HOW TO DO PHENOMENOLOGY THE EASIEST TYPE

DESCRIBING EXPERIENCE Personal experience is often a good starting point for phenomenological inquiry. Our personal life experiences are immediately accessible to us in a way that no one else's are. However, the phenomenologist does not want to trouble the reader with purely private, autobiographical facticities of one's life. In drawing up personal descriptions of lived experiences, the phenomenologist knows that the patterns of meaning of one's own experiences are also the possible experiences of others, and therefore may be recognizable by others. To conduct a personal description of a lived experience, I try to describe my experience as much as possible in experiential terms, focusing on a particular situation or event. I try, as Merleau-Ponty says, to give a direct description of my experience as it is, without offering causal explanations or interpretive generalizations of my experience.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE (1) Describe the experience as much as possible as you live(d) through it. Avoid causal explanations, generalizations, or abstract interpretations. (2) Describe the experience from the inside, as it were-almost like a state of mind: the feelings, the mood, the emotions, etc.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE 2 (3) Focus on a particular example or incident of the object of experience: describe specific events, an adventure, a happening, a particular experience. (4) Try to focus on an example of the experience which stands out for its vividness, or as it was the first time.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE 3 (5) attend to how the body feels, how things smell(ed), how they sound(ed), etc. (6) avoid trying to beautify your account with fancy phrases or flowery terminology.

HOW TO DO PHENOMENOLOGY it is important to realize that it is not of great concern whether this experience actually happened in exactly that way. Phenomenology is less concerned with the factual accuracy than with the plausibility of an account--whether it is true to our living sense of it.

START WITH YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE