Achieving Empathy and Engagement: A practical approach to the design, conduct and reporting of phenomenographic research

Phenomenography is a methodology which has been quietly influential in research on higher education, having been the basis of many studies of approaches to learning and student understandings of a wide range of concepts in a variety of disciplines. Yet there is a need to clarify important aspects of the methodology so that it can be used with increasing effectiveness. This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion and clarification of the phenomenographic research approach on two counts. Firstly, it is argued that phenomenography would benefit from a more rigorous consideration of how to engage with the student’s lived experience. Secondly, drawing on that discussion, the paper sets out a series of guidelines for the conduct of phenomenographic research and demonstrates how these might be achieved in practice by drawing on the experience of two higher education research studies: one into students’ experiences of cheating and the other into lecturers’ and students’ experiences of the teaching and learning of accounting.