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The Descriptive Phenomenological
Psychological Method
Amedeo P. Giorgi and Barbro M. Giorgi
Phenomenology, as a distinct philosophy in the modern sense, began with the publication of Logical Investigations (1900/1970) by Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s thought developed continuously, if nonlinearly, over roughly a half century in which he was active as a scholar and thinker. He influenced many of the dominant philosophers of the 20th century who worked in the continental tradition (e.g., Heidegger, 1927/1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962; Sartre, 1943/
- and often the thought of those Husserl influenced became more well- known than the thought of Husserl himself, often unfairly so (MacDonald, 2001), especially in the social and human sciences. Speigelberg (1982) has written the classic history of this movement, and the reader is referred to his work for more details concerning philosophical phenomenology and its history. There was also a grassroots American phenomenological movement in psychology that initiated with the work of Snygg (1935) in the 1930s, especially Snygg and Combs (1949) later. However, this development took place without any influence of continental philosophical phenomenology. In essence, phenom- enology means for this tradition “from the point of view of the behaving organ- ism itself” (Snygg, 1941, p. 406). The major contribution of this grassroots phenomenological tradition were pulled together and published by Kuenzli (1959). This book contains 14 chapters by the major representatives of this approach, including Snygg, Combs, Rogers, and MacLeod. A check of all the references indicates that no major philosopher of the continental philosophical tradition is referenced in any of the 14 chapters. Only in the selected bibliogra- phy section at the end of the book are two of Sartre’s smaller works mentioned. Moreover, the idea of a phenomenological method as applied in psychology is not articulated in any of the chapters. Mostly the argument was presented as a need for a phenomenological “approach,” “perspective,” or “frame of reference.” This tradition obviously has interesting aspects but it does not touch on the method to be articulated in this chapter. Neither does the defense of phenome- nology by Rogers and MacLeod in the famous debate with behaviorism touch on the manner in which the phenomenological method should be used in psy- chology (Wann, 1964).
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Most of the major philosophers in the continental tradition strongly be- lieved that phenomenological philosophy could help psychology in diverse ways. For example, Husserl (1962/1977) himself, in the summer of 1925, gave a course on phenomenological psychology, but it was clearly a philosophical course on the mind and its activities from a phenomenological perspective (Scanlon, 1977). Husserl believed that his approach could help clarify the fundamental concepts of psychology, and as a consequence, psychologists would be able to use the concepts consistently and more accurately. Merleau-Ponty (1962/1964) also wrote extensively about the relationship between phenomenology and psychology and in ways that were quite sympathetic to the psychologist’s per- spective. He clarified the ideas of eidetic reduction and eidetic intuition and related the latter to the empirical procedures of induction in penetrating ways. However, these analyses were conceptual and philosophical even though they are very helpful to those psychologists who would adopt a phenomenological perspective. How one would apply the phenomenological method in psychology is not detailed. However, the conceptual clarity Merleau-Ponty gives to certain Husserlian formulae and ideas is well worth the reading. Finally, Sartre (1936/ 1962, 1939/1962, 1940/1966) in his early works also claimed to have helped psychology, even if via “critique.” His two books on imagination and his short essay on the emotions begin with criticisms of the assumptions that traditional psychology brings to its labors, and when he presents the phenomenological alternative Sartre would claim that psychology has been significantly helped. Sartre believed that phenomenological philosophical assumptions help one to interrogate the experiential world far more accurately than either positivistic or logical empiricism would. Although Sartre’s insights are unmistakably helpful, just how he achieved what he did is not spoken to—that is, he presented results, not processes. The previous paragraph illustrates how philosophers familiar with phe- nomenology touched on the helpful possibilities of phenomenology for psychol- ogy. It was inevitable perhaps that the opposite effort should also take place; psychologists familiar with phenomenological philosophy would indicate how