IV-INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

A. THEORETICAL ORIGINS
Hermneutics- the practical and philosophical concern with the process of interpretation.
In IPA it two stage interpretation process or a double hermeneutic.
“ The participants are trying to make sense of their world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants
trying to make sense of their world”.
Idiography- an approach committed to understanding each individual on its own term
“The aim of IPA is to explore in detail individual personal and lived experiences and to examine how participants are
making sense of their personal and social world.”
B. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• As has been stated, IPA is concerned with the in –depth exploration of the personal and lived experience of the
individual and with how participants are making sense of the lived experience.
• Good IPA studies tend to tap into “hot cognition” , engaging with issues that are current, emotive and
sometimes dilemmatic.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Examples of psychological research questions addressed in IPA studies.
• How does a woman’s sense of identity change during the transition of motherhood? (Smith, 1999)
• What sense do people who have had a heart attack make of what has happened? (French et al., 2005)
• What is it like to experience addiction to alcohol and how does this affect self and identity? (Shinebourne &
Smith, 2009)
• How do young people with psychosis experience and interpret personal romantic relationships? (Redmond et
al., 2010)
• What is the experience of deciding whether to take a genetic test or not like? (Smith et al., 2013)
C. SAMPLING SIZE
• IPA studies are conducted on relatively small sample sizes for individual transcripts or accounts takes a long
time.
• There seems to have been some consensus that between six and eight participants is an appropriate number for
an IPA study. It provides enough cases to examine similarities and differences between participants.
• Usually try and find a fairly homogenous sample.
• It uses purposive sampling to closely defined group or set criteria for whom the research questions will be
significant.
D. DATA COLLECTION: SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
• SEMI STRUCTURED INTERVIEW
• An interview that starts with an interview schedule (guide rather than dictated) but that moves
flexibility to follow up the concerns and interest of the participants.
• Ordering of questions is less important.
• Depends on established empathic relationship with the participants
• Facilitating their giving their account of the topic of interest in their own words and in their own way.
• It also possible to collect rich verbal accounts by other means: Autobiograhical or personal accounts (keeping
diaries).
INTERVIEW SCHEDULE
1. Can you tell me about what your life was like as a child and when you were growing up?
Prompt: Might want to focus on particular age points- child/teenager/young
adult/family/school/college/work/relationships.
1. Can you tell me about times when you have been involved in conflictual situation when you were growing up?
Prompt: Might want to focus on particular age points/contexts- school/family, etc.
description/cause/protagonist/actions/affect/cognitive response then.
3. Can you tell me what the word ‘anger’ means to you?
4. Can you tell me about times when you’ve been angry when you were growing up? Prompt: Maybe you focus
on particular age points/contexts- school/family, etc.
description/cause/protagonist/actions/affect/cognitive response then. What about more recently?
5. Can you tell me how you have been acted on that anger?

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 Prompt: Age points/context
Audio Recorder
• For IPA, it is necessary to audio-record and transcribe the whole interview.
• Transcripts is a time consuming business: you can expect an hour of interviewing to take seven hours or more to
transcribe.
E. DATA ANALYSIS:
Stage 1: Initial readings of the transcript
• First, during transcription, the interviewer kept a record of initial thoughts, comments and points of potential
significance.
• Second, each transcript was read several times and the right-hand margin was used to make notes on anything that
appeared significant and or interest.
With each reading, the researcher should expect to feel more immersed in the data, becoming more responsive
to what is being said.

Stage 2. Identifying and labelling themes

• Returning to the transcript and using the left hand margin to transform initial notes and ideas into more specific
themes or phrases.
• Caution is essential at this point so that the connection between participant’s own words and the researcher’s
interpretation is not lost.

Stage 3. Linking themes and identifying thematic clusters

• Consist of establishing connections between the preliminary themes and clustering them appropriate.
• As part of this process, it may be useful to ‘imagine a magnet with some of the themes pulling others in and
helping to make sense of them’.
• This process is inevitably selective so that some of the themes may be dropped either because they do not fit
well with the emerging structure or because, within the emerging analysis, they do not have a strong enough
evidence base.

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Stage 4. Producing a summary table of superordinate themes
• Finally, a table is produced that shows each superordinate theme and the themes that comprise it.
• These clusters are a given a label (a superordinate them title) that conveys the conceptual nature of the themes
there in.
• Key words from the participants are used to remind the researcher what prompted the themes.

F. PRESENTATION OF THE ANALYSIS IN NARRATIVE FORM

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