IPA Notes:

History:
Jonathan Smith (1996)
Chapter One: What IPA is (Unit, Convergence/Divergence, Double Hermeneutics: human beings
and researchers)
IPA is concerned with making sense of an experience that one has been made cognizant of and
so becomes laden with significance. There are smaller units and larger units – the smallest units
being the minutiae of moments and larger ones comprise of several moments and events linked
by meaning. It is idiographic in its approach ─ the interest of IPA lies in what an experience is
like for a particular participant and similar others in order to explore in detail the similarities and
differences of an experience and see where they converge or diverge.
Researchers engage with double hermeneutics: a researcher makes sense of the participant’s
sense-making of an experience. And so, what access a researcher has to the experience is bound
by the participant’s account. How a researcher relates to the participant proceeds at two levels: as
a human being who thinks and feels, and as a researcher who does the same but systematically
and self-consciously.
Chapter 2: Theoretical Foundations ─ Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Idiography
Phenomenology is a pluralistic philosophical approach to the study of experience, with an
interest in thinking about what the experience of being human is like in terms of the things which
matter to us and which constitute the lived world; there is also an interest in how we might come
to understand what our experiences of the world are like. Phenomenology lends psychology a
manner of examining and comprehending lived experience.
Husserlian Phenomenology: how to attempt at capturing particular experiences as experience for
particular people; bracketing of the taken-for-granted world and eidetic reduction to arrive at
essence (Intentionality, Bracketing, Eidetic Reduction, Essence)
Phenomenology involves the careful examination of the elements of human experience.
How someone might come to know their own experience with depth and rigor in order to identify
the essential qualities and features of the experience. If done, then these essential qualities would
transcend the particular circumstances of their experience and illuminate a given experience for
others too.
“Go back to the things themselves” – where thing refers to experiential content of
consciousness. To savor the minutiae rather than to box and categorize experiences according to
preconceived ideas. This involves setting aside our natural attitudes in favor of a
phenomenological one: to gaze inward and examine our perceptions of objects. This means
attending to the taken-for-granted experience of an activity through reflection rather than
dwelling on its immediate manifestations
Husserl invokes the term, “intentionality” to describe the relationship between process
occurring in consciousness and the object of attention for that process. A consciousness-of
something. Example: if I think about an apple, my mind is oriented towards that apple and that I
am thinking, remembering it.
To adopt a phenomenological attitude (which intends to identify the core structures and
features of human experience) we must bracket (set aside) the taken-for-granted world in order to
concentrate on our perception of that world. It becomes an absolute attention to the taken-for-
granted. In such regard, you do not think separately of the content-structure and the experiential
features – you can only describe an intentional experience by including a description of the
object as such (physical, structural features)
Husserl’s phenomenological method proceeds through a series of reductions to cut off the
distractions and misdirections of one’s own assumptions and preconceptions and to focus upon
the essence of the experience of a given phenomenon. This is called “eidetic reduction” in which
one attempts to capture and establish what is at the core of the subjective experience of an object.
Eidetic reduction involves techniques in order to get at the essence – the set of invariant
properties lying underneath the subjective perception of individual manifestations of that type of
object.
Free imaginative variation where one carefully considers different possible instances of
the object. “What is it that makes this house a house and not a shop?” an endeavor that would
require us to draw upon our past experiences of houses and imagining new examples and
checking boundaries in order to arrive at what makes an object that object (a house is a house
because… what is at the core of its houseness? This is essence)
Heideggerian Phenomenology: humans are thrown into the world and so are embedded in it; our
being-in-the-world is temporal, perspectival, and always in-relation-to something; meaning-
making is central (Wordliness – the possible and the meaningful, situatedness, relatedness,
Dasein, thrown)
Heidegger questions the possibility of any knowledge outside an interpretative stance
whilst grounding this stance in the lived world (wordliness – meaning makes possible the world
as such [not for the existence of the world] but it makes for a significant world) Heidegger is
concerned with the ontological question of existence itself and with the practical activities we are
caught up in, and through which the world appears to us and is made meaningful. Heidegger is
concerned with what is possible (the embodied intentional actor) and what is meaningful (the
intersubjective), as beings are thrown into a world where things pre-exist and so cannot be
meaningfully detached from them. Dasein involves reflexive awareness

Hermeneutic and existential emphases in phenomenological philosophy.

