Does anyone have good examples of phenomenological analysis?

From Wikipedia:

Data collection does not set out to test hypotheses, and this stance is maintained in data analysis. The analyst reflects upon his or her own preconceptions about the data, and attempts to suspend these in order to focus on grasping the experiential world of the research participant. Transcripts are coded in considerable detail, with the focus shifting back and forth from the key claims of the particant, to the researcher’s interpretation of the meaning of those claims. IPA’s hermeneutic stance is one of inquiry and meaning-making,[3] and so the analyst attempts to make sense of the participant’s attempts to make sense of their own experiences. Thus, one might use IPA if one had a research question which aimed to understand what a given experience was like (phenomenology) and how someone made sense of it (interpretation).

Analysis in IPA is said to be ‘bottom-up.’ This means that the researcher generates codes from the data, rather than using a pre-existing theory to identify codes that might be applied to the data. IPA studies do not test theories, then, but they are often relevant to the development of existing theories. One might use the findings of a study on the meaning of sexual intimacy to gay men in close relationships, for example, to re-examine the adequacy of theories which attempt to predict and explain safe sex practices.[4] IPA encourages an open-ended dialogue between the researcher and the participants and may, therefore, lead us to see things in a new light.

What you would be doing, I think, is to imagine you are a participant in the game, or possibly the player or the person who designed the game, or maybe more likely, all three. You would observe the actions of these characters and try to understand the action from their points of view.

What did the designer have in mind? What kind of experience did he want players to have? Why does the player play? What narrative does he construct while playing? What are his emotions? Who does he identify with? What satisfaction does he get?

Then what is the main character in the game? What motivates him? What does he do? Why does he do it? What motives do we attribute to him? What does he feel?

All this must be done very carefully. In the case of this, I would transcribe the words of the character (if he speaks aloud). Otherwise I would videotape the player and the action on the screen. I would code that carefully, and of course, that is the raw material for my analyses.

With the designer, you kind of have to make it up, unless you can interview them. But it is interesting trying to infer what the designer might have had in mind.

What you are trying to do is to create meaning out of all the little bits of stuff you code. I don’t know what your age is, but I would recommend using Atlas.ti to do you analysis if you want to make the job easier. I’m guess you’re not a grad student, so that will be a bit much, unless your school has copies of the software.

Phenomenological analysis is just a method. More simply you are just analyzing your material like you would if you were doing a book report back in the day. Of course, it’s a bit more complex than that, but you describe the action and then tell us what it means. When you tell us what it means, you have to analyze it at a very finely granular level. That’s where the coding comes in.

I’m not sure if you will add much doing it this way, but it is always possible you will find things when you focus at a small level that you wouldn’t find just mulling it in your head. Still, if you have video or text, it allows you to look at one little chunk at a time, and that can help you find stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily find.

Anyway, let me know if you have questions. This is what I do for a living.

@wundayatta I certainly appreciate this answer. I am a graduate student, but not one who specializes in coding in any form, more in cultural phenomena. This particular methodology really just is killing me because it requires a certain confidence in what you observe. As someone coming from more of a discourse analysis field, I usually can fall back on many other sources. How do you “verify” your phenomena? In your opinion.

It’s not all that different from discourse analysis. In fact, from my perspective, they are all very similar.

Are you an anthropologist? Is this a methods course?

In discourse analysis you are looking at what people say about a subject. You may look at many different voices, and I’m not sure about how you handle the actual analysis as a matter of practice. Do you take notes? If so, what do you take notes on? Later on, how do you organize your notes? How do you weave the actual text together with your notes and your analysis?

It is so similar to what you are doing that I think you are making it into something it isn’t. Take notes on the material. Look at how you interact with the game. Write down notes about what you notice. What do you think during this scene? What about during that scene? What is the action on the screen? What does it make you think about? What back story do you attribute to it? How do you explain it to yourself?

With software, you can isolate chunks of the video for analysis. You can note when certain images appear. When certain action sequences occur. You can code all the action sequences as action sequences. You can code the still sequences as still sequences. THese are just examples. I don’t know the game and so I don’t know what I would see in them, nor how I would code them. You are looking for things that stand out at you—key memes, just as you would in discourse analysis.

Maybe you have to take it second by second, and take notes on each second. You may have to video your interaction in order to do this kind of analysis. I don’t know what your professor is expecting, but that might be a useful tool.

Does this make sense?