From Monet's Paintings to Margaret's Ducks: Divagations on Phenomenological Research (Report‪)‬

Introduction We start with the reasons that led us to the drawing up of this text. Recently, we participated in meetings where a number of authors and their proposals of application of the phenomenological method were debated (Colaizzi, 1978; Giorgi, 1985; Karlsson, 1995; Moustakas, 1994; van Kaam, 1958; van Manen, 1990). From these debates a set of consensual and diverging ideas and opinions emerged. These meetings had a private nature. However, it seemed evident that the discussion of different applications of the phenomenological method should be extended to a wider scope, with eventual positive repercussions for students, researchers, lecturers and therapists. The objective of this text is not to fill that gap or draw up a summary of ideas put forward in the aforementioned meetings. We only want to address a number of issues which seem to us less consensual. However, there is a cross-sectional question, which shall follow-up the themes dealt with in this text. During these meetings the hypothesis we are upholding--a monotheistic perspective of the phenomenological method--emerged. We argue enthusiastically that phenomenology, as a research method, asserts itself more and more in the international panorama of qualitative research. It is also true that we have some reservations about how phenomenology is currently used as a research tool. Nevertheless, we do not judge that a single and adjusted way of applying phenomenology to research exists, but rather we believe there are reasons to question our present context where the fostering of an unlimited number of methodologies is currently in fashion. This is not the hypothesis referred to--the upholding of a singular view of the method--that, as a matter of fact is important, but what is underlying therein, what may reflect on some controversies that we may share, as a community that shares a common interest--phenomenology. The hypothesis that seemed to us to be an ambiguity transformed itself in catalyser.