 Meaning is fundamental, as all things we experience must first make sense
Dasein – there-being; the uniquely situated human being
::Dasein is always in a context (thrown into a world where things pre-exist—the context)
Intersubjectivity: shared, overlapping and relational nature of our engagement in the world. We
are with what we are with? In the sense that we are relational and always embedded, for the
dasein (selfhood) exists in relation. (different from Husserl who detaches the embodied from the
reflection, as in structure vs essence). For Heidegger, our relatedness to the world is an inherent
aspect of being human. Intersubjectivity is the concept which aims t describe this relatedness and
to account for our ability to communicate with and make sense of each other [I want to dance to
music right now]
Being-in-the-world (Dasein) is temporal and finite, relatedness and sociality

Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology: the body shapes the fundamental character of our knowing
about the world; the lived experience of being a body-in-the-world cannot be fully captured, but
must not be overlooked (Body-subjects – not objects subsumed in the world, but as subjects that
interact with the world; embodied nature of relationship with the world: all knowledge of the
world is possible for us because we interact with the world through our bodies and perception –
the self is different from the others—position of difference)
Shares with Husserl and Heidegger the commitment to understand being-in-the-world, but opts
(similar to Heidegger) for a more contextual phenomenology. They both emphasize the situated
and interpretive quality of our knowledge of the world.
Embodied nature of our relationship with the world. The body is the point at which we interface
with the world and make sense of it. This implies that there is a self and there is an other with
whom we are oriented to with oour bodies and senses. But this perception of the other begins
through a position of difference: I perceive anger and grief in another’s behaviors and body, but
they themselves are not grief nor anger. I only see it, but what I perceive is different from what
they have lived (then here a difference in significance and therefore of experience)

Sarterian Phenomenology: others experience the world as well and the world fits around them
differently- embedded, interpersonal, relational
Extends the project of existential phenomenology. Similar to Heidegger, we are caught up in
projects in the world (contextual), we have self that seeks for meaning: an action-oriented,
meaning-making self-consciousness that engages with the world.
Existence comes before essence – we are always becoming ourselves; the self is not a pre-
existing object but an ongoing project to be unfurled.
Absence-Presence is important in defining who we are and how we see the world:
 Nothingness – the absence of a thing changes the texture of the experience, whereas its
presence would fit everything else around it.
I don’t exist in isolation; others are there with their own projects and contexts:
Perception: 2-way look: perception of others means that we cannot just see an
event and expect that it unfurls experientially for others in a similar manner as it
does for us.
Perception also means that we are beings being perceived by others; our self-
consciousness becomes apparent when we become aware that we are an object
being watched—the emotions therein only make sense in an interpersonal context
For Sartre, human nature is becoming rather than being: people have the freedom to choose and
are responsible for their actions which are always embedded in an context: their individual life,
biographical history and the social climate in which the person acts
IPA: Heidegger says the worldliness of experience is significant; Sartre emphasizes that in this
world, our relations matter in that the absence and presence of these relationships would change
our experience of the world; that we are and our subjects are embedded in their own histories and
contexts that in turn creates differences in how we experience the world an relate to one another:
people engage in projects in the world, and the embodied, interpersonal, affective and moral
nature of encounters

Summary: What these philosophers have contributed to IPA

Husserl: importance and relevance of a focus on experience and perception
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre – people are embedded in a world of objects, relationships,
language, culture, projects and concerns, which move us away from the transcendental interests
and descriptive comments of Husserl towards a more interpretative and worldly position with a
focus on understanding the perspectival directedness of our involvement in the lived world – a
property both personal and inherent in the relationships to the world and others rather than ours
alone as beings in isolation.
Experience invokes a lived process, an unfurling of perspectives and meanings, unique to a
person’s embodied and situated relationship to the world.
In IPA, our attempts to understand the relationship of people to the world is interpretative and
will focus upon their attempts to make meanings out of their projects.
Hermeneutics – the theory of interpretation
Schleiermacher – grammatical and psychological interpretation. Grammatical: objective textual
meaning; psychological: individuality of the author or speaker
Believes that authors impress a particular kind of meaning to their productions given the
techniques they employ to produce it. Interpretations are available for readers, but these
interpretations must accommodate the wider context in which production occurred.
IPA: our interpretations do not mean to stake claims about what the participant is experiencing,
but rather that our interpretations and analyses can offer meaningful insights that exceed what
participants explicitly state
Schleiermacher: analysis of his procedure brings to consciousness what was unconscious for the
author, because to analyze the procedure is to conceive of his relationship to language through a
duplication of it which he may not be aware of.
IPA: added value to a production because we offer a perspective that the participant did not have.
Added value comes from systematic and detailed analysis, from connections that emerge through
having oversight of a larger data set, or some may come from a dialogue with psychological
theory.
Interpretation is possible because we share common ground with our participants for we are
human as well and we come to appreciate the differences through a comparison with ourselves.

