Characteristics of Phenomenology Research :
1. Phenomenology focuses on the appearance og things, a return to things just as they are given, removed from everyday routines and biases, from what we are told is true in nature and in the natural world of everyday living.
2. Phenomenology is concerned with wholeness, with examining entities from many sides, angles, and perspectives until a unified vision of the essences of a phenomenon or experience is achieved.
3. Phenomenology seeks meanings from appearances and arrives at essences through intuition and reflection on conscious acts of experience, leading to ideas, concepts, judgments, and understandings.
4. Phenomenology committed to descriptions of experiences, not explanations or analyses. Descriptions retain, as close as possible, the original texture of things,, their phenomenal qualities and material properties. Descriptions keep a phenomenon alive, illuminate its presence, accentuate its underlying meanings, enable the phenomenon to linger, retain its spirit, as near to its actual nature as possible.
5. In descriptions one seeks to present in vivid and accurate terms, in complete terms, what appears in consciousness and in direct seeing images, impressions, verbal pictures, features of heaviness, lightness, sweetness, saltines, bitterness, sourness, openness, constrictedness, coldness, warmth, roughness, smoothness, sense qualities of sound, touch, sight and taste, and aesthetic properties.
6. Phenomenology is rooted in questions that give a direction and focus to meaning, and in themes that sustain an inquiry, awaken further interest and concern, and account for our passionate involvement with whatever is beeing experienced. In a phenomenological investigation the researcher is has personal interest in whatever she or he seeks to know, the researcher is intimately connected with the phenomenon. The puzlement is autobiographical, making memory and history essential dimensions of discovery, in the present and extensions into the future.
7. Subject and object are integrated - what I see is interwoven with how I see it, with whom I see it, and with whom I am. My perception, the thing I perceive, and the experience or act interelate to make the objective subjective and the subjective objective.
8. At all points in an investigation intersubjective reality is part of the process, yet every perception begins with my own sense of what an issue or object or experience is and means.
9. The data of experience, my own thinking, intuiting, reflecting, and judging are regarded as the primary evidences of scientific investigation.
10. The research question that is the focus of and guides an investigation must be carefully constructed, avery word deliberately chosen and ordered in such a way that the primary words appear immediately, capture my attention, and guide and direct me in the phenomenological process of seeing, reflecting, and knowing. Every method relates back to the question, is developed solely to illuminate the question, and provides a portrayal of the phenomenon that is vital, rich, and layered in its textures and meanings.
