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Little is known about the lived experience of the older user of assistive technology. The aim of the investigation is to gain an appreciation of the experience of assistive technology (AT) in older people.

Qualitative phenomenology was conducted on individual interviews undertaken using a Husserlian phenomenological approach. The participants were six individuals, >65 years who all lived in supported housing.

Six key themes emerged from interviews: being unsure; being old; being a bother; being on my own; being neighbourly and being independent.

Reactions to assistive technology are highly individualised and salient. In order to humanise the technology it is necessary to understand the person who is using it. Further research in this area is a priority as AT evolves and matures.

This study offers a novel insight into a neglected but important area of concern for older people.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the articulation of the affordances of two qualitative methodologies when used within one study to address the multi-dimensional nature of the research phenomena.

This paper considers one example of combining narrative inquiry and phenomenological inquiry to construct new understandings of teacher learning from an Australian study.

The author draws on the individual meaning-making and shared social phenomena of professional learning explored for five secondary school teachers. Findings are accessed in two ways: narrative inquiry enables the construction of unique professional learning narratives and phenomenological inquiry proposes commonalities in the teachers’ experiences.

Selected examples from the study are used to explore what may be learnt from combining two interpretative methodologies within one study with limited references to the overall research findings.

These qualitative methodological designs and their implementation within one study have positive influences on the multifaceted nature of the construction of meaning-making in teacher professional learning. Furthermore, using two qualitative methodologies together provide insights on the study phenomena, in this instance, highlighting the personal aspect of expert teachers’ professional learning needs and the disruptive dissonance of ongoing problematics as central for the teachers throughout their professional learning.

This study offers one possibility for combining methodologies to access the meaning-making in teacher learning and one avenue for creating hermeneutic understanding in using the methods within this approach.

In this paper, the authors underpin thematic analysis with a philosophical and methodological dimension and present a nuanced perspective on the application of thematic analysis in a data-driven context. Thematic analysis is a widely used qualitative analytic method; it is perceived as a transparent approach that offers single meaning. However, through Husserlian descriptive phenomenology, this paper aims to examine issues regarding subject/object and multidimensional meanings and realities.

In most extant studies, thematic analysis has become a prescriptive approach. This emerging qualitative approach has been applied to a range of studies on social and organisational issues, knowledge management and education. However, despite its wide usage, researchers are divided as to its effectiveness. Many choose quantitative approaches as an alternative, and some disagree as to what counts as the definitive framework and process for thematic analysis. Consequently, the authors provide a level of validity for thematic analysis through emphasising a specific methodological approach based on ontological and epistemological positions.

Contrary to the common mantra from contemporary qualitative researchers who claim thematic analysis is often based on a static and enduring approach, the current paper highlights the dynamic nature of a thematic analytic approach and offers a deeper understanding of the ways in which researchers can use the right approach to understand the emerging complex data context.

Several insights regarding the literature on thematic analysis were identified, including the current conceptualisation of thematic analysis as a dynamic approach. Understanding thematic analysis through phenomenology provides a basis on which to undertake a whole range of inclusive approaches that were previously undifferentiated from a quantitative perspective.

Phenomenology has a long tradition as a qualitative research method in the social and health sciences. The application of phenomenological methods to understand lived experiences and subjectivities offers researchers a rich tapestry of methodological approaches, often however, the availability of these methods to researchers is tempered as a result of inflexible ideas regarding their use. This article aims to highlight the uniting features between approaches.

The paper begins by offering a brief overview of the two traditions within phenomenology, the descriptive and interpretive approaches and traces the development of each one. It then presents an overview of the commonalities shared by both approaches in with particular reference to the philosophical and methodological cohesion between them.

Frequently, the literature fails to focus on how these methodologies can be used together, and instead foregrounds the ontological and methodological differences between them. While an overview of some of the more vociferous debates within phenomenology are included and acknowledged, the paper calls for a focus on the shared goals of the phenomenological project.

This article aims to illustrate that, while recognising differences, the two phenomenological traditions have more in common that unites them, and argues that once this is applied pragmatically, a multiplicity of phenomenological traditions are available to researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to look at how phenomenology can be used to explore the meaning and experience of organizational life. It argues that phenomenology provides more than just themes or leitmotifs for post hoc analysis of narrative data; in its basic formulation, phenomenology is a way of thinking – a method – which illuminates the embodied, subjective and inter-subjective qualities of the life-world.

The paper follows Husserl's command to “go back to the things themselves” to access raw experience, asking ourselves, “what does experience mean phenomenologically?” We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to “flesh out” the embodied aspects of that phenomenological experience, outlining how the idea of a “field of presence” grounds our reflections in the here-and-now and gives our selfhood its coherence.

The paper presents data on the diverse meanings of “experience” to suggest that phenomenological and organizational understandings can be differentiated in terms of both temporality and selfhood. The paper argues that these differentiations expose different ways of thinking about the world more generally, drawing on Husserl's philosophy of the “natural attitude” to propose that one of its derivations, an “organizational attitude”, is obscuring our view of embodied experience.

The paper provides practical guidelines for those interested in researching the embodied, experiential qualities of organizational life. These emphasize the need to suspend the “organizational attitude”, modify how the authors position and explain the research, and attend to the interplay between the felt sense of the world and the words used to articulate it.

