Metoda analizy wywiadu mikrofenomenologicznego – założenia i proces analizy.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe the method of analysis of the microphenomenological interview and to compare this method to other similar methods. Microphenomenological method was proposed by the French phenomenologist Claire Petitmengin. The microphenomenological interview is a qualitative, second-person method of studying experience that responds to problems resulting from the study of subjective experience, such as, among others, distraction, preoccupation with the goal of action, inaccessibility of experience in real time, or difficulty in putting into words the lived experience. The aim of this method is to discover the structure of experience in its diachronic and synchronic dimensions. The interview is semi-structured and the questions asked are guided by the structure of the experience itself and cannot be suggestive. In this article, we present a method of analysis of the microphenomenological interview, although its first two parts are also devoted to the process of conducting it, in order to understand the idea of the interview. The process of analysis consists in identifying in structural sentences minimal units of meaning, which Petitmengin calls descriptemes, which create examples of descriptive categories. Moreover, this analysis also consists in the process of abstraction, which in the context of the microphenomenological interview means drawing from previously identified minimal structural statements, increasingly general descriptive categories. This is done on both synchronic and diachronic levels, through a series of abstraction operations. Abstraction operations are the main tools of analysis in this method. In this article, we present a method for analyzing the microphenomenological interview and we compare this method to other methods, such as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience (Stanghellini et al., 2021), Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), Front-Loaded Phenomenology (Gallagher, 2003), and Ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019). We show that the microphenomenological interview method is a unique and distinctive qualitative method for examining subjective experience.