Thematic Moment Analysis: A Didactic Application of a Procedure for Phenomenological Analysis of Narrative Data.

Abstract

Following in the theoretical and methodological roots of the 'Duquesne school,' this work presents a procedure for the phenomenological analysis of narrative data. After describing its 'approach,' this work lays out the procedure for 'thematic moment analysis' using the work of Giorgi as a point of reference. Idiographic results of single datum of being afraid are presented along with the steps through which this 'idiographic thematic narrative' was developed. Procedures for arriving at 'comparative analysis' of more than one piece of data are presented and distinguished from claims of generality sought by works drawing on larger data pools. Finally, this work discusses issues of internal and external validity both specifically in regards to the 'thematic moments' procedure and in terms of phenomenological research in general.

Thematic Collation: An Illustrative Analysis of the Experience of Regret

“…The demarcation of thematic moments (see Garza 2004) rests on the foundational work of Giorgi. However, it takes as its mode of demarcation the identification by the researcher, informed by explication guiding questions, of moments in the data taken to be revelatory of themes of the experience under investigation.…”

“…The explication guiding question for this research was: How is this situation revelatory of the lived experience of regret? A moment is an aspect of the data (sentences, words, phrases, 2 even the "voice" or "tone" of the data 3 ) that coheres about and illuminates a theme of the experience under investigation 4 (Garza 2004). Like meaning units for Giorgi, these moments show themselves to the researcher's intuition in light of a guiding interest or question being investigated.…”

“….to want to have the cube just by itself, not as founded on its manifolds of presentations" (Sokolowski 2001, p. 25). The moments identified by the researcher present an "aspect" or "face" of the phenomenon under investigation -a sort of touchstone moment by which the rest of the data can be rendered sensible from a particular vantage point (Garza 2004). Since like meaning units, the moments are not objectively present in the data, it follows that "all researchers would not have to have identical [moments] for the procedure to be valid" (Giorgi & Giorgi 2003, p. 252).…”

“…The data presented here are analyzed at the level of the assembled thematic clusters. (For a complete description and examples of analysis of individual moments, see Garza [2004] and the appendix. For an example utilizing the step of intermediate analysis of the individual moments that comprise each cluster, see Waugh [2005].…”

Ethics and the Primacy of the Other: A Levinasian Foundation for Phenomenological Research

“…This paper seeks to explore the practical implications of Levinas's phenomenology of the Other for existential-phenomenological research in the tradition of the so-called "Duquesne School" and at the University of Dallas (see Garza, 2004, for a broader discussion of this lineage). It is acknowledged that there is a wide variety of phenomenological research done elsewhere, including Duquesne University (for more detailed accounts of this lineage, see Polkinghorne, 1989;Smith, 1983Smith, , 2002and von Eckartsberg, 1998) and Seattle University (Halling, Kunz, & Rowe, 1994).…”