Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Abstract

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...

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