Analiza i Egzystencja
November 25, 2025
Paweł Gwiaździński, Magdalena Reuter
The microphenomenological interview method offers a second-person approach to studying subjective experience, addressing limitations of both third-person methods (which miss subjective consciousness) and first-person methods (which rely on the researcher's own experience). Developed by Claire Petitmengin, this method involves an interviewer guiding a participant to articulate the diachronic and synchronic structure of their lived experience, making it suitable for empirical cognitive science research seeking objective yet participant-centered data.
Analiza i Egzystencja
November 25, 2025
Paweł Gwiaździński, Magdalena Reuter
This article describes how to analyze a microphenomenological interview and compares that method with other qualitative approaches. The microphenomenological interview, developed by Claire Petitmengin, is a second-person technique that addresses challenges in studying subjective experience, such as distraction, goal preoccupation, and difficulty verbalizing lived experience. The analysis identifies minimal units of meaning (descriptemes) in structural sentences, which form descriptive categories. Through abstraction operations on synchronic and diachronic levels, increasingly general categories emerge. The method is contrasted with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, Grounded Theory, Front-Loaded Phenomenology, and Ethnography, and is shown to be a distinctive qualitative method for examining subjective experience.