IPA

Interpretative Phenomonological Analysis (IPA)

How do people make sense of their experience? Howdo  they define their experience and what meaning do they put to it? This is what IPA attempts to discover. The main aims are to explore lived experience and to closely examine how people make sense of these experiences. Discover common meaning for individual.

  • 3 theoretical underpinnings.
    1. Subjective experience.
    2. Hidden meaning. Hermeneutics – theory of interpretation “human existence is interpretative”.
    3. Idiography (individual cases in their unique context)
  • 2 positions: hermeneutics of empathy / hermeneutics of suspicion.
  • Questions asked are “what” and “how”

Steps:

  1. Reading and re-reading
  2. Initial noting in order – (descriptive, linguistic and conceptual comments)
  3. Developing emergent themes
  4. Searching for connections among emergent themes
  5. Moving to the next case
  6. Looking for patterns across
  7. Writing up