phenomenology could help the development of psychology. These two efforts are quite different even if the same philosophy is being tapped by representatives of both disciplines because the sensitivities to the weaknesses of the mainstream paradigm differed. The philosophers concentrated on assumptions and concepts and psychologists looked for methodical help. The American psychologist who attempted a rigorous interpretation of how the phenomenological method as developed within the continental philosophical tradition could be adapted and made useful for psychology was the senior author of this chapter (Amedeo; Giorgi, 1985). Cloonan (1995) has provided an extensive history of this develop- ment on the North American continent, so we will be brief. In the early 1960s the senior author had joined a psychology department that was explicitly existential–phenomenological in orientation and his task was to come up with alternative research strategies consistent with the frame- work of that approach. Having heard that the phenomenological method was well-developed in Europe, the senior author spent more than a year in the 1960s contacting every phenomenologist he could find, but he was disappointed to discover that none of the workers in the field of phenomenological psychology
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commentators believed that the correct implementation of the reduction was not possible. We will speak only of the two reductions Husserl would want followers to use, either philosophically or scientifically. If one were to perform philosophical phenomenological analyses, then Husserl would want to use the transcendental phenomenological reduction. By the transcendental reduction Husserl means the assumption of an attitude by the researcher whereby the objects and acts of consciousness are considered to belong to any consciousness as such. Specifically, in the interest of the most universal findings possible, Husserl would want to consider the objects and acts under investigation as belonging to any possible consciousness and explicitly as not belonging to a human mode of consciousness. Results of this kind of analysis have universal implications for any imaginable consciousness. That is, a human mode of con- sciousness is but one type of consciousness: infrahuman organisms or species and imaginably extrahuman species and the way they relate conscious acts to objects would have to be included. It is the essence of “consciousness as such” that Husserl was after. After assuming the attitude of the transcendental phenomenological reduc- tion, the researcher turns to the object whose essence is to be determined. The object that triggers off the essential search can be a real object or state of affairs or else something fictional. What happens next is that one tries to determine the essence of the “given” object or state of affairs by means of the method of free imaginative variation. The procedure of imaginative variation begins by varying specific dimensions of the given object and one seeks the effect on the object of the removal or variation of the key dimension. If the object “collapses” as a consequence of the removal of the key dimension, then one would have to say that the dimension so varied is essential for the object to appear as whole. If the object is only slightly modified but still recognizable despite the variation of the dimension, then it is considered to be accidental rather than essential. To take a simple and straightforward example, the essence of a cup deter- mined by means of imaginative variation would be as follows. I can start with a cup with which I am now drinking coffee. It is black, octagonal, and made of ceramic. I then take a certain distance from the specific cup and ask precisely what it is that determines its “cupness.” That is, the specific cup that I am using becomes an example of “cupness” as such. But an example, even a good one, does not articulate essentialness. Discovering essentialness requires a process and the process involves imaginative variation. For example, is color— blackness—essential for a cup to be a cup? No, because not only can nonblack cups be remembered by us, but we can also easily imagine many other colors that a cup could be and it would not affect its cupness at all. Changing colors in imagination would be varying the dimension of color, but it does not affect the “cupness” of the cup. How about material? This cup, we said, is ceramic. But one can easily imagine other materials—glass, wood, metal, and so forth. Cupness can be produced by any of the aforementioned. However, materiality does have its limits. A functioning cup cannot be made of porous material (e.g., net). Thus, nonporous material belongs to the essence of a cup, because if it is lacking the very possibility of a cup collapses. Nonporous materiality is essen- tial to it.
