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Phenomenography


Phenomenography is a qualitative research methodology, within the interpretivist paradigm, that investigates the qualitatively different ways in which people experience something or think about something. It is an approach to educational research which appeared in publications in the early 1980s. It initially emerged from an empirical rather than a theoretical or philosophical basis.

While being an established methodological approach in education for several decades, phenomenography has now been applied rather extensively in a range of diverse disciplines such as environmental management, computer programming, workplace competence, and internationalization practices.

Phenomenography's ontological assumptions are subjectivist: the world exists and different people construct it in different ways and from a non-dualist viewpoint (viz., there is only one world, one that is ours, and one that people experience in many different ways). Phenomenography's research object has the character of knowledge; therefore its ontological assumptions are also epistemological assumptions.

Its emphasis is on description. Its data collection methods typically include close interviews with a small, purposive sample of subjects, with the researcher "working toward an articulation of the interviewee’s reflections on experience that is as complete as possible". Description is important because our knowledge of the world is a matter of meaning and of the qualitative similarities and differences in meaning as it is experienced by different people.

A phenomenographic data analysis sorts perceptions which emerge from the data collected into specific "categories of description." The set of these categories is sometimes referred to as an "outcome space." These categories (and the underlying structure) become the phenomenographic essence of the phenomenon. They are the primary outcomes and are the most important result of phenomenographic research. Phenomenographic categories are logically related to one another, typically by way of hierarchically inclusive relationships, although linear and branched relationships can also occur. That which varies between different categories of description is known as the "dimensions of variation."

The process of phenomenographic analysis is strongly iterative and comparative. It involves continual sorting and resorting of data and ongoing comparisons between the data and the developing categories of description, as well as between the categories themselves.


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