INTRODUCTIONInterpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is concerned with the detailed examination of personal lived experience. IPA is part of a family of phenomenological psychology approaches, all of which differ to some degree in their theoretical emphases and methodological commitments but are in broad agreement about the relevance of an experiential perspective for the discipline.IPA avows a phenomenological commitment to examine a topic, as far as is possible, in its own terms. For IPA this inevitably involves an interpretative process on the part of both researcher and participant. IPA is concerned with the detailed examination of particulars, first providing an in-depth account of each case before moving to look for patternings of convergence and divergence across cases. A text offering a detailed account of the theoretical foundations and empirical practices of IPA was published in 2009 (Smith, Flowers and Larkin).IPA was first articulated in the UK in the 1990s and initially was picked up as an approach to the psychology of experience in health and clinical/counselling psychology. Since then it has considerably widened its reach. It is now one of the best established qualitative approaches in UK psychology but is also used increasingly by psychology researchers throughout the world. In parallel to this growth has been a broadening of the domains of inquiry IPA is employed in. One now finds IPA research in organizational studies (e.g. de Miguel, Lizaso, Larranaga & Arrospide, 2015;Tomkins & Eatough, 2014), education (e.g. Denovan & Macaskill, 2013;Thurston, 2014), health (Seamark et al. 2004, Cassidy et al. 2011, sports science (see Smith, in prep) and the humanities (Hefferon and Ollis, 2006). What appeals to researchers in these diverse fields is IPA's explicit commitment to understanding phenomena of interest from a first person perspective and its belief in the value of subjective knowledge for psychological understanding. 2Beyond these developments, IPA continues to mature with evidence of researchers adopting a creative and imaginative stance to the approach which is in keeping with its original spirit -to provide qualitative researchers with ways of thinking about and researching psychological topics which are underpinned by phenomenology and hermeneutics. As part of the process of helping researchers to conduct excellent hermeneutic phenomenological research, one of us has written papers elaborating evaluative criteria for what constitutes a good IPA study (Smith, 2011a(Smith, , 2011b) and these will be discussed later in the chapter.The chapter begins with a discussion of IPA's intellectual origins emphasizing the phenomenological and hermeneutic touchstones which inform it. Following this, some key characteristics of IPA will be identified and described, namely, experience, idiography and interpretation. IPA has always encouraged engagement with other qualitative approaches as well as working with developments in mainstream psychology and these will be reflected on paying particular attent...

INTRODUCTION Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is concerned with the detailed examination of personal lived experience. IPA is part of a family of phenomenological psychology approaches, all of which differ to some degree in their theoretical emphases and methodological commitments but are in broad agreement about the relevance of an experiential perspective for the discipline. IPA avows a phenomenological commitment to examine a topic, as far as is possible, in its own terms. For IPA this inevitably involves an interpretative process on the part of both researcher and participant. IPA is concerned with the detailed examination of particulars, first providing an in-depth account of each case before moving to look for patternings of convergence and divergence across cases. A text offering a detailed account of the theoretical foundations and empirical practices of IPA was published in 2009 (Smith, Flowers and Larkin). IPA was first articulated in the UK in the 1990s and initially was picked up as an approach to the psychology of experience in health and clinical/counselling psychology. Since then it has considerably widened its reach. It is now one of the best established qualitative approaches in UK psychology but is also used increasingly by psychology researchers throughout the world. In parallel to this growth has been a broadening of the domains of inquiry IPA is employed in. One now finds IPA research in organizational studies (e. (Hefferon and Ollis, 2006). What appeals to researchers in these diverse fields is IPA's explicit commitment to understanding phenomena of interest from a first person perspective and its belief in the value of subjective knowledge for psychological understanding. 2 Beyond these developments, IPA continues to mature with evidence of researchers adopting a creative and imaginative stance to the approach which is in keeping with its original spirit-to provide qualitative researchers with ways of thinking about and researching psychological topics which are underpinned by phenomenology and hermeneutics. As part of the process of helping researchers to conduct excellent hermeneutic phenomenological research, one of us has written papers elaborating evaluative criteria for what constitutes a good IPA study (Smith, 2011a, 2011b) and these will be discussed later in the chapter. The chapter begins with a discussion of IPA's intellectual origins emphasizing the phenomenological and hermeneutic touchstones which inform it. Following this, some key characteristics of IPA will be identified and described, namely, experience, idiography and interpretation. IPA has always encouraged engagement with other qualitative approaches as well as working with developments in mainstream psychology and these will be reflected on paying particular attention to cognition and language. This will be followed by a section examining the current picture of IPA research. We finish the chapter with some concluding thoughts. THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF IPA: PHENOMENOLOGY & HERMENEUTICS IPA has a long ...

Framework analysis is an approach to qualitative research which is being increasingly used across multiple disciplines, including psychology, social policy and nursing research. The stages of framework analysis have been described in published work, but the literature is lacking in articles describing how to conduct it in practice, particularly in the field of psychology, where researchers may be working as part of a team. Having used framework analysis on a study exploring adolescents' experiences of depression, we faced various challenges along the way and learned from experience how to use this approach to qualitative analysis. In this reflective article, we describe a worked example of using framework, which we hope will assist other researchers in deciding if this approach is suitable for their own research, and will provide guidance on how one might go about conducting framework analysis when working as part of a research team. We conclude that framework is a valuable contribution to qualitative methods in psychology, offering a pragmatic, flexible and rigorous approach to data analysis.

INTRODUCTIONInterpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is concerned with the detailed examination of personal lived experience. IPA is part of a family of phenomenological psychology approaches, all of which differ to some degree in their theoretical emphases and methodological commitments but are in broad agreement about the relevance of an experiential perspective for the discipline.IPA avows a phenomenological commitment to examine a topic, as far as is possible, in its own terms. For IPA this inevitably involves an interpretative process on the part of both researcher and participant. IPA is concerned with the detailed examination of particulars, first providing an in-depth account of each case before moving to look for patternings of convergence and divergence across cases. A text offering a detailed account of the theoretical foundations and empirical practices of IPA was published in 2009 (Smith, Flowers and Larkin).IPA was first articulated in the UK in the 1990s and initially was picked up as an approach to the psychology of experience in health and clinical/counselling psychology. Since then it has considerably widened its reach. It is now one of the best established qualitative approaches in UK psychology but is also used increasingly by psychology researchers throughout the world. In parallel to this growth has been a broadening of the domains of inquiry IPA is employed in. One now finds IPA research in organizational studies (e.g. de Miguel, Lizaso, Larranaga & Arrospide, 2015;Tomkins & Eatough, 2014), education (e.g. Denovan & Macaskill, 2013;Thurston, 2014), health (Seamark et al. 2004, Cassidy et al. 2011, sports science (see Smith, in prep) and the humanities (Hefferon and Ollis, 2006). What appeals to researchers in these diverse fields is IPA's explicit commitment to understanding phenomena of interest from a first person perspective and its belief in the value of subjective knowledge for psychological understanding. 2Beyond these developments, IPA continues to mature with evidence of researchers adopting a creative and imaginative stance to the approach which is in keeping with its original spirit -to provide qualitative researchers with ways of thinking about and researching psychological topics which are underpinned by phenomenology and hermeneutics. As part of the process of helping researchers to conduct excellent hermeneutic phenomenological research, one of us has written papers elaborating evaluative criteria for what constitutes a good IPA study (Smith, 2011a(Smith, , 2011b) and these will be discussed later in the chapter.The chapter begins with a discussion of IPA's intellectual origins emphasizing the phenomenological and hermeneutic touchstones which inform it. Following this, some key characteristics of IPA will be identified and described, namely, experience, idiography and interpretation. IPA has always encouraged engagement with other qualitative approaches as well as working with developments in mainstream psychology and these will be reflected on paying particular attent...

We describe here some of the developing conversations between “third phase” cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy. Contributors to these conversations treat cognition as an embodied, active, and situated phenomenon. We argue that, despite much promise, proper engagement with the foundational phenomenological concept of a situated, meaning-making person has yet to be fully reflected in these conversations. We note that the outcomes of this dialogue have important implications for the field of phenomenological psychology. In particular, we demonstrate that one qualitative method, interpretative phenomenological analysis, can make a useful contribution to the ongoing developments in this field. We suggest that it can provide a valuable hermeneutic counterpoint to the primacy of empiricist methods. Through reference to sustained examples from research participants’ accounts of chronic pain, we show how qualitative phenomenological approaches, such as interpretative phenomenological analysis, can illuminate the importance of situating embodied personal experience in the context of meaning, relationships, and the lived world.

Over the last few years there has been an increasing interest in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). These represent the latest Internetonly computer gaming experience consisting of a multi-player universe with an advanced and detailed world. One of the most popular (and largest) of these is Everquest. The data for this study were taken from a range of online gaming forums where individuals shared their experiences of playing EverQuest. Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a method for analyzing qualitative data and meaning making activities. The study presents an IPA account of online gamers who perceive themselves to play excessively. The aim of the study was to examine how individuals perceived and made sense of EverQuest in the context of their lives. It is clear that the accounts presented by players and ex-players appear to be 'addicted' to EverQuest in the same way that other people become addicted to alcohol or gambling. Most of the individuals in this study appear to display (or allude to) the core components of addiction such as salience,

This paper is concerned with illuminating how emotion (anger) and emotion-related phenomena such as feelings, thoughts and expressions appear to the individual person. In particular, it focuses on the role of feelings in emotion experience. It does this through the qualitative analysis of interview material from a single person case study using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The paper examines how the participant feels and experiences anger, the defining characteristics of anger episodes, and how the typical pattern of these episodes is disrupted by life-changes. The findings are examined in light of phenomenological ideas and the utility of these ideas for psychology's understanding of emotion argued for.

Policy-makers have identified an urgent need to improve our ability to detect and diagnose depression in adolescents. This study aims to explore the lived experience of depression in clinically referred adolescents. 77 adolescents, aged between 11 and 17 with moderate to severe depression, were interviewed as part of a randomised controlled trial, using the Expectations of Therapy Interview. Data were analysed qualitatively using framework analysis, with a focus on how the adolescents spoke about their depression. The study identified five themes: 1) Misery, despair and tears; 2) Anger and violence towards self and others; 3) A bleak view of everything; 4) Isolation and cutting off from the world; and 5) The impact on education. Researchers and policy-makers need to develop an understanding of depression grounded in the experiences of adolescents to improve detection and diagnosis of depression.