======= Date Modified 29 Jan 2009 14:16:52 =======
Hi there,
Perhaps posting under this topic must be too late but let me explain phenomenography "in the most basic possible way" and "as if you were explaining it to a child". I am doing PhD, chose phenomenography and have done my empirical study. Hope the following will help.
Please note that I skip all statements about ontology, epistemology, etc.
As some people already indicated clearly, phenomenography is not phenomenology. My understanding of the difference is like, the former is to describe (-graphy) a phenomenon. The latter is to structure (-logy) the meaning essense of a phenomenon. I will not go in detail about this aspect either because you want to know what phenomenography is. If you were really interested in DOING phenomenography, you will be able to find out by yourself.
Phenomenography is an interpretive research method to investigate and describe qualitatively different ways in which [a group of] people experience a particular phenomenon. The best reference to learn at the PhD level is "Learning and Awareness" by Marton and Booth (1997). Since phenomenography is "interpretive", it is obviously a qualitative research method.
I put my interpretation of "a group of people" because you cannot study one individual by using the phenomenographic approach. This is another significant difference between phenomenology and phenomenography. Phenomenological research allows studying the experience of one individual, phenomenography does not.
Phenomenography looks at "conceptions" that means what and how [a group of] people experience (think, understand and conceive, etc.) something. Thus, typical research topics are: Nurses' conceptions of nursing; teachers' experiences of teaching; or students' conceptions of learning. I looked at workers' understanding of a management concept [XYZ] in my study. Thus, my research question was two: What does the concept of XYZ mean to workers? and How did those workers understand XYZ? These questions was also used as interview questions. The result I found was four meanings of XYZ (this is to answer the "what" question) and four approaches to understand XYZ (this is to answer the "how" question). At the end, I developed the list of categories and a conceptual map to "describe" the phenomenon of XYZ.
I hope this explanation can be a good starting point to understand phenomenography ;-)