Heidegger: lived time and experience in the world is accessible only through interpretation of
meaning.
Phenomenology for Heidegger is about the hidden meanings that are integral to what makes
something a thing and integral to its ability to produce the meanings it produces: what lies hidden
in contrast to what it shows and is being brought to light, but what is shown is inherent to its
properties and constitutes its meaning.

Phenomenon: perceptual; Logos: analytical

The primary aim is to examine the thing itself (Phenomenon), but requires us to facilitate and
grasp the showing (logos). Therefore, Phenomenology is Hermeneutic:
The thing appears in a way that is self-concealing; phenomenology is to seek meaning hidden by
that entity’s mode of appearing. Hermeneutics allows us to study this explicitly.
IPA: note how Heidegger connects phenomenology and interpretation (because duh, it’s the IP in
IPA) 2nd, Heidegger connects our bracketing as a cyclical endeavor: first, we engage with text by
interpreting it through our lens of fore-conceptions, then we bracket away our fore-conceptions
(prior assumptions) and allow the text to speak for itself and connect with our fore-structures.
(example ni author: encountering a text, I don’t really know which of my fore-strcutures are
relevant, but after engaging with the text, I can better know what my presuppositions are)

Gadamer
Interpretation is an iterative dialogic process where our preconceptions are imposed upon the text
and wrangled with as we come to know the text deeper. As we go more in depth, our
preconceptions are challenged, reworked into more suitable ones. This is the movement of
understanding and interpretation. A dialog of the old and the new.
Gadamer: the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself
in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings. The person is
prepared for the text to tell him something.

The Hermeneutic Circle

IPA is iterative: To understand any given part, you look to the whole; to understand the whole,
you look to the parts

Summary:
IPA is an interpretative phenomenological approach and therefore Heidegger’s explicit ascription
of phenomenology as a hermeneutic enterprise is significant.
IPA is concerned with examining how a phenomenon appears, and the analyst is implicated in
facilitating and making sense of this appearance. Heidegger and Gadamer give insightful and
dynamic descriptions of the relationship between the fore-understanding and the new
phenomenon being attended to. These help to thicken our understanding of the research process.
There are a number of ways in which IPA is instantiating the hermeneutic circle

Idiography: being concerned with the particular

Detail and depth, must be systematic and thorough
Commitment to understanding how a phenomena is understood by particular people in a
particular context, must use small and purposively-selected and carefully-situated samples
Prescribes a different way of establishing generalizations by locating them in the particular and
developing them more cautiously.
The focus on the particular doesn’t mean a focus on the individual.
On the one hand, experience is uniquely embodied, situated and perspectival = amenable to an
idiographic approach.
On the other hand, it is also a worldly and relational phenomenon = a concept of person which is
not quite so discrete and contained as the typical understanding of an ‘individual’.
Dasein is always in-relation-to something, so it isn’t the unitary person and what we see is not
only a property of the person. Rather, looking at individuals can offer a unique perspective on
their relationship to or involvement in a phenomena of interest:
Dasein is not the assemblage of dispersed and disparate personae commonly posited by
social constructionism (e.g. see Gergen, 1991) – but it is thoroughly immersed and
embedded in a world of things and relationships. Because Dasein’s experience is
understood to be an in-relation-to phenomenon, it is not really a property of the
individual per se. However, a given person can offer us a personally unique perspective
on their relationship to, or involvement in, various phenomena of interest.
Analytic Induction: a hypothesis is tested out case by case, wherein after each case the
hypothesis is revised to fit the case in order to arrive at a final theoretical statement that fits all
cases
We have been arguing for a role for the case study, and an idiographic level of analysis. We must
recognize that the particular and the general are not so distinct, however. Thus Warnock (1987)
makes the important point that delving deeper into the particular also takes us closer to the
universal. We are thus better positioned to think about how we and other people might deal with
the particular situation being explored, how at the deepest level we share a great deal with a
person whose personal circumstances may, at face value, seem entirely separate and different
from our own. Thus in some ways the detail of the individual also brings us closer to significant
aspects of the general.

