Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: 7-Step Guide (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Are you using interpretative phenomenological analysis? For this presentation, I'm going to give you basic information that will help you to analyze your qualitative data if your approach is interpretative phenomenological analysis. This one is going to really help you because whether you are doing manual coding or you are using a software, these strategies should always be used when you are analyzing your qualitative data. Imagine that you use interpretative phenomenological analysis. You have interviewed a lot of participants and then you have hours of transcripts. What do you do next? Before I give you information about what you have to do in terms of making sense of your data, let me give you a little background information about IPA. IPA is one of the phenomenological approaches. What is phenomenological approach? It's a qualitative approach. Whenever you are doing a research and you want to capture the experience of participants, you can use phenomenological approach. But there are two main types of phenomenological approach. We have the transcendental phenomenological approach. Sometimes we call it descriptive phenomenological approach. Descriptive means that you are capturing participant experience. Participants give you information about what do you have experienced and then this is what you have to do. You analyze that information, describe that experience and try to find the underlying characteristics about that experience. So you are technically describing participant experience so that you can identify unique characteristics which is called the essence of the experience. The second approach is called interpretative phenomenological analysis or we can call it a humane approach. We give participant opportunity to make sense of the experience. So for interpretative, what you are doing is that you are interview participant. You want participant to recall the experience and provide you how they make sense of the experience and you collect that information and then make sense of that experience to help you to understand what they have experienced and how the experience is and then that information will help you to address your research question. So that's the basic understanding of interpretative. So whenever you are doing a research and you want to not only capture participant experience but you want participant to make sense of that experience so that you can also make sense of that information that they have given you. That is interpretative phenomenological analysis. So basically this one is used when you have small sample size. Let's say you have in between 8 to 12 participants. This approach could be very helpful. One of the popular sampling approach that you could use is purposive sampling, right? So the purposive sampling is where you are selecting participant that meets the purpose of the study. You have a specific criteria and then you are going and actively looking for people who qualify to be part of your study. The sample most of the time is homogeneous. This means that you are actively looking for participants that have similar background and they have experienced a specific phenomenon, right? And they have similar background so that you'll be able to get overall understanding of participant experience, right? And then typically when we are interviewing participants, we use semi-structured interviews. So semi-structured means that you have a list of questions that you want to ask participants but when you are talking to them, you are not strictly going by the list of questions that you have. The questions that you have will guide the conversation. So you can ask the first question and then move on to the second, the third or fourth question based on how the participants are responding, right? So this is going to be helpful because you want participants to reflect and make sense of the experience and this means that you have to go with the flow. Based on what they are saying, you can also ask more questions and then you'll be able to get rich information from them. And you'll recall the conversation and then transcribe it verbatim. This means that word for word and then you have your data to analyze. So there are some concepts that you have to know as you use this approach and one of the concepts is the double hemaneutic, right? So humaneutic is, think about it as interpretation, right? You want to make sense of participant information and then double means that participants, you give the participant a chance to make sense of the experience and then you make sense of what they have presented to you. So they are making sense of the experience and then you are also making sense of that information that they have presented to you. That's why they're called double hemaneutic, right? So as a researcher, what you are doing is that you are giving opportunity to listen to participant, ask very good questions. Questions like, what was your experience? What was going into your mind? What do you think about your action that you took? What are the decisions that you took? How did you feel about that? What was your reaction? All this information will help participant to make sense of the experience and then you also analyze that information, interpret what you have said and also help you to address your research question. So this concept is very important when you are using IP. Another concept that you have to be knowledgeable about is ideographic principle. So this is what is so unique. Let me talk a little bit about thematic analysis, right? So normally for thematic analysis, if you are using thematic analysis, you go through the transcript and then you start with initial coding. So you go through the transcript, identify information that is significant and develop codes, right? And then after developing codes for participant 1, you move on to participant 2, right? And do the same thing to develop initial code. You move to participant 3. You finish going through all the transcripts and having initial codes. Then after that, you categorize your code to develop themes, right? So that at the end of the day, you have your themes to address your research question. This IPA is a little bit different. So for IPA, you want to first have a holistic understanding of individual participant experience. So this means that you take one participant, you go through the data, identify information that are significant, that you make sense of the data and then develop themes. Categorize the themes so that you can also develop overarching themes or we call it superordinate themes. And I will talk about superordinate themes. So this means that you first analyze participant data, right? From the beginning to the end until you get the overarching themes. Then after that, you go to the next participant and do the same thing. So you do it for individual participants. The essence is that you first want to understand individual participant experience. And after you're going through all the data and having themes for each of the participants, then now you can do a cross case analysis and trying to bring all the themes from individual cases together or individual participants together. And then you have the main theme that reflects the overall experience of participants. So that's the uniqueness of IPA. Going through each case from the beginning to the end to develop themes before you go to the next one, right? If you want to learn more about interpretative phenomenological analysis, there are two books that I want to recommend. So the first book is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Theory, Method and Research. The second edition of Smith, Lawess, and Larkin's book is so helpful if you want to understand how to use this approach. And the second book I want to recommend is the one written by Lawson and me, right? So this book is going to be also very helpful for you. It gives you foundational knowledge about phenomenology and about how to use interpretative phenomenological approach and also using descriptive or transcendental phenomenological approach. We provide you step-by-step how to analyze your data and how to incorporate a specific theoretical framework that you have selected into the analysis. So this book can also help you a lot. I'll put the links to these books in the description section. I'm going to go ahead and provide you seven steps in analyzing your data if you are using IPA. So the first step is to read and reread the first transcript. The first reading is more of to get overall understanding of participant experience, right? You read through the participant transcript trying to get overall understanding of what participant has experienced and the meaning that participant attached to those experiences. The second one is more intense. This one is trying to let the data speak to you. Now you're going to go into deep where you really pay attention to what participants are saying and what it means. As you are doing that, you are also taking notes, right? What meaning are you extracting? You also have to think about your research question because the reason why you are going through your data is to help you to collect information or gather information that will help you to address your research. So with research question in mind, you go through and then as you are going through, you are identifying significant information and also making notes. What is your understanding? So first you ask yourself what is participant telling me, right? And then what is the meaning of that information? And based on that and also with a research question in mind, you can also take some notes, right? So that's the initial ideas that you are extracting. As you are doing initial idea, you're also looking for emotions and tone and parcels. All these information will help you to better understand how they make sense of the experience. So these are the things that you have to note at the beginning, right? Then you, the next step is to develop emergent themes, right? We can call it initial themes, right? Based on what you have learned so far for the first one, you will have overall understanding. You have also taken some notes about the significant information that you have identified. The next step is to do the actual coding, right? How do you do the actual coding? We call it line-by-line coding because you are going through each statement, right? And then examining each statement, first finding out whether you understand what the participant is telling you. And then you ask yourself, is that information relevant? Relevant information is any information that will help you to address your research question. So you select or highlight all relevant information. Some of the ideas that you got at the beginning, the initial, the first step will help you to come up with themes. So see themes as labels that represent your understanding of participant information, right? So what is your understanding of participant information and how does that information address your research question that you have? So the theme can be in between two to five words, sometimes one word, but it's always advisable to have two to five words representing your understanding of the information that you have identified at the same time addressing your research question. At the end of the day, we are still focused on one participant, right? So at the end of the day, you have a list of emergent themes, right? Then you move on to the next one. You say, okay, you're going to have a lot of emergent themes, right? Or we call it initial themes. Then we're going to also do, we call it clustering process or sorting process. So this is where you examine each of the themes, right? And see whether there are similarities and group them based on their similarities. So at the end of the day, this is how it's going to look like. So you have your emergent themes, you have your initial themes that you have, as you can see here, and then you move on to exploring relationship between the emergent themes and so that you can come up with group of themes. And then based on the group, you give it a name. That label can now be called ordinate themes, right? So that label will help you to come up with the superordinate theme. It's just a higher level categories, right? So you ask yourself, okay, so I have this group, right? So as you can see here, this group, the label is here, as you can see here, lack of understanding, right? So these two, then you come up with a label that represent the two, and then you can refine that label at this stage. And then you can get a list of higher level categories, which is called superordinate theme, or you can call it overarching theme. So you see the process. And as I said, this is for only one participant, right? So you're going to do the same for the rest of the participants after you are finished with the first participant, right? Then when you do that, finish with the first participant, then you do the same thing for the rest, right? And before you do the same thing for the rest, you can also have a table. This one can be called a summary table. This table will have all the list of superordinate themes, all the overarching themes, and also a brief information about what they represent. So as you can see here, finding strength in faith. This is an overarching theme or superordinate theme, and this is what it represents, or this is the meaning, or this is the definition, is a faith and spirituality are a source of comfort, hope, and strength, right? So