Introduction to phenomenological psychological research

This report presents an introduction to phenomenological psychological research. A brief theoretical section on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy is followed by a comparison between phenomenological psychology and traditional psychology and a tutorial example of the phenomenological method in psychological research. The authors argue for the necessity of a phenomenological descriptive approach to psychological research which seeks to discover the meaning of various phenomena using the descriptions of subjects' experiences. The results of a phenomenological psychological study consist of a structural description of the phenomenon in question, which basically describes the what and how of a specific phenomenon rather than the explanatory why.