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One can do the same with any imaginable variable concerning cups: size, strength, aesthetics, and so forth. Whatever a material cup is made of, it would have to be solid enough to hold a moderate amount of liquid and be graspable by an embodied creature with a free hand. Having a handle is not a necessity. Although we used actual experiences and memorable past moments in my example, the whole process could just as easily have been merely imaginative. The last step of the method is to describe the invariant aspect of the object, or its essence. This we have done by stating that a cup’s essence is to be container of liquids manageable by hands. Now, one difficulty that is frequently not appreciated is that if one followed these procedures exactly as described, one would be doing a philosophical analysis. The same would be true if one followed Spiegelberg’s (1982) more extended but essentially similar method. Rather, what is required are changes that will make the method suitable for scientific analyses rather than philo- sophical ones. Although the fine line between philosophy and science may be hard to draw, the larger sorts of modifications that we have in mind would not be. First of all, the order of the steps to be followed is not the same as with the philosophical procedure. For the scientific level of analysis, one first obtains descriptions of experiences from others, then one enters into a scientific phe- nomenological reduction while simultaneously adopting a psychological per- spective, then one analyzes the raw data to come up with the essential structure of the experience, which is then carefully described at a level other than that of the original description. We shall now cover each of these points in greater detail. With the philosophical method, because all of the work is done by the philosopher him- or herself, it is possible to enter into the phenomenological reduction right away. However, within scientific circles such a step would meet with severe criticisms. It is easy to specify the question that would be effectively unanswerable if one were to do a phenomenological analysis of his or her own experiences: How could I prove, the questioner would ask, that my concrete description was not unconsciously selected and construed to prove that my theoretical analysis was correct? One could answer this question philosophi- cally and theoretically from a phenomenological perspective, but it would not necessarily be effective from the perspective of empirical scientists. Moreover, when the method was initially introduced in the early 1970s, the psychological establishment was dead set against qualitative procedures and so it would have been an uphill struggle to try to justify such a procedure even though it was strictly legitimate phenomenologically. As a consequence, to minimize the number of battles to be fought to introduce qualitative research into psychology in a legitimate way, it was decided not to analyze one’s own experience even though this step could have threatened the phenomenological claim that we wanted to make for the method. We decided that the only recourse left as scientists inspired by phenomenological philosophy was to analyze the experi- ences of others, especially those others who had no knowledge of scientific theories and their vicissitudes. The reason that this step could have threatened the phenomenological status of our method is that within the phenomenological perspective one is
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to say that they are taken exactly as they present themselves except that no existential status is assigned to them. That is, what is experienced is understood to be an experiential given to the person experiencing the object, the person is genuinely experiencing some given phenomenon, but the claim that what is present to the person’s consciousness actually exists the way it is given is not affirmed. In other words, in the reduction phenomenologists distinguish between the mode of givenness of an object (its presence) and how it actually exists, which might be determined only after many conscious acts. Phenomenol- ogists recognize that there is a spontaneous positing of the existence of the object that normally takes place in everyday life and in the reduction that positing is withheld. In addition, to use the epoche´ means to bracket past knowledge about the experienced object to experience this instance of its occur- rence freshly. One could say all of this quickly by simply saying that within the scientific phenomenological reduction one takes whatever is given to be a phenomenon, except that we are not sure that the expression would be correctly understood. To be taken as a phenomenon means that everything that is noticed with respect to the given is taken to be worthy precisely as a presence in the manner in which it is present, but one does not have to say that the given is the way it presents itself to be. One makes no commitment to the existence of the given within the reduction. This aspect of the reduction is devised to help overcome the natural human bias of stating that things are the way we experience them to be without critical evaluation. Often they are, but within scientific circles it is better to be sure, and so the epistemological claim is concerned with what cannot be known in other ways—how things present themselves to persons—but they could exist in other ways. A privileged example of what is referred to would be if one said, “This meal seems salty to me.” The person is referring to how the meal presents itself to him or her, but there is awareness that it could be otherwise to others. That is how knowledge claims are to be understood within the reduction. For the scientific reduction, the acts of consciousness are taken to be acts of human beings who are related to and influenced by the world. The attitude of the transcendental reduction is quite different and that is what prevents it from being immediately useful for human scientific purposes. For this reason, the scientific phenomenological reduction is often understood to be a mixed reduction because the objects or states of affairs are reduced but the acts are not. When it is said that within the reduction everything that presents itself is to be accounted for precisely as it presents itself, it is a strategy devised to counteract the potentially biasing effects of past experience. When we encoun- ter familiar objects we tend to see them through familiar eyes and thus often miss seeing novel features of familiar situations. Hence, by understanding that the given has to be seen merely as a presentational something rather than the familiar “object that always is there,” new dimensions of the total experience are likely to appear. This is what is meant when phenomenologists say that they want to experience things “freshly” or “with disciplined naivete´.” Even if objects turn out to be precisely as we first thought, it is more rigorous to give nuances and “taken-for-granted” aspects a chance to show themselves, because phenomenologists do want the totality to be accounted for.
