Abstract
This paper is an illustration of the application of a hermeneutic phenomenological study. The theory of meaning and interpretation, drawing on philosophical hermeneutics and the work of Gadamer and Heidegger, and its alignment with phenomenological thought is presented. The paper explains and aims to make visible how key concerns in relation to the fusion of horizons, hermeneutic understanding, hermeneutic circle and hermeneutic phenomenological attitude were implemented. The purpose is to provide practical guidance and illustrate a fully worked up example of hermeneutic phenomenological work as research praxis. This present paper makes a case that hermeneutic phenomenological work is detailed, lengthy, rigorous and systematic in its own philosophical and theoretical frame. It articulates the philosophical and methodological alignment of hermeneutics in a specific hermeneutic phenomenological study and makes visible the work of hermeneutic phenomenology. It concludes by sharing key reflections and insights on the hermeneutic phenomenological process.
Keywords
Introduction
Phenomenology
Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, believed that the primacy of the natural sciences had become detached from the fabric and reality of human experience, and that every theoretical and scientific practice grows out of and remains supported by the forgotten ground of our directly felt and lived experience. (Abram, 1997, p. 43)
Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy was thereby instrumental in re-establishing the fundamental contribution of human experience. In Husserl’s view, a more secure founding of scientific knowledge would start with describing the objects of study as phenomena to consciousness. According to Husserl (2012), meanings which can be intuited (through consciousness), can be described precisely as intuited with the help of a method, which he termed the phenomenological attitude and reduction. This systematic study of phenomenological appearance and the modes of appearing reflected a radical readjustment of viewpoint (Husserl, 1970, Moran, 2000).
However, as pointed out by Giorgi (2009 p. 87) “for Husserl, phenomenology was never less than a philosophy, and the method he articulated was intended to be a philosophical one”. While Husserl’s phenomenology was a philosophical, epistemological project that offered a rigorous (descriptive) science to study lived experience (Moran, 2000), Heidegger, as a philosopher in his own right considered phenomenology a method of ontology (Spiegelberg, 1994). In Being in Time (2003), Heidegger rendered explicit his ideas about phenomenology as a method of interpretation through which to disclose ontological being (Dasein). For Heidegger (2003), uncovering the basic structure of human understanding and existence, was always interpretive in character.
Despite these distinctions, there is some coherence in philosophical and theoretical notions around the lifeworld, intentionality, intersubjectivity and phenomenological reflection in both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s writings. This paper aims to navigate a path between these two philosophers while also drawing on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to support a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology.
Despite phenomenology’s relatively recent inception, translating it from the philosophical to the empirical, human science context (Giorgi, 2000) has expanded and progressed at pace. Several types of phenomenological inquiry have emerged, which share a common interest in empirically understanding the nature of human experience but draw on foundational philosophies in different ways. For example, Husserlian, Heideggarian, the Dutch or Utrecht School (van Manen) and French existential phase concerned with phenomenology, perception and embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre).
Debates within the research field abound, some of which include: how the phenomenological attitude, reduction and epoché 1 are understood, applied, and whether they are fundamental to phenomenological research? (H. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2020; Morley, 2010, 2019; Zahavi, 2019a, 2019b) What is/isn’t phenomenology? (Finlay, 2009; van Manen, 2017) What makes phenomenology, phenomenology? (Giorgi, 1997; van Manen, 2017) What level of philosophical understanding should be expected from qualitative phenomenological researchers? (Applebaum, 2011a; Giorgi, 2017) Whether phenomenology is hermeneutic (interpretive) and/or a Husserlian (descriptive) endeavor? Whether these positions are divergent, exist on a continuum or offer a third way by focusing on their shared philosophical and epistemological grounding? (Applebaum, 2012; H. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2019a; K. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2004; Finlay, 2009). As a relatively recent movement, responding to these debates and concerns is important to contribute to the field of phenomenological research as it continues to develop in a diverse range of disciplines (Giorgi, 2017).