The logic of the body helps the authors to work towards a more integrative, conciliatory epistemological position for qualitative organizational research. The paper uses a phenomenological view of embodiment – as both subjectively experienced and objectively presented to the world – to suggest that the body, particularly when it is sick, is giving us clues for how to conceptualize the life-world of work.

This paper aims to illuminate the possibilities of phenomenology in hospitality, enriching methodological rigor necessary to study holistic experiences, which are increasingly recognized as a central component of hospitality businesses.

It first presents the main tenets of phenomenology, along with its two orientations (descriptive and hermeneutic) and three associated methods (descriptive phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology and interpretive phenomenological analysis). Second, it undertakes a critical review of post-2010 hospitality and tourism phenomenological studies. Third, the author focuses on Giorgi’s phenomenological method in psychology and illustrates the main methodological aspects with the data gathered for the study on the user experience of hotel smartphone apps. Finally, it discusses challenges and suggests prospective areas for hospitality phenomenological research.

Phenomenology can address a variety of subjects in hospitality, ranging from hospitality guests and workers to business owners, entrepreneurs and members of larger communities.

For the academic audience, the paper demystifies philosophically rich methodology of phenomenology by highlighting its methodological aspects and practical applications. It also hopes to contribute to practitioners’ greater appreciation of phenomenological knowledge of lived experiences.

An extract from a book manuscript highlighting the specific challenge which Greenfield posed to established thinking. Discusses how the study of education administration has been characterized by attempts to develop a theory which describes, explains and predicts administrative behaviour within the school context. Assesses the contribution of the “theory movement” and Kuhnian concepts; the movement of research towards finding a phenomological alternative to explain administrative behaviour; and the development of interpretive approaches which look towards subjects such as the humanities for a possible solution. In the light of this background discusses in depth the contribution made by T.B. Greenfield to the debate and considers the viability of an interpretive alternative.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search engine, or catalog, asks a user to enter the name of an author? And how does that accord with the manner in which the data have been entered in association with the names of the entities identified with the concept of authorship?

The authors use several cases as bases of phenomenological discourse analysis, combining as best the authors can components of eidetic bracketing (a Husserlian technique for isolating noetic reduction) with Foucauldian discourse analysis. The two approaches are not sympathetic or together cogent, so the authors present them instead as alternative explanations alongside empirical evidence. In this way the authors are able to isolate components of iconic “authorship” and then subsequently engage them in discourse.

An “author” is an iconic name associated with a class of works. An “author” is a role in public discourse between a set of works and the culture that consumes them. An “author” is a role in cultural sublimation, or a power broker in deabstemiation. An “author” is last, if ever, a person responsible for the intellectual content of a published work. The library catalog’s attribution of “author” is at odds with the Foucauldian discursive comprehension of the role of an “author.”

One of the main assets of this paper is the combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis with phenomenological analysis for the study of the “author.” The authors turned to Foucauldian discourse analysis to discover the loci of power in the interactions of the public with the named authorial entities. The authors also looked to phenomenological analysis to consider the lived experience of users who encounter the same named authorial entities. The study of the “author” in this combined way facilitated the revelation of new aspects of the role of authorship in search engines and library catalogs.

This conceptual article aims to examine the application of interpretative phenomenology to research on teacher experience. It covers methodological theory and practical interpretative approaches that are pertinent for generating useful insights into an educational issue.

Drawing on an illustrative research on secondary teachers' disciplinary and pedagogical reasoning and classroom practices in Ghana, this article explores the author's musings and introspection around carrying out an interpretative phenomenological research and demonstrates how the approach helped to amplify teachers' voices.

The article demonstrates that the canons of interpretative phenomenology and qualitative research in general, while translatable to practice, need to be regarded as a series of emergent decisions and actions rather than prescriptive set of principles. The article explains that educational researchers must recognise interpretation as the lifeblood of the approach and move beyond the description of essences and explicate participants' experiences of phenomena using workable frames of interpretation.

The article extends the current methodological knowledge base by contributing to international discussions on qualitative research and to an understanding of the applicability of interpretative phenomenological research design to research on teacher reasoning and practice. It also serves as a useful methodological resource for novice researchers.

This paper argues that there is a need to theorize socially constituted temporal phenomena, such as the fragmentation and multiplication of futures in media representations of technology, since this contextualizes consumption in important ways.

However, this argument requires a critique of agentic bias in phenomenological approaches to time. By drawing on Husserl, Heidegger and Ricœur, it is shown that phenomenological time is fundamentally intersubjective and contextualized in a tension between chronological and experienced time, rather than first and foremost created and felt by the individual consumer subject or experienced only as “flow.” This implies a switch from an egological to a sociological approach to time and consumption.

Thus, the multiplication of socially constituted narratives about the future, in late-modernity, disrupts instrumental modes of thinking about the consumer object, making it “unhandy” and “disturbing.” The meaning of the object therefore becomes “damaged.” However, this also allows the possibility for it to be known in wholly new ways.

Since many definitions of consumption are future oriented, the fragmentation of the future speaks to how we form meanings about consumption. Thus, a socially constituted theory of consumer temporality impacts the experience of consumer objects.

This theorization of time and consumption suggests the possibility of comparative studies of temporality to understand the universe in which consumer choices can unfold.

This is the first attempt to apply the epistemological criteria from the context of context debate in regard to consumer temporality.