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The third step of the procedure is to seek the essence of the phenomenon by means of the method of free imaginative variation, but another difference from the philosophical method is introduced. We are seeking the psychological essence or structure of the phenomenon and not the universal essence or the essence as such. Philosophers tend to seek ultimates and so they always want universal essences. However, universalization often comes at the price of ab- straction, but in psychology, the content is as important as the form, and that means that context is also important, so the claim made by the scientific method is only “generality.” That is, because of contextual imaginative variation, one can be sure that the findings of the analysis will hold for situations other than the one in which empirical data were collected, but the same contextual imaginative variation teaches us that universality is equally not attainable. Thus, the very fact that a psychological perspective is declared dominant in these analyses makes the method greatly different from the philosophical method. However, perspective is critical for all science, and psychology is no different. To do a psychological analysis means to adopt a psychological perspec- tive, and this will ultimately lead to a psychological essence, which will be different from a sociological, biological, or historical essence. Each discipline has to come up with essences that are relevant to its perspective, but care also has to be taken that the disciplinary essence (e.g., psychological essence) is not projected beyond its zone of relevancy. A clash of perspectives or essences would have to be resolved on grounds other than those being formulated in this chapter. A word should also be spoken about the psychological perspective being discussed. What is being recommended is that the psychological perspective of the practitioner be adopted, and not any specific theoretical perspective such as psychoanalytical, cognitive, Gestalt, and so forth, because all of the latter are theoretical perspectives within psychology. What is being advocated is the adoption of a generic psychological perspective rather than that of another discipline such as sociology or anthropology. We are aware, of course, that theoretically speaking, the articulation of a discipline-wide psychological per- spective has not yet been formulated or accepted. Nevertheless, thousands of practitioners adopt such a perspective everyday in their concrete work and happily admit that they are theoretically “eclectic” or neutral. That is the position we are advocating. The living of the psychological attitude or perspec- tive is ahead of its theoretical articulation. This is where the general prac- titioner dwells, except for those who make a point of positing a theoretical position, and the performance of the phenomenological method is a praxis that requires the same general attitude. Before summarizing the phenomenological status of the method, one other point has to be mentioned even though it is not an explicit step of the method— that is the notion of intentionality, which is, for Husserl, the key feature of consciousness. To say that consciousness is intentional is to say that every object of consciousness transcends the act in which it appears, whether it is a part of consciousness (e.g., a memory) or outside of it (e.g., a table). For those objects, called transcendent, that are actually outside consciousness but related to specific acts that grasp them, the claim can be made that consciousness relates to objects that are not themselves consciousness and yet the acts that
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an analysis of a description without knowing how it ends. That is the major point of this first step. One does not do anything about what one has read— the subsequent steps take care of that. One simply needs to know the overall sense of the description before embarking on the next step.
Determination of Parts: Establishing Meaning Units
The ultimate outcome of a phenomenological analysis is to determine the mean- ing(s) of experience. As a consequence, most descriptions within a research context are too long to be capably handled in their entirety, parts have to be established to be able to achieve a more thorough analysis. Moreover, because the disclosure of meaning is the ultimate outcome, the parts that are established are based on meaning discriminations, and the results are called meaning units. Operationally the parts are determined in the following way. The re- searcher goes back and begins to reread the description from within the perspec- tive of the phenomenological reduction and with a psychological attitude, mind- ful of the phenomenon being researched, and every time he or she experiences a shift of meaning in the reading of the description, a mark is made in the appropriate place. One continues in such a fashion until the whole description is delineated with such meaning units. That is the termination of the second step. One has to appreciate that there are no “objective” meaning units in the description as such. The meaning units are correlated with the perspective of the researcher. Moreover, the meaning units are not theoretically weighty. That is, they are merely practical outcomes to help the analysis. All researchers would not have to have identical meaning units for the procedure to be valid. The method is judged by its outcome, not by intermediary stages.