One such debate revolves around the hermeneutic arguments about meaning and interpretation, and objections to descriptive science. The adoption of an “all is interpretation” argument as a means to reject Husserl’s descriptive science, alongside insufficiently theorized or practically described philosophical, methodological and methodical concerns, have done little to enhance the scientific standing of interpretive, hermeneutically-aligned phenomenological research (Applebaum, 2012). Applebaum (2011b) goes further, proposing that interpretive phenomenology permits the researcher to do what they will with the data, be (un)methodical and eradicates the need for scientific rigor completely (Applebaum, 2012). It is not our remit to address all the above arguments in detail. However, reflective of Giorgi’s (2000) proposition for “foundational labor” and Applebaum’s (2012) call for rigorous science, the present paper aims to contribute to the debates by making a case for hermeneutic phenomenological work. The paper therefore aims to provide an example of how hermeneutic phenomenology can be philosophically and theoretically grounded and rigorously and systematically applied.
The paper proceeds by articulating the philosophical and theoretical orientations of a study that explored how being on an acute stroke unit was experientially lived through. It then takes an empirical step, explaining how these foundations were applied methodically while considering consistency, coherence and flexibility (Holloway & Todres, 2003). Using examples, the paper will illuminate the somewhat intangible, invisible process and clarify the ambiguity and overlooked work that hermeneutic phenomenological practice involves. Although it describes one possible path, it does not exclude or diminish others.
Hermeneutic Phenomenology
A phenomenologically and hermeneutically grounded research endeavour needs to navigate the debates, theories, philosophical and epistemological positions, as well as the momentous issue of meaning (H. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2019b). This study was aligned with the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological emphases found in Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s philosophy, and concerned with grasping the lived experiential meanings and understanding the lifeworld and being, from an ontological perspective. It adopted a standpoint indicative of the mutual entanglement between being, Dasein and “being-in-the-world” as a primordial ontology (Malpas, 2008). Human lives, experiences and the world as lived (human lifeworld and its phenomena) are understood within their particular temporal, situated frame through an interpretivist epistemology, that draws upon intentionality, intersubjectivity and hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation.
Articulating the Theory of Meaning and Interpretation
The theory of meaning and interpretation included key concerns relating to the hermeneutic circle, fusion of horizons and hermeneutic phenomenological attitude. This theory acknowledges that hermeneutic work can uncover and unfold meaning. However, this uncovering is not assumed, and all remains intentionally and hermeneutically connected: Nothing that is said has its truth simply in itself, but refers instead backward and forward to what is unsaid. (Gadamer, 2008, p. 67)
Heidegger’s position was that the manifest, that which shows itself phenomenologically, may not show itself at all or perhaps as “appearance”: Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself; but at the same time it is something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground. (Heidegger, 2003, p. 59)
A shared concern toward that which is visible, in-visible, that which appears, and the intentional, reflective nature of both Heidegger’s and Husserl’s phenomenological projects, and hermeneutic thinking of Gadamer (2008) and Schleiermacher (1998) were key philosophical orientations. Although Being (Dasein) permeates the everyday through and through, it is also concealed and resistant to being made present (Nenon, 1997). Engagement with part and whole in the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 1988), focusing in-between what shows itself as meaningful, how it speaks through experience and language as we attend to the phenomenon in its appearing (Finlay, 2009), are specific intentional reflective acts that both perceptually make meaning present (Husserl, 2012) and disclose Dasein’s hiddenness (Nenon, 1997).
This theory of interpretation considers language and dialogue as ontological
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, as well as the medium through which access to the lifeworld is possible, perspectively and hermeneutically
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: when one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried on further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement and in the end plays them into each other. (Gadamer, 2008, p. 66)
The underpinning philosophical principles articulated above support the ontological project, concerned with getting to the “things themselves” and being through phenomenology, and hermeneutics and the phenomenological attitude and reflection as the mediums through which our understanding of lived experience and being-in-the-world can be unfolded, constituted and brought forth.
The Hermeneutic Circle
The hermeneutic circle reflects the ongoing, attentive, circular movement between part and whole (Gadamer, 1988; Schleiermacher, 1998) as understanding becomes more complete: The task is to expand in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning. Harmonizing all the particulars with the whole is at each stage the criterion of correct understanding. (Gadamer, 1988, p. 68).
