Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology

The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology was developed by the American psychologist Amedeo Giorgi in the early 1970s. Giorgi based his method on principals laid out by philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as what he had learned from his prior professional experience in psychophysics. Giorgi was an early pioneer of the humanistic psychology movement, the use of phenomenology in psychology, and qualitative research in psychology, and to this day continues to advocate for the importance of a human science approach to psychological subject matter. Giorgi has directed over 100 dissertations that have used the Descriptive Phenomenological Method on a wide variety of psychological problems, and he has published over 100 articles on the phenomenological approach to psychology.

Giorgi promotes phenomenology as a theoretical movement that avoids certain reductionist tendencies sustained by many contemporary approaches to psychological research. According to the phenomenological psychological perspective espoused by Giorgi, researchers are encouraged to "bracket" their own assumptions pertaining to the phenomenon in question by refraining from positing a static sense of objective reality for oneself and the participants whose experiences are being studied. This allows the researchers to attend to the descriptions of the participants without forcing the meaning of the descriptive units into pre-defined categories.

An important aspect of the descriptive phenomenological method in psychology is the way by which it distinguishes itself from those approaches that are strictly interpretive. In this, Giorgi closely follows Husserl who proposes that "being given and being interpreted are descriptions of the same situation from two different levels of discourse." As such, in the Descriptive Phenomenological Method there are both descriptive and interpretive moments, but the researcher remains careful to attend to each type of act in unique ways. Through a sort of empathic immersion with the subjects and their descriptions, the researchers get a sense of the ways that the experiences given by the participants were actually lived, which is in turn described. During this process, however, theoretical or speculative interpretation should be avoided so as to flesh out the full lived meaning inherent to the descriptions themselves (Giorgi, 2009, p. 127). Interpretation may then occur to various extents during other phases of the research process, but only as it relates to implications of the results rather than the lived meaning of the participants' experiences.

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