Transformation of Meaning Units Into Psychologically Sensitive
Expressions
The reader will notice that there is a progressive refinement of the original description with respect to its sense. At first one merely reads what the partici- pant expressed. Then the next step produces meaning discriminations that are meant to be psychologically relevant with respect to the phenomenon being researched. The third step, which is at the heart of the method and where it bottoms out, so to speak, expresses the psychological meaning of the partici- pant’s everyday language more directly with the help of free imaginative varia- tion. The whole purpose of the method is to discover and articulate the psycho- logical meanings being lived by the participant that reveal the nature of the phenomenon being researched. The original description is full of “everyday expressions” and it is full of references to the participant’s world. The everyday expressions are often idiosyncratic but still rich with meaning. The meanings expressed by the participants have to be made psychologically explicit with regard to the phenomenon that is being researched and not directly as revela- tory of the participant in his or her personal existence. In articulating these psychological meanings, one has to avoid two errors. Clinicians tend to pursue the meanings with respect to the personal lives of
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the participants to the extent that they are available. That would be pursuing the personal interest of the participant too far. On the other hand, to the extent that contextualized personal meanings reveal something psychologically significant about the phenomenon, they have to be pursued for their relevance for the phenomenon. In other words, personal meanings are pursued not for their own sake but for the value they have for clarifying the context in which psychological phenomena manifest themselves, and therefore, for their role in specifying psychological meanings. Another potential error one should avoid is the use of psychological jargon as it exists in the literature. It is surely a huge problem to come up with original psychologically sensitive expressions on the spot, but it is more deleterious to try to use already established theory-laden terms. Each established psychologi- cal perspective has certain strengths, but also certain limits. Because no theo- retical perspective is as broad as the psychological perspective as such one never really knows whether the theory-laden term is being used in an area of strength or not. However difficult, the procedure biases itself toward the perspective that demands a creative use of language to come up with careful descriptions of the invariant psychological meanings of each meaning unit. Ordinary language twisted toward psychologically heightened revelations is the recommended strategy. Mere labeling should also be avoided.
The Determination of the Structure
The third step of the analysis ends with a series of transformed meaning units— that is, meaning units that were originally in the language of the participant are now expressed with heightened psychological sensitivity with respect to the phenomenon under study. One then practices imaginative variation on these transformed meaning units to see what is truly essential about them (like with the cup) and then one carefully describes the most invariant connected meanings belonging to the experience, and that is the general structure. It is quite possible that terms not found in the transformed meaning units are required to describe the structure. Before turning to the example analyses it may be helpful to the reader to see a flow chart of the scientific method. It may also be helpful to the reader to appreciate that each step of the method is a finer and more particular analysis built on the previous step, until the fourth step, which is once again a holistic articulation of the phenomenon, except that it is done psychologically this time. Exhibit 13.1 summarizes the steps that we have been articulating in this section.
Examples of Phenomenological Analysis of Descriptions
We shall now turn to examples of phenomenological analyses. Readers inter- ested in other examples of analyses or theoretical articulations are referred to the following sources: Giorgi (1985, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1992, 1994, 1997). For the example in this chapter, the data will be taken from a master’s thesis (Sorenson-Englander, 2000) performed under the senior
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author’s direction at Saybrook Graduate School. The phenomenon being re- searched is known as internalized homophobia, although it is not taken for granted that that is what the outcome will be. Two examples of data analysis will be provided because it will help clarify the role of the psychological structure more easily. What follows next are the transcribed interview data. Appendix 13.1 presents the transcripts of the interviews with P 1 and P 2 , the participants in this research. The two sets of data are exact transcriptions of what the participants said. The method begins with a reading of the entire description, but nothing is done except for a first grasp of what the participant said. The second step is the determination of the meaning units, and these are expressed by the slashes in the texts. The third step demands that the language of the participant be expressed in such a way that the psychological meanings within the description be more explicitly stated. Appendix 13.2 highlights the third step. The column on the left shows the participant’s words and the column on the right shows the transformations performed by the researcher to highlight psychological insights. Finally, the structure of the experience is determined by means of imaginative variation of the transformed meaning units. Although there is no space to show the process, the structure itself is presented in Appendix 13.3.
Poststructural Analyses
Although the achievement of the structure is an important step of the analytical process, it is not, as some researchers seem to believe, the final step. The purpose of the structure is to help understand the empirical data in a more methodical and systematic way. Again, a full analysis cannot be done, but key constituents of the structure can help understand the variations found in the empirical data. First of all, we must remember that what stimulated the study was the sense that male homosexuals might be “internalizing” homophobia and thus experiencing negative feelings toward themselves. The participants who re- sponded to the question posed by the interviewer answered from the perspective of everyday life. It is granted beforehand that the everyday life description is richer than any psychological analysis, but it is also true that the psychological dimensions contained within the description have to be highlighted, made explicit, and thematized. That is why the analyses in Appendix 13.2 are pre- sented. They indicate a thematization of the psychological factors whether they were originally explicit or implicit. But precisely because the participants spoke from the perspective of everyday life, it is not a priori certain that the phenome- non they experienced is psychologically equivalent to the everyday understand- ing of it. As the reader can see, we have labeled the structure differently. We believe that the complexity of the experience calls for some refinement. There are “moments” where one can detect the acceptance of the judgment of the society at large toward homosexuals, but they are only “moments.” The total experience is filled with many other meanings, including genuine fear of conse- quences of being publicly known as gay. The respect for the complexity of the experience and the refinement of psychological understanding are two consequences of the phenomenological analysis.