this is a brief definition of the theme or the overarching theme or superordinate theme. So you remember that you first have to develop initial themes, or we call it emergent theme, right? These are the emergent themes. This can also be called sub themes because it's under the overarching theme or the superordinate theme. So these are the emergent themes, right? And you see how they are connected to the main theme. And also you see here is quotation from participant that supports individual sub themes. And also the line is indicating where in the transcript where that information is. So if you look at line 21 to 22 in a transcript, then you see that information. So this is just a summary of only one case. You're going to do the same thing for the rest of the participants, right? So as you can see here, the step five is to repeat the process. Repeat one to four for all the participants. So you read and reread. You develop emergent themes. You cluster the themes to develop categories or overarching themes, and you produce a table. We call it a summary table or a theme table, right? And then you repeat the step five is to repeat the same thing for the rest of the participants, right? Okay, let's say you have five participants. You have done the four steps for all participants, and this is what you're going to get. You're going to get summary table or theme table for each of the participants. The next step is to compare and contrast. Compare the main themes and find out the overlapping themes. So as you can see here, if you compare case one and case two, the overlapping themes is here, like the theme that overlaps, right? And then the ones that are different, you can list them. So what you're doing is that you are now examining each of them, comparing each of the main themes across the cases or across participants, and then you can also compile all the overlapping themes, which is the superordinate themes, right? And then the ones that are different. So now when you compile it, the question is, what do you do with the one that are different? You can also use the sorting strategy again, right? So this means that the ones that are different, you can examine each of them and see whether they have anything in common that you can bring them together. If you bring them together, you can now develop another overarching theme that will be added to the ones that they have in common. So you see the ones that they have in common, let's say they have three in common, three themes in common. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to examine each of the ones that are different and see whether you can combine them. And then when you combine them, what kind of label do you have to give to them? When you get that label, you add it to the list of the initial overlapped themes that you have, right? So this means that let's go back a little bit. This means that you're going to try to use the same technique you use to cluster where you group all the codes. So instead of grouping the themes, you are grouping the superordinate themes that are different so that at the end of the day, you'll be able to come up with a theme that you can add it to the rest of the themes that are overlapping, right? So that's how you're going to do it. Let me know whether you want me to show you a practical way, maybe using MaskQDA or in vivo or doing it manually. You can put it in the comment section and also please subscribe to my channel. It goes a long way to improve my work and also help other people. At the end of the day, you build the master theme table, right? So this master theme table is overall themes that cut across the cases or participants. So you can see that here we have a list of themes here, superordinate themes, and then the check mark shows who are linked to the theme. So you can see that this first team, all the five participants are linked to the theme and the second team, all the five participants. When we go to the fourth theme, four of them are linked to this theme. Participant five is not linked to this theme. So this one will help you to see who is connected to the themes that you have, right? The final themes. So in terms of write-up, so this is step seven. In terms of writing up, there are two options that you have. The first option, which is more popular, is where you write your results separately from the discussion. So you first have to write your results. So how do you write your results? Most of the time, you state the theme, you provide your understanding of the theme or the definition of the theme, what the theme represents and how unique the theme is. And sometimes you can also talk about the sub-themes too, if you want to. And then you can also quote two or three participants in support of the theme. As you can see here, you can see here that participant P1 and P2 have been quoted in support of the theme. And then after everything, presenting your findings, then you go to discussion and then provide the interpretation of the finding. Some also like the second option, right, where you present both the result and the discussion in one place, right? The second option is useful because sometimes it's difficult to separate your interpretation from what the result is. Because even the result is really your interpretation of what participant is telling you. So people like combining the two as they are trying to present what the theme means. They also talk about their thoughts, their understanding, what the findings suggest, right? But if you are working on your dissertation, it's expected that you have a chapter for presenting your findings and also another chapter for discussion, right? So you just have to choose based on what is required, based on the document that you want to work on. If you are working on your dissertation, then the first option will be the best. If you are writing an article, then you may choose the second option, especially if you find it difficult to separate the finding from your interpretation or the discussion, right? So this is what I have for you. If you have any questions, let me know. If you want me to do another presentation about how to use one of the qualitative analysis software to help analyze your data using IPA, let me know. I'll be happy to do a video on that. And I'm going to put a link in the description area there that I want to share this document that I created from Cloud AI. This is just more detailed information about what I've just presented to you with detailed examples so that you understand all the concepts, right? All the seven steps that we talk about. And then giving you examples under each of the steps so that you'll be able to apply those skills when you are analyzing your data using IPA. I hope this presentation was helpful. Thank you so much for your time.