논문리뷰5: Choose your method: a comparison of phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory

Starks, Helene, and Susan Brown Trinidad. "Choose your method: A comparison of phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory." Qualitative health research 17.10 (2007): 1372-1380.

1) The purpose of this article is to compare three qualitative approaches that can be used in health research: phenomenology,

discourse analysis, and grounded theory. The goal in phenomenology is to study how people make meaning of their lived experience; discourse analysis examines how language is used to accomplish personal, social, and political projects; and grounded theory develops explanatory theories of basic social processes studied in context. 

2) Phenomenology: It involves the use of thick description and close analysis of lived experience to understand how meaning is created through embodied perception. Phenomenological analysis seeks to capture the meaning and common features, or essences, of an experience or event. We create meaning through the experience of moving through space and across time.

Discourse analysis: it is concerned with language-in-use; how individuals accomplish personal, social, and political projects through language. Language both mediates and constructs our understanding of reality. Careful analysis of language (building tasks of language: significance, activities, relationships, politics, connections, and sign systems and knowledge) can shed light on the creation and maintenance of social norms, the construction of personal and group identities, and the negotiation of social and political interaction. 

Grounded theory: affected by symbolic interactionism, which posits that meaning is negotiated and understood through interactions with others in social processes. The goal is to develop an explanatory theory of basic social processes, studied in the environments in which they take place. six Cs of social processes: causes, contexts, contingencies, consequences, covariances, and conditions to understand the patterns and relationships among these elements. 

3) the approaches as methods

1) framing the research question: phenomenologists ask questions about lived experiences, discourse analysts explore how knowledge, meaning, identities, and social goods are negotiated and constructed through language-in-use. 

grounded theorists inquire about how social structures and processes influence how things are accomplished through a given set of social interactions

2) sampling: Phenomenologists are interested in common features of the lived experience; Within discourse analysis sampling different groups that participate within a given discourse can illuminate the ways in which participants appeal to external discourses and identify their influence on the discourse under study. Grounded theory relies on theoretical sampling, which involves recruiting participants with differing experiences of the phenomenon so as to explore multiple dimensions of the social processes under study. The researcher continues to add individuals to the sample until she reaches theoretical saturation.

3) data collection: Data collection strategies for all three approaches can use a mix of observation, interviews, and close reading

of extant texts. In phenomenology observation of how participants live in their environment through time and space provides clues about how they might embody meaning. For discourse analysis observing participants’ speech provides insight about how the participants deploy language to accomplish their objectives and position themselves in relation to others. In grounded theory observation allows the researcher to see how social processes are constructed and constrained by the physical and social environments

in which they are practiced.

4) analytic methods: The general methods of interpretation are fairly similar across the three approaches. Interpretive analysis is an iterative, inductive process of decontextualization and recontextualization. During decontextualization he analyst separates data from the original context of individual cases and assigns codes to units of meaning in the texts. In recontextualization he or she examines the codes for patterns and then reintegrates, organizes, and reduces the data around central themes and relationships drawn across all the cases and narratives.

5) coding: Creswell (1997) has described a systematic process for coding data from a phenomenological inquiry in which specific statements are analyzed and categorized into clusters of meaning that represent the phenomenon of interest.

The objective of a discourse analysis is to understand what people are doing with their language in a given situation. Thus, the coding phase for a discourse analysis entails identifying themes and roles as signified through language use. 

Grounded theory involves a constant comparison method of coding and analyzing data through three stages: open coding (examining, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing data); axial coding (reassembling data into groupings based on relationships and patterns within and among the categories identified in the data); and selective coding (identifying and describing the central phenomenon, or “core category,” in the data

6) the role of the analyst and assuring trustworthiness: In phenomenology and grounded theory researchers engage in the selfreflective

process of “bracketing,” whereby they recognize and set aside (but do not abandon) their a priori knowledge and assumptions, with the analytic goal of attending to the participants’ accounts with an open mind.

Additional reflexive practices include consulting with colleagues and mentors and writing memos throughout the analysis to help analysts examine how their thoughts and ideas evolve as they engage more deeply with the data. Memos also serve the function of establishing an audit trail, whereby the analyst documents her thoughts and reactions as a way of keeping track of emerging impressions of what the data mean, how they relate to each other, and how engaging with the data shapes her understanding of the initial hypotheses.