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Table 13.1. Selected Constituents of the Structure Along With Empirical Variations Provided by P 1 and P 2
Constituents P 1 P 2
Feelings of emotional Some of the people... I dropped out of the race. ambivalence were really effeminate Too bad and negative?? I was ashamed of my
... maybe this was a good decision, but I was more way to let my parents ashamed of being gay. know I was different Feelings of unsafety My partner and I go to see I’m still pretty scared of a therapist to deal with what might happen if issues like this... but I’m really open about it’s never going to go being gay, especially away. with the hate crimes that keep happening. Curtailing of desires I couldn’t tell my parents I wasn’t ready to be openly that I was gay—not yet gay, so I dropped out of at any rate. the race. Selective momentary And shame—at my mother... but I was more acceptance of judgments for her reaction—and at ashamed of being gay. of society at large myself I guess.
Note. Not all constituents are listed because the table is for demonstration purposes only.
Now, if we turn to Table 13.1, a demonstration table, we can see how the delineation of a structure can help deepen the psychological understanding of a situated experience. The first constituent listed is called “feelings of emotional ambivalence.” This is a psychological understanding of certain empirical de- tails, which are included in Exhibit 13.1, as well as a generalization of a key psychological factor that belongs to the structure of the experience. As Table 13.1 shows, empirically P 1 was quite concerned about how to reveal to his mother, who had a negative attitude toward gays, that he himself was gay. P 2 felt ambivalent about becoming class president. He knew that he could do a good job, but was it worth being exposed as gay? He decided that it was not worth it, but not with neutral feelings. He really felt badly that he was not free to use his talents to become a leader of the senior class. Thus, although the empirical details are starkly different for the two participants, they both can be subsumed under the psychological heading “feelings of ambiva- lence.” Thus, the structure generalizes in a psychologically meaningful way and it helps deepen the essential understanding of the experience by reducing myriad details to their essential components. The reader can examine Table 13.1 to see how the psychological constit- uents “feelings of unsafety” and “curtailing of desires” are exemplified. Because “internalized homophobia” was the triggering phenomenon of this research, we have included the moments of acceptance of outside attitudes as well. It is interesting to note that there was first, in both cases, feelings of shame directed toward something else before the shame was directed toward oneself. P 1 was ashamed of his mother first, and P 2 was ashamed that he did not continue to
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manifest gay postures and gestures. But then P 1 himself says that he does not like such gestures either although he is gay. Is he identifying with his mother’s attitude? But he also did not like how his mother was reacting to the gay person, so one cannot say that there is complete identity with the mother’s attitude. Psychologically, P 1 says that he wanted to escape the whole situation, but because the whole reception was centered on him, he knew that he could not do so without grave consequences. He would like to leave but he must stay. Once again, like with his homosexuality and with his observation of his mother toward the manifest gay person, P 1 is trapped within a situation that provokes ambivalent feelings. P 1 was also motivated to tell his parents about his sexual preference, but observing his mother’s negative, judgmental attitude he real- ized that she would not be ready to hear this news about himself in a sympa- thetic and accepting way. Again, ambivalent feelings prevail because P 1 obvi- ously wants his mother’s acceptance at some level and he is fearful that it may not be forthcoming. Still, he seems not prepared yet for a radical solution (breaking with his parents entirely) and so he dwells with myriad conflicting feelings. Meaning unit 16 is basically six lines long, yet we were able to unpack all of the above from those six lines, and everything stated is psychologically very important. To leave all of the above implicit makes the psychological analysis obscure and gives the critical reader no chance to double-check pre- cisely what aspects of the analysis he or she might disagree with. Finally, the structure is meant to convey what is truly psychologically essential about a series of experiences of the same type. Again, the structure is not meant to be universal but only general or typical. Those aspects of the experience that are highly specific or contingent would not be part of the structure. Only those constituents or relationships that are defining for the phenomenon would be included. The criterion is that the structure would be radically altered if a key constituent were to be removed. For example, neither participant that we have presented has declared publicly that he is gay. Can we imagine gays that have publicly declared their homosexuality also experiencing some moments of homophobia? We suppose so, but the dynamics could not be the same as described by these participants. Their lack of public disclosure hovers all around everything they say. That is why the idea of lack of public declaration belongs to the essential description of the phenomenon.
