Talk as Data and Practice — a critical look at phenomenographic inquiry and the appeal to experience

Abstract The article continues a critical discussion of phenomenography by raising some issues on the status of interview data in such research. It is argued that it is doubtful if and in what sense the interview data generated in much of the empirical work within this tradition can be assumed to refer to “ways of experiencing”, the core object of research in phenomenography. In general, it would seem that the data must be understood as indicative of accounting practices — ways of talking and reasoning — that interviewees, for one reason or another, find appropriate when being asked questions. Very little, if anything, is gained in analytical terms by an initial commitment to a position in which the researcher connects utterances to experiences rather than to discourse, since the latter is what is in fact analyzed. It is also argued that in some important respects discursive practices must be seen as preceding experience, and that experiential accounts given by individuals are grounded in discursive patterns.