allow
them to be examined.
Embodiment and enculturation
• Embodiment (the physical/perceptual awareness of one’s
body as it may be perceived by another) for example in
understanding persistent chronic pain, ‘I am a pain,’ and ‘It
makes me a pain.’‘I was a nice person and now I’m a cow.’
• Enculturation (how we became) includes ideas about gender,
ethnicity, ability, health, illness etc the socially constituted
nature of personhood.
• For an understanding of how we became and how we sustain
ourselves, we need an account of how the embodied-situated
and intersubjective-relational qualities of human
understanding come together from the perspective of a given
person in a given context.
Reducing complexity through IPA analysis
A rigorous and systematic analysis is undertaken to reduce the
complexity of the data.
1. The transcript is read and reread
2. Initial notes are made on each transcript
3. Emergent themes are created from initial notes
(It helps to have three columns with the transcript in the middle
one and initial notes on left and emergent concepts on
right).
4. Emergent themes are clustered into subordinate themes
5. Then into superordinate themes
6. Overarching concepts for the whole sample are created
What makes for a good IPA study (Smith
2011)=Trustworthiness
• Clear focus rather than broad reconnaissance
• Strong data from purposive small sample
• Evidence for overarching themes taken from a large
proportion of participants-i.e. prevalence claimed
• Sufficient elaboration of a theme
• Interpretative commentary not just descriptions
• Convergence and divergence made clear
• Well written
Validity=Yardley (2008)
‘Establishing the degree to which people can
accept your research as sound, legitimate and
authoritative by people interested in your
research findings.’
Trustworthiness or Validity according to
Yardley (2008)
• Sensitivity to context-literature, setting &
participants’ perspectives
• Commitment and rigour -in recruitment
• Coherence and transparency- how coding
modified and convergence/ divergence of
themes
• Impact and importance-links to practice &
theory and literature
Discourse and Narrative Analysis
Exploring Social and Individual
Worlds
M5 Year 2 (2:3)
14th January 2014
Professional Doctorate in Child and Educational Psychology (M5)
DEdChPsych
Dr H M Hulusi
Hopes for the session
• Define Discourse and Narrative Analysis
• Differentiate between DA &NA
• Experience DA and NA
First Principles
Ontology
Our assumptions
about reality
Epistemology
Our beliefs about how
one might discover
knowledge about the
world
Methodology
The tools and
techniques of research
Ontological Positions
• Objective World
• Socially Constructed Social World - DA
• Individually Constructed World- NA
Discourse Analysis
Researching the Socially Constructed World
•
Conversational Analysis / Discourse Analysis
•
A discourse is a body of text that
– communicates and idea or knowledge
– communicates repeatable relationships to, between and among objects
•
Every text is conditioned and inscribes itself within a given discourse
•
DA focuses on language and communication in the broadest sense
– Data is any thing that holds a discourse, conversation, writing, film, art
•
Starting point is apolitical unless adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis
– E.g. Feminist, Marxist, Liberal
•
Discourse Analysis is a deconstructive reading and interpretation of a
problem
Goal of Discourse Analysis
• Seek to enable us to understand the conditions behind
a specific "problem”
– Why do more girls than boys take A level psychology?
– The dominant discourse around psychology as a subject contradicts
the dominant discourses around masculinity
• Help us to realize that the essence of that "problem",
and its resolution, lie in the very assumptions that
enable the existence of that "problem”
– Challenge these discourses by identifying and elevating
completing or contra discourses
Models of DA
All suggest a systematic staged approach, all warn
against use of exact protocols!
Discourse and Social Psychology
- Potter and Weatherell (1987)
- 8 Steps
Critical Discourse Analysis
- Foucault (1972,2002)
- Willig’s (2008) six stages of FDA
Key Questions in a DA
How are
people
characterized?
How is the
account
linguistically
constructed?
What are
similarities and
differences
between this
and other
articles on
similar topics ?
How is power
and control
exercised? By
whom, for
whom?
Who’s
discourse is
supported /
minimized?
DA
What is
the
function
of the
account?
What is the
author’s
intended
message?