The Scientific Status of the Method
There are still persons today who equate science with quantification rather than with the most precise knowledge possible, which is what science’s ideal is. It is true that numbers can provide exactitude, but when the exactness of the means fits oddly with the mode of questioning and the amorphousness of the phenomenon, then one ends up with much less than the apparent exactness that numbers offer. Quantification is a powerful tool when the conditions of research allow it, but it is not the only means of achieving precision. Rather, for us the criteria of science are met when the knowledge obtained is systematic, methodical, critical, and general. To be systematic means that there is a connection between various subfields within a given discipline—for
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example, between learning and motivation or anxiety and performance and so on. Of course, at any given time in the history of a discipline these connections may not be well-understood, but at least are recognized as problems to be tackled. To be methodical means that certain basic steps that can be followed by many people to test the knowledge claims that any individual scientist can make are available. To be critical means that the knowledge gained by any method is not simply accepted because it has been gained, but that other experts within the scientific community challenge the procedures or the knowledge, including trying to replicate the findings. It also implies that the scientist who obtained the knowledge also tests it or remains skeptical of it as he or she goes along so that greater confidence in the outcome can be established. Finally, generality means that the knowledge gained is applicable to situations other than the specific one in which the knowledge was obtained. The claim is made that the method described in this chapter meets all four of the scientific criteria just described.
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partner and I were not obvious in our behavior or dress./ Most of our gay friends then and now are not obvious. Who would want to draw attention to being a social outcast?/ Anyway, my parents’ friends pretty much hung out together by the food, and my colleagues hung out together by the drinks. There wasn’t much interaction between the two groups—maybe because of the generational differences—but I think it was mostly because my colleagues made my parents and their friends uncomfortable./
I: Can you tell me more about this—about thinking your colleagues made your parents and their friends uncomfortable?
P 1 : One guy in particular was holding his cigarette like so (participant demon- strates) and he had his legs crossed—not like a man—like a woman./
I: Is there a difference?
P 1 : Oh yes! Men sit like this (demonstrates). and women—and Fifi’s—sit like this (demonstrates).
I: I see. So it was the gesture and the posture?
P 1 : (nods). My mom reacted exactly the same way as when she had done before. She was disgusted. And angry that I might have invited someone like that. Or that I would even know someone like that. Or that I might even be like that. My parents sort of prided themselves for not having any gay friends. You know how some people will say “Some of my best friends are gay?” Well, not my parents./ Actually, one of my relatives is gay but no one from my family has associated with him for years./
I: Was it just this one person, or were there others?
P^1 : Oh, ya, I guess—one guy was pretty loud—especially after a few drinks. He giggled a lot. Not laughed—giggled./ But the one who really stood out was the guy with the cigarette and crossed legs. And it gave me the creeps when I saw the say way my mother reacted. I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. But I was the guest of honor. I realized that I couldn’t tell my parents I was gay—not yet, at any rate./
I: Have you since?
P 1 : I waited until I had moved across country with my partner, as far away from them as I could get. It was around my 30th birthday. I wrote them a letter./ At first, my mother pretended she never got the letter. She would call and ask if I’d met any nice women./ My partner and I had a ceremony last year to affirm our commitment to each other, and my mother said I chose to become gay. Both my parents said I should rethink my lifestyle decision. We haven’t spoken since./
I: Back to the party—what did you feel when you saw your mother react?
P 1 : Embarrassment—for the way my colleague was acting. And shame—at my mother for her reaction—and at myself, I guess./ You know, I experience internalized homophobia quite often. I can’t be around a Fifi. And there are times when I guess that’s part of why I continue to see my therapist on a
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weekly basis. My partner and I go to see a therapist together, but I see one on my own—to deal with issues like this. It’s not always there, but it’s never going to go away—until other people get over their homophobia./
Interview Participant 2
I was really competitive and successful in high school until I decided to get involved in politics. I was running for senior class president./ I was pretty active in some gay-related activities but didn’t openly admit to being gay. Why should I? After all, a lