Editorial

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In a previous QHW Editorial (Hallberg, 2006) the importance of not following slavishly any rigid stepby-step ‘‘method’’ was emphasized. Where the goal is to illuminate individuals’ sometimes enigmatic lifeworlds, thereby showing how health and wellbeing can be promoted, supported and restored, no inflexible and formulaic research technique is adequate. Research must be carried out by an open, lifeworld-sensitive approach where there is scope for genuinely empathic sensibility. Techniques must be chosen that are appropriate for the phenomenon under investigation. The research approach must be built on a strong foundation of ontology, epistemology and methodology. Of course, there are several human science research approaches that meet these criteria. Phenomenology is an example of such an approach. Phenomenological philosophy gives to research a thorough understanding of what knowledge is, what proposed knowledge needs in order to be valid, and how a researcher gets access to such knowledge. Phenomenological research is interested in human meaning, e.g. the meaning of health, illness and well-being. The research may on the one hand have a hermeneutical flavour, regarding the data as ‘‘text’’ for interpretation (there is a strong emphasis on the impact of language). Therefore, although phenomenological research is always close to experience, the hermeneutical researchers see themselves as having a heavy task*that of making sense of experience. It may be that external sources such as previously published research findings or existing theories are brought into the analysis. In such analyses the findings are summed up in a ‘‘comprehensive understanding’’ or a ‘‘main interpretation’’, where the phenomenon is described in a way that includes the original empirical as well as external data sources. If the research on the other hand is focused strongly on the experience as it is expressed in empirical data it is a ‘‘descriptive analysis’’. Though the researcher obviously has a part to play in the description of experience, it is always emphasised that the description is of the research participant’s experience and the researcher is a kind of midwife in bringing the experience to the light of day. Results of such analysis are mainly presented as a ‘‘general structure’’, in which the essential meanings of the phenomenon as well as its other constituting meanings are described. No doubt great care is needed in coming to a good description of the lifeworld and human meaning* bracketing presuppositions and ‘‘bridling’’ the forthcoming understanding so as to focus purely on the experience of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the process of description is not so very controversial* maybe because something like it is shared by other approaches. Nevertheless, the idea of presenting a general structure, and in particular the idea that the researcher can arrive at essential meanings, is very much under debate. Consequently, we want to illuminate some of the characteristics of phenomenological empirical analysis in which the goal is a general structure. Basically, all phenomenological research begins in the lifeworld, e.g. individuals’ experiences of health or illness. However, some studies which announce themselves as phenomenological, do not go much further than listing some themes common to the research participants’ accounts of their experience. In these instances, the work ought to be seen as ‘‘thematic analysis’’ rather than phenomenological research, despite having a foundation in the careful description of experience. In truly phenomenological research, the individual instances of experience are reflectively worked on by the researcher, who may, for example, look for aspects of an experience, which*though they might not have been explicitly mentioned in interviews* are necessary components of that experience. In such analysis the deeper-lying meanings must be illuminated and not least must the relationships between the meanings, i.e. the pattern of meanings, be explicated (Dahlberg, 2006). The process of coming to an essential description of a phenomenon, therefore, involves ‘‘free imaginative variation’’. The aim is to reach a statement of the phenomenon which is sufficiently clear for anyone who knows the general, essential structure of the experience to be able to say, when a new instance occurs, whether it is an instance of that very phenomenon or not. In this sense, the essence provides a phenomenological equivalent of generalizability. The description of a general structure includes the essential meanings but it may also be right to present some particularities. To give a simple example, an essential meaning of ‘‘table’’ is its capability of offering a hard surface on a certain level above the floor. But in order to understand the table phenomenon it could be of importance to also present some International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being. 2009; 4: 130 132