Analysis of a visual discourse
Validity and Reliability
• Inductive process of analysis leading to qualitative data
• Trustworthiness rather than reliability and validity
• Trustworthiness depends on the force and logic of
one's arguments or rhetoric (CDA).
• Critical deconstructionist approaches (especially CDA)
are themselves subject to their own deconstructive
reading and counter-interpretations.
Principles of Narrative Psychology
Researching the Individually Constructed World
• We are (all) driven to produce accounts of ourselves that are
in the form of stories/narratives.
• Early experimental research suggests that our drive to offer a
narrative is so strong that we will even offer coherent stories
for inanimate objects (Heider and Simmel, 1944).
• The social world is itself ‘storied’ (i.e. ‘public’ stories circulate
in popular culture, providing meaning people can use to
construct personal identities and personal narratives).
• Our sense of self in the world is defined by the stories we hold
and the stories that we choose to tell others
Function of Narrative
• “Narrative is concerned with the human
means of making sense of an ever changing
world. It is through narrative that we can
bring a sense of order to the seeming disorder
in our world, and it is through narrative that
we can begin to define ourselves as having
some sense of temporal continuity and as
being distinct from others.” Murray, 2003 (p.11)
Agency and Power:
An important psychological function
• Narrative provides us with a sense of agency.
• Agency is developed through the process of
bringing order to disorder by organizing a
sequence of events into a plot.
• When we are denied the opportunity to express
agency we experience suffering
– Ricouer (1984)
Narrative Structures
A narrative has the following elements
- transformation (i.e. change over time)
- action and characters
- temporal dimension
- ‘emplotment’.
- Narratives must have a point (a ‘so what?’
factor), which often takes the form of a moral
message
Differences between NA & DA
• DA tends to pull apart stories told by
participants, analyzing themes, units or
categories.
• NA fundamentally attempts to hold together
the structure and coherence of the story.
• Our narratives have ontological value
– Our narratives are our realities
Methodology: Narrative Analysis
• So, if our narratives have ontological value,
then…………….
– Our stories / narratives can be seen as interpretive
devices through which we can make sense of the
experiences of the narrator
– Our stories can be seen as data and in a sense a
window in to our reality and experience
• Mishler (1986) and Riessman (1993).
Types of Narrative Analysis
• Riessman (1993) proposes three approaches
to narrative analysis.
1. Life Story method.
2. Analysis of a sequence of core narratives within
an interview. In this case, sequences are
analyzed for structure and thematic
connections.
3. Stanza Analysis in order to enable the analysis of
how metaphor is utilized by the narrator (see
Gee, 1991).
Essentials of Narrative Analysis
McLeod (2001)
• How and why do people tell
stories?
• Analysis of competing voices
• What type of stories are told?
• Thematic similarities between
the story told and wider
cultural narratives
• How do these stories change?
• Examination of the overall
structure of a story
• Analysis of various voices
• What is the role of the
researcher in relation to the
client’s story? How is the story
co-constructed?
Essentials of Narrative Analysis
• Narrative analysis is about the sense the analyst brings to the
story based on the narrative analytic structure they use.
• Ricouer (1991) used the term ‘appropriation’ to describe the
analyst’s interpretation of the narrative.
• According to Ricouer (1986) the analyst’s appropriation is an
emergent entity:
“The meaning or significance of a story wells up from the intersection of
the world of the text and the world of the reader”. (p.430)
Stanza Analysis
Gee (1986, 1991)
“….interpretation, like visual perception, is an amalgam of structural
properties of the text and creative inferences drawn on the basis of
context and previous experience.” (p.16)
• The unadjusted or ‘Prosodic’ text undergo stanza analysis before
any subsequent analysis are carried out. The transcript is
‘smoothed’ and the flow increased when presented in a stanza form
as a poem.
•
•
•
•
Stanza often fall in to related pairs of ideas (‘strophes’).
Strophes make up larger units that make up ‘parts’
Parts make up the story as a whole.
In essence, stanza can be viewed as a group of lines relating to a
single topic encapsulating a perspective.
Stanza Analysis
NQTs Narratives
Stanza Form
Why didn’t you mark them like, the 1st October?
Well, because I’m not Superman, I would answer
I’m not a superhero,
I’m just a human being. (p.7)
I was expected to be left to my own devices.
But this is like being thrown,
being thrown in the Atlantic Ocean.
With a, with a 20lbs weight.
(p.14)
Who supports who?
it’s done and dusted you broke it in the relationship,
don’t give anything back, don’t give anything back
If she’s falling over, don’t pick her up
(p.21)
Thematic Analysis & Content
Analysis
Content Analysis (CA)
• There are different types of CA that can be
broadly categorised as either quantitative
or qualitative methods.
• The common factor is that of
systematically categorising data in order to
make sense of it;
• The differences lay in the ways that
categories are generated and applied to
the data.
Quantitative CA
• Data is categorised using predetermined categories that
are generated from sources outside of the data, usually
theory or previous research.
• The data is then sorted according to these categories in
terms of the frequency with which terms or phrases
occur.
• As a result the categorised data becomes largely
decontextualised.
• Counting codes makes qualitative CA a contentious
approach. By decontextualising the data it can be argued
that it is stripped of meaning and therefore lacking in
trustworthiness.
Qualitative CA: 3 approaches
Qualitative CA: 3 approaches
• Conventional CA: Categories are derived directly
from the text. Generally used with a studies aiming
to describe a phenomenon. Usually appropriate
when existing theory or research literature on a
phenomenon is limited
• Directed CA: Analysis starts with a theory/ research
findings as guidance for initial codes. The goal is to
validate or extend a theoretical framework or theory.
• Summative CA: Involves counting and comparisons,
usually keywords, followed by the interpretation of
the underlying context. Often used to analyse texts
and literature.
3 Phases of Analysis:
• Immersion: Engagement with the data. Reading
through the transcripts to make sense of the
whole before rearranging it into units for
analysis.
• Reduction: The researcher develops a
systematic approach to the data, using inductive
or deductive codes.
• Interpretation: There are many ways to go about
interpreting data, but will include re-organizing it,
writing descriptive and interpretive summaries,
displaying key results, and drawing and verifying
conclusions.
Example:
Thematic Analysis
• A method for identifying, analysing, and
reporting patterns (themes) within data.
• The “keyness” of a theme is not dependent on
quantifiable measures but in terms of whether it
captures something important in relation to the
overall research question.
• Aims to provide a rich thematic description of the
data set, so that the reader gets a sense of the
important themes. This might be a particularly
Inductive & Theoretical TA
• Inductive TA is data driven. The data is coded
without trying to fit it into a pre-existing coding
frame. This is useful when you are investigating
an under-researched area, or with participants
whose views on the topic are not known.
• Theoretical TA is driven by the researcher’s
theoretical or analytic interest in the area, and is
thus more explicitly analyst-driven. This form of
TA tends to provide less a rich description of the
data overall, and more a detailed analysis of
some aspect of the data.
Inductive and Theoretical TA
• The choice between inductive and theoretical TA
maps onto how and why you are coding the
data.
• You can either code for a quite specific research
question (the more theoretical approach) or:
• Have a more exploratory aims research the
specific research question can evolve through
the coding process (which maps onto the
inductive approach).
TA & Grounded Theory
• An inductive approach to thematic analysis
shares methodological similarities to
grounded theory.
• Some research that claims to be grounded
theory falls short of a full grounded theory,
as the analysis is not directed towards
theory-development.
Conducting TA
• Thematic analysis can be free from
epistemological positions.
• It is often criticised when studies fail to
provide a clear report of the specific
methods used, and its flexibility can mean
that a systematic approach is not adopted.
• It is important to describe the procedure of
the analysis, as well as being explicit
about the assumptions that informed it.
Conducting TA
• Thematic analysis seeks to identify
patterns and themes from within the data
whilst staying as close to the data as
possible so as to accurately reflect the
views. This must be done by the
researcher becoming very familiar with the
data.
The process
Thematic Maps
• TA usually involves producing a hierarchy
of themes and/or a map of how themes
relate to each other