Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)
- Comes with own specific set of assumptions compared to thematic analysis which you create
- Small samples
- Creates thick data
- Interviews normally long
IPA as a specific approach
-Experience is close rather than per se = how they came to understand experience and what it meant to them
3 elements of IPA
- Takes a critical realist approach
- Idea there is a reality but can only know it in part
- Phenomenology:
- -> detailed examination of individuals lived experience
- Symbolic interactionism:
- Symbolic symbols help communication
- Idea that the mind and self emerge from social interactions and the meanings that symbols help
- Hermeneutics:
- -> Analysis/interpretation of experiences
- -> double hermeneutic:
- First round = ppts have to interpret their experience
- Second round = researchers have to understand and then interpret their interpretation
Idiographic approach taken by IPA
- Focus on individual
- Looks at how phenomena has been understood by particular people and contexts
- Doesnt mean just one person = done on case by case basis
Basic principles of IPA
- Open ended questions
- Inductive
- Idiotgraphic
- Assumes agency of individual = individual actively talking about their experience
- Dynamic interpretive endeavour = research involves in process of sense making
Using TA and IPA on one data set experiment (Spiers and Riley, 2019)
- Interviewed 47 GPs about depression, anxiety, stress and burnout
- TA applied to whole set and IPA on subsample
- TA provided breadth and broader insights into issues facing GPs
- IPA provided depth, exploring some of lived experience by GPS
Limitations of IPA
- Over-reliance on language
- Only works for ppts that can articulate experience
- Not always sufficiently interpretative
What are discourses?
- Ways of understanding particular ways of speaking
- Inter-related sets of texts that bring object into being
- DA use systematic study of text to assert the constructed effects of discourse
- Texts only meaningful when connected to other texts
- To understand meaning have to know context
Discourse analysis
- Involves strong, social constructionist view of the world
- Reflectivity is central
- Analyst first focus is on language and what it does in the world
- They must go beyond the data –> use theory to interpret
- Linguistic approach to talking that aims to see how the speakers choice of words construct the social object
2 principles of discourse analysis
Language does things:
- People use language and it re-creates knowledge and understanding
- Purposeful and helps structure lives
- Usually promotes one person or populations interest
People use discursive practices:
- way in which a discourse is acted on and circulated within a culture
- People use discursive practices because we are actively involved in reproducing DP
Linguistic features
- Focus on systematic, grammatical and pragmatic features of material
- Powerful discursive practice in political argument was to change verbs into nouns e.g. politicians dont say we are going to privatise the railways, they say there will be a privatisation of the rail ways
- Choice of grammatical form is a discursive practice which promotes interests of certain groups in society
Repertoires
- Usually arise at ideological dilemmas
- Used to construct alternative versions of events
- Analytic focus on variability across contexts
- Different linguistic repertoire in way scientists express themselves about the world:
Empiricist repertoire:
-In public texts vocab paints picture about empirically, knowable real world
Contingent repertoire:
- Done in private
- Scientists words described shifting world where facts were humanly constructed
- Was used when things went wrong
Other approaches to analysis
Discursive psychology:
- How people use discursive resources in order to achieve their objectives in social interaction
- More naturalistic than discourse analysis
Foucauldian discourse analysis:
-Looks at what kinds of object is constructed and its implication to subjectivity, self hood and power relations
Limitation if discourse analysis
- Embedded in social constructionism so inflexible to other approaches
- Heavily reflexive