Gadamer (2004) advanced that when encountering each part, the reader is at once and then continuously projecting toward the whole. This projection is toward the horizon of another, but from the reader’s own position (horizon) of fore-understanding and prejudices (Gadamer, 2004): This formulation certainly does not mean that we are enclosed within a wall of prejudices and only let through narrow portals those things that can produce a pass saying “Nothing new will be said here.” Instead we welcome just that guest who promises something new to our curiosity. (Gadamer, 2008, p. 9)
The hermeneutic “circle of understanding” for Heidegger involved the anticipatory movement of fore-understanding/ fore-structure as the expression of meaningful existential Dasein (Being) (Heidegger, 2003). The theory of meaning and interpretation thereby considered the movement and interplay between interpreter, their fore-understanding and enabling function of prejudices as “brought into play” (Vilhauer, 2009). Play that carries forwards the hermeneutic work. This includes the prejudice of completeness: that a text should completely express its meaning—but also that what it says should be the complete truth. (Gadamer, 2004, p. 294)
Oft forgotten but fundamental, it is the text/s failure to deliver that provides the incentive to enter the hermeneutic circle and get to work on uncovering meaning.
Fusion of Horizons
The hermeneutic circle, dialogue, and process of interpretation leads to a fusion of horizons as understanding takes place (Gadamer, 2004). Workings within the play of understanding are considered transformative, temporal and necessitate a commitment to the “play activity.” This has a “life, meaning, essence or spirit of its own that emerges from the players’ engagement in their back-and-forth movement” (Vilhauer, 2009, p. 359). The play and act of interpretation provide the means through which the opening, closing, broadening and fusion of horizons can occur (Gadamer, 2008). In this vein, fusion of horizons offers a gateway to “extend meaning from what is directly given” (p. 536), to discover something more; a new perspective and shared understanding of the subject matter (Vessey, 2009). Phenomenologically, these “matters” are the lived meaning that dwells in experience and the lifeworld, made manifest through the mode of given-ness (Husserl, 1970).
Applying Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Principles in a Specific Study
The Study
The research was approved by University of Brighton Faculty of Health and Social Science Research Ethics and Governance Committee, the National Research Ethics Committee (09/H1107/111) and complied with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki and later amendments. All participants provided written informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity were upheld and data managed securely.
The study in question looked to bring forth how the acute stroke unit was meaningfully lived through from two horizonal perspectives. This paper uses one of these perspectives to illustrate the hermeneutic phenomenological method.
After extensive work with four stroke survivors’ experiential accounts, the acute stroke unit emerged as a lived space in two meaningful and interconnected forms: holding space and transitional space. The stroke survivors experience of being on an acute stroke unit meant being held intimately and safely as well as held apart from other meaningful spaces, like the space of home and the hospital/ healthcare space. In doing so, holding space was understood to nurture, sustain and offer protection and distance so that the stroke survivors could think and consider how they would respond to the stroke without suffering additional hurt, vulnerability and disruption. Holding was fulfilled by nurses and others, including their fellow stroke survivors and meant that stroke survivors could transition. These transitions could be protective or potentially driven, and ranged from passive to temporary, active, recovery-orientated transitions and/or a reassertion of their self and agency while on the acute stroke unit (Suddick et al., 2020a).
An Apprenticeship and Training for the Work
A hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither “neutrality” with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings. (Gadamer, 2004, pp. 271–272)
These summarized findings provide a deceptively tidy picture. In fact, the researcher’s (K.S.) initial attempts at analysis were lengthy but unsuccessful. She was complacent, naïve, did not dwell within the accounts, work hermeneutically or garner phenomenological insights. At this point, she went back to work on the philosophical and methodological foundations of the study and re-engaged with two individuals’ accounts in depth. This reflected a necessary training in readiness for the work, so that she could attend to the text’s alterity, come to meaningfully understand herself, another, and apprehend the phenomenon in-between.
The paper proceeds by explaining the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude, how empirical descriptions/ texts/s were gathered and aims to illustrate how the hermeneutic circle, fusion of horizons, and hermeneutic phenomenological attitude and reflection, allowed the meaningful experience of being on the acute stroke unit to be made manifest. Acknowledging that the text and words remain the same we will show how the dialogue and “movement of play” (Vilhauer, 2009) provided access to unfolding the text/s meaning and truth. A truth that is always intentionally connected to (and accessible through) the manner of appearing and the researchers’ horizon/s of understanding, fore-meanings and prejudice. Using key illustrations, the aim is to make visible the rigorous intertwined hermeneutic and phenomenological work involved, as this presencing unfolds.
