Writing Phenomenological-Psychological Descriptions: An Illustration Attempting to Balance Texture and Structure

Abstract

Reflexive knowledge (Hertz, 1997; Myerhoff & Ruby, 1982) provides insight into the workings of the social and experiential worlds as well as into how that knowledge came into existence. This concern is a theme in reflexive feminist ethnography (Reinharz, 1997), in hermeneutic phenomenology (Van Manen, 1990), and in auto/biographical studies (Sparkes, 1995). Within this perspective there is no ‘voiceless’ writing (Charmaz & Mitchell, 1997), and there is an increasing concern in qualitative research to pursue the epistemological, ethical, and methodological implications of such reflexivity. Such a challenge includes a concern to care for our informants’ voices, to care for the human phenomena that are being expressed, to care for how our own voice as writer reveals, conceals, and co-creates, and to care for our readers as part of the ongoing conversation. All of these things are co-constitutive of human understanding and there are interesting attempts to write up our insights from qualitative enquiry that respects such complexity. It is within this spirit that Day Sclater (1998b) draws on the work of Donald Winnicott to show how informants’ stories can be seen as ‘transitional phenomena’ which are part of an ongoing conversation between private and public worlds, between interviewer and interviewee, and between the discovery and co-creation of meanings and subjectivities.