IPA and the Theory

Key points:
1. Phenomenological (draw on the core ideas of philo discussion above): Detailed
examination of lived experience where the experience speaks for itself rather than from
predefined category systems
a. Phenomenology is a lived dynamic activity
b. Systematic and attentive reflection on everyday experience (Husserl)
c. Experience is a particular moment of significance to a person with which they
engage in with conscious awareness
d. Thus IPA is concerned with human lived experience, and posits that experience
can be understood via an examination of the meanings which people impress upon
it. These meanings, in turn, may illuminate the embodied, cognitive-affective and
existential domains of psychology. People are physical and psychological entities.
They do things in the world, they reflect on what they do, and those actions have
meaningful, existential consequences.
2. Hermeneutics:
a. Interpretative Process (Heidegger)
i. Hermeneutic process: interpretation ( Heideggerian, Gadamerian) –
 1. Appearing (Heidegger) - [interpretation] a phenomenon ready to
shine forth but detective work is required to facilitate its coming
forth and then to make sense of it through interpretative
engagement
a. Requires that bracketing in order to focus on what must be
interpreted to engage in this interpretative process.
Reflective practices are also cyclical. In this manner, one
may observe and acknowledge one’s preconceptions as
they engage with the text.
2. The Double Hermeneutic Process- researcher is making sense of
participant making sense of something
a. First sense of DH: Participant’s meaning making is first-
order; researcher’s sense-making is second-order:
researcher draws upon everyday human resources to make
sense of the world, but unlike the participant, researcher
has access only to what participant reports about
experience.
i. Shifting focus from the self and onto the participant
with preconceptions set aside, attending closely to
facilitate uncovering the participant’s experience.
Then to re-engage with their experiences with prior
conceptions and personal experience. Then circle
back to the interview and engage with the text
anew.
b. Second sense of DH: hermeneutics of empathy combines
with hermeneutics of questioning ─ adopting an insider
perspective, while at the same time, looking at things from
a different angle next to the participant. Trying to
understand what it is like for someone while also analyzing,
illumination, and making sense of something.
ii. Successful IPA reads within the terms of the text, even if it uses multi-
level analyses of text: example, engaging with main emerging substantive
themes, then looking at metaphors pax used, then detailed reading of the
temporal construction of her account. Then a fourth level of analysis
which contrasted these interpretations with a psychoanalytic reading.
iii. Analytic process if geared towards learning both about the person
providing the account and the subject matterof account (Schleiermacher vs
Gadamer)
iv. :: IPA requires phenomenology in that it requires one to get close to the
personal experience of the participant; it requires hermeneutics because
this process of getting within the thick of the experience and seeing the
phenomenon is an interpretative endeavor
3. Idiographic commitment: particular pax in particular contexts, exploring personal
perspectives, case  general claims
a. Offers detailed nuanced analyses of particular instances of lived experience
b. Case studies with insightful analysis of data from a sensitively conducted
interview on a topic of considerable importance to the participant contribute to
psychology
c. Detailed examination of cases but then moving to examination of similarities and
differences across cases to produce fine-grained accounts of patterns of meaning
for participants reflecting upon a shared experience.
i. It should be possible to parse the account both for shared themes and for
the distinctive voices and variations on those themes
ii. Prioritizes detailed analyses of particular cases of actual life and lived
experience
iii. Contribution to psychology comes from conneting findings to the extant
psychological literature. IPA helps readers see how the case can shed light
on existing nomothetic research (part and whole relationship)
1. Readers can draw upon experiential knowledge and think of
implications of the IPA to their own work as they examine the case
2. Insightful case studies may take us into the universal because it
touches on what it is to be human at its most essential – specifics
are unique, but they are hung on what is shared and communal.