Applying a Hermeneutic Phenomenological Attitude
Phenomenological researchers have written about the phenomenological attitude and reduction in different ways. Giorgi (2009) in his application of the descriptive method, explains the levels of phenomenological attitude and reduction, i.e. basic level, eidetic and scientific reduction and transcendental reduction, and that some level of adoption of the phenomenological attitude is necessary for research to claim phenomenological status. In their reflective lifeworld research, Dahlberg and Dahlberg (2019a) engage the phenomenological attitude through bridling. This involves bracketing the natural attitude and adopting an openness and questioning attentiveness to what comes to awareness, how something is, how the phenomenon shows itself and its meaning (K. Dahlberg, 2006). Our claim is that the researcher (K.S.) adopted both phenomenological and hermeneutic attitudes.
The basic level phenomenological attitude applied in this study involved the researcher transitioning from the natural every-day pre-reflective attitude, and directing her systematic and rigorous attention, reflection and questioning toward the way in which meaningful lived experience was manifested through her bodily being-in-the-world—being-with-others’ sensing, feeling, awakening attitude, so as to explore its possibilities. Hermeneutically and phenomenologically, K.S. reflected on the relational process of understanding phenomena and their meanings within the shared inter-subjective space of the research encounter and beyond (K. Dahlberg, 2006; Finlay, 2002, 2006). This was intertwined with the co-constituting play-process of hermeneutic interpretation, dialogue and fusion of horizons between the researcher, participants and the phenomenon (Finlay, 2014). Examples of reflection, dialogue, play, and the unfolding of meaning through the text’s alterity and the researcher’s horizon of understanding (in the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude) are interspersed throughout the following sections.
Gathering Text/s and Description Through Phenomenological Interviews and Dialogue
This study used phenomenological interviews to gather thick descriptions of living in and through the world experientially in the everyday “pre-reflective, pre-conscious mode of being in the world” (Wrathall, 2006, p. 41). These interviews were a way to produce a text, begin to enter into dialogue and collect concrete descriptions that were as complete as possible (Giorgi, 1997). Participants were free to talk and expand without interrupting. Depending upon the conversation, K.S. would summarize, rephrase, probe, ask follow-up questions and whether there was anything further (H. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2020) . After finishing the interview with Sally (pseudonym) I was overcome with anxiety. Although it was long, little focused on her time on the stroke unit. I had tried to return to the topic numerous times, but also found myself asking Sally what appeared to be completely unrelated questions about her life. I realized I had felt overwhelmed by her account of loss and was looking to offer respite (both to her and myself). Was I wanting to distance from this loss, or find connection because of it? My response felt incompatible with “researcher” but more indicative of human need. I sense I was subconsciously prioritizing and looking to “be” with her, her story and life, at the expense of the phenomenological description. It offers preliminary insight into the tension and movement between “being” and “doing” in my phenomenological research practice.
Going to Work on Understanding each Persons’ Meaningful Experience
The hermeneutic phenomenological attitude meant using reflection to make visible fore-meaning, horizons of understanding, the texts alterity, and intentional character of experience as the researcher came to understand what being on an acute stroke unit was like: continually reflecting upon interpretations of both our own experience and the phenomenon being studied, in order to move beyond the partiality of previous understandings and investments in particular outcomes. (Finlay, 2014, p. 130)
This commenced by listening to recordings, turning the researchers’ attention to the text/s, each person and herself, as she began to work with part and whole. K.S. would listen to the recording when she struggled to engage with the text. When she found herself staring blankly, she used diagrams, drawing and writing. I drew a picture (of a nurse surrounded by many patients on one side, a chiasm in between, and home, a bed and a burglar on the other side). It feels forced, and I return to the transcript. The nursing part of the picture seems a small element of what Sarah is expressing but this is quick to speak to me because of my pre-understandings and assumptions regarding the stress and demands they face. I think about what I sense and feel when I read and listen to Sarah’s account. Through this work, her mother’s love and disappointment emerges. I look at the picture again and feel the empathy and understanding Sarah expresses for the nurses on the stroke unit, but also because she is the mother of a nurse. From the same picture I gain a sense of separation between home and hospital, movement forwards and back, something about the stroke, being at home, and the stroke entering the marital bed at night (like a burglar), perhaps the security of home? I question and think further, working within the hermeneutic circle. What emerges is the hospital—but as a separate place where she adopts a different persona. I go back to the transcript to see what unfolds. The burglar feels like an echo from another account which has crept into my thoughts-unconsciously looking for connections but relevant to be discarded. There are remnants that remain: about danger, security and safety and I take these “shadow unformed thoughts” with me for my next foray into the hermeneutic circle. I allow and permit time away. It isn’t as if I leave thinking or the dialogue behind, it comes with me and I embrace the companionship and what plays out inside my head. What is she/he saying here? Is that what she’s/he’s really saying? Or is that my thinking? What is not being said in this description? When I shut my eyes what am I seeing? When I read and hear this, what am I feeling? What is going on here? What was this like? What does this mean? How is this meaning being made manifest?
Articulating the Early Analysis using a Sample Extract.
Continuing the Hermeneutic Phenomenological Work, Using the Same Extract as Illustration.
This was not the end of the work. The emergent understanding remained tentative and further trying out, questioning, returning and working within the hermeneutic circle and text/s, and the intentional threads that connected them were required. Time, attention, focus and engagement, not moving too quickly, slovenly (H. Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2003) or assuming or looking for the familiar were essential. After numerous iterations (each saved separately), an analysis document for each person was composed. The below excerpt from Andrew’s document, illustrates the continued hermeneutic phenomenological work and fusion of horizon that occurred: Other parts of Andrew’s narrative after stroke were understood to assist in the unfolding of meaning. He described how he had a reoccurring health condition which meant he was returned, “sent back” to the acute stroke unit because “they [in the community rehabilitation unit] couldn’t handle it.” He explained that when he was discharged from the stroke unit, he was told he was going home and given just a day’s notice. Before arriving on the acute stroke unit, and during the night he spent in the Accident and Emergency department after having the stroke, “they” gave him an injection that was “meant to save you” but he had a massive nosebleed and it was stopped. He explained “so that was it—I mean—I went up on the ward.” These appearances felt like endings, and the last one, an abrupt and significant end to the saving. I paid attention to how these experiences and endings seemed to contribute to his temporal vulnerability and how the last may have held particular relevance as it coincided with the start of his time on the stroke unit. Although not articulated explicitly, I felt as if I was transported to the emotional and psychological “place” he may have found himself after being unsuccessfully saved. One which may have meaningfully signified his vulnerability and appreciation of the nurses on the unit. Although he was matter of fact in the research interview, I reflected on how this, his use of contrast, and a more distant “you,” may have functioned to distance himself and perhaps me from these felt implications. Andrew’s account of having the stroke appeared to contrast the nebulous quality of his experience of being on the stroke unit. He explained that due to the repetitive actions of nurses, and because he slept, time went quickly. His previously heightened awareness was understood to be replaced by a reduced sense of presence, agency and knowing. I began to apprehend how this nebulous space (place and time related) was where he experienced vulnerability. This was in part, hermeneutically accessed and meaningfully signified by the importance of the nurses within his account. “They” appeared to be present and clear in what was an indistinct period after his stroke. “They” made the acute stroke unit what it was and different from the hospital, other wards and other “theys” that sent him, processed, injected, told him and did not save him. “They” were understood as essential for protecting from vulnerability (being dehumanized, alone) and helping him practically and psychologically keep going when faced with the threat and vulnerability because of the stroke.
Going to Work Across the Collective Whole
Once the individual accounts were analyzed, the researcher began working toward a unified, comprehensive understanding of what was meaningful for the stroke survivors as a whole (Figure 1). To begin K.S. found a room, and in each corner placed all related text/s for each stroke survivor. She moved between them, reading, thinking and remembering, searching for ways toward the center. Sometimes she lay down and closed her eyes; sometimes she sat, stood, talked to herself, to them. She left the room and returned. Nothing magically “came” but she was eliciting the space, time and commitment needed. As with the individual accounts, playful, attentive questioning, sensing, dwelling and intentional reflection between part and whole through the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude, were necessary (Figure 1). This involved writing, drawing and returning to texts (individual accounts, recordings, transcripts, findings), as well as working within and across multiple hermeneutic circles and the dialogue in-between (Figure 1).
The ongoing dialogue and work toward a unified, hermeneutic and phenomenological understanding
Within this process an additional activity; the creation of visual maps was undertaken (described in detail elsewhere, Suddick et al., 2020b). This offered further opportunity to enter the hermeneutic circle, work with part and whole and embrace a more dynamic, textured, holistic understanding of lived experience. The entire process was not as straightforward as Figure 1 indicates. Playing, writing, creating the maps and working with the analysis across the collective whole and individual analyses, were all intertwined. The researcher would leave the maps and revisit the writing, leave one hermeneutic circle and enter another, returning and working within the new changed alterity. This extensive work within and across multiple hermeneutic circles continued as the meaningful experience of living through the acute stroke unit was made manifest. The initial analysis that I undertook demonstrated a bias and prejudice grounded within my own experiential concerns and struggles in practice. This assumed stroke survivors would be dissatisfied, and that they would describe limited or missing needs within their stroke unit experience. It became apparent that I also held an a priori notion that care and rehabilitation would emerge as meaningful phenomena, and that they were discrete entities. At numerous points, I would often revert to my comfortable, but inauthentic “natural attitude” of “doing” and “distancing.” This was when I was quick to assume and manipulate words and phrases, just as I had peoples’ bodies in my clinical practice. I had to re-engage the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude and focus on attending, patiently “being” and intimately dwelling with the accounts/ texts, as well as myself. While working with the stroke survivors’ accounts as a whole, within the hermeneutic circle/s and hermeneutic phenomenological attitude, it became apparent that accounts of rehabilitation were indeed limited or missing. However, rather than validating my pre-understanding, I attended to what was left in its wake. What emerged was the acute stroke unit as a meaningful, transitional space that was orientated around the self. These concerns or understandings were not present in my a priori fore-meaning or horizon of understanding about the acute stroke unit experience. As I interacted with Sarah’s and Sally’s descriptions and text/s, space in a tentative way began to form within my horizon of understanding. This appeared in various ways. For example, the chasm and abstract sense of space between their pre-stroke lifeworld and since the stroke, and a physical (but non-geographical) space in relation to absence and presence. This encompassed the absence and presence of nurses, and for Sarah, the felt absence of the people on the unit once she returned home. Sarah’s analysis also provided access to my understanding of the acute stroke unit and in particular the hospital bay, as a place and temporary encampment that she and other stroke survivors populated and practiced (Figure 2). This was where they sustained and supported each other, shared knowledge, understanding, abilities, responsibility and care. Working within the hermeneutic circle and hermeneutic phenomenological attitude I also came to understand how Jane and Andrew were held apart from their lifeworld by the acute stroke unit, and for Andrew, also, the dehumanizing other wards of the hospital. Jane was appreciative of the people who contributed during her time on the unit through their kindness, and how they protected and sustained her. However, she described how she also began to feel confined and held in a negative sense. As I worked at length through the process shown in Figure 1 and across, and between the accounts of these four people (Figure 2), the space of the stoke unit in the phenomenological sense of the word as a lived space, and the spatiality of their experience emerged in different, similar and nuanced ways. I came to understand that the acute stroke unit as holding space, was thereby signified through intimacy and distance, was complex, nuanced, responsive to human need, and produced and fulfilled by stroke survivors as well as health practitioners. The meaning of the holding space went beyond my pre-understandings of caring and helping and was intertwined, sometimes the impetus for stroke survivors’ transition (Figure 2).
A summary of how spatiality and holding space emerged as meaningful through the hermeneutic phenomenological work with four stroke survivors’ experiential descriptions.
Reflections
This paper has aimed to address the hermeneutic phenomenological scientific method and ontological, epistemological and methodological concerns in the context of empirical research. In doing so, we hope to have gone some way to respond to Applebaum’s (2012) contention that the hermeneutic attitude can be naïve, assumptive and methodologically incoherent. This paper has illustrated how hermeneutics and the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude worked as research praxis. It has illustrated the rigorous back and forth intentional, reflective movement between what appeared, the manner of appearing and part and whole, as a path to unfold meaning. Meaning that is encountered and grasped through a practical, relational, concernful orientation and embodied, being-in-the world attitude.
It is widely known that developing hermeneutic understanding means working with part and whole on various levels. However, this paper has shown that developing hermeneutic and phenomenological understanding involved adoption of a specific attitude as well as movement and interpretive work within multiple hermeneutic circles/ spirals, all of which remained intentionally intertwined and dynamically in-play. Bringing to light such a lengthy, nonlinear, messy and complex process was not straightforward, and further work in developing ways to effectively convey the hermeneutic phenomenological method and more obscure hermeneutic principles like the fusion of horizons and texts alterity, require explicit consideration.
Although this paper has not discussed the quality dimensions of the study in question (this is addressed elsewhere, Suddick, 2017; Suddick et al., 2019), it has illustrated a thorough, rigorous, extensive process which upheld the philosophical and methodological foundations. Notwithstanding, we have demonstrated the congruence and points of contact when interweaving hermeneutics with phenomenology, and how phenomenological principles were upheld through the hermeneutic phenomenological attitude and reflection and ontological emphasis of lived experience.
Hermeneutic phenomenology can draw on a number of orientating perspectives. The researcher discovered that using and listening to her body was necessary for sensitive dwelling and sensing. Finlay (2006, 2011) has advocated embodied practices and reflexivity, Todres (2007), embodied enquiry and embodied relational understanding. Despite this, embodiment is too easily diminished within the research process. Daza and Huckaby (2014) with their em-bodied data analysis highlighted the body’s limited presence in methodological literature, and more telling perhaps their own theses. In this study, the researchers’ hermeneutic phenomenological embodied practice reflected “being with that”; where being and knowing meet (Todres, 2008 p. 1569); and re-established touch, flesh, and the deep, irrefutable relationship between the body, perception, sensations and interpretation. Kearney (2015) suggests we can recover the body as text and the text as body, restoring hermeneutics to phenomenology and vice versa. Attending to embodied knowing within hermeneutic phenomenological practice may be even more important in our ever-increasingly “fleshless society,” where advances in technology have removed touch and physical (and perhaps thereby other forms of) closeness (Kearney, 2014), knowing, and where self-other have become objectified (Todres, 2007).
Conclusion
Hermeneutics means going to work on the text/s so its own truth can emerge (Gadamer, 2004). Hermeneutic phenomenology means working with part and whole in a cyclical, open and interrogative way to understand the person/ people who produced the text, the person doing the hermeneutic phenomenological work, and ultimately, the phenomenon that is brought to awareness and made manifest as a result of the work.
This paper has attempted to convey the somewhat abstract and less articulated process that occurs in hermeneutic phenomenological research. It illustrates the texts alterity and integral interplay between part and whole, as meaning unfolds and is apprehended. It has articulated the movement from pre-understanding, prejudgments, and prior horizons of understanding (a position of not knowing) to embodied understanding and “truth.” Truth that is determined through an extensive, complex, interrogative intentional dialogue. A dialogue that does not look for straightforward verification but embraces play in all its potentiality. It has explained what is meant by hermeneutics and the fusion of horizons between researcher, the individuals involved and phenomenon of interest, perceived and understood from the researchers’ horizon of understanding.
We have attempted to articulate how the phenomenon was apprehended through the work of hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenological attitude and reflection. We have proposed the relevance of apprenticeship and a hermeneutically and phenomenologically grounded understanding, alongside dialogue within and across “multiple hermeneutic circles.” In doing so, we have aimed to show how hermeneutics and phenomenology can work in a specific empirical research study.
This paper aimed to demonstrate how philosophy can contribute to methodological and methodical development, and how phenomenological and hermeneutic principles can be rigorously and coherently applied. This does not exclude other ways of going to work in hermeneutic phenomenology. In fact, all is in play, and to address the obscurity of hermeneutics and phenomenological inquiry and the range of ways hermeneutic phenomenology can work, we ask others to contribute and extend this dialogue: Hence there is an infinite dialogue in questioning as well as answering, in whose space word and answer stand. (Gadamer, 2008, p. 67)
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the people who participated in the study that informed this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The University of Brighton provided a small grant that supported the completion of the study. No grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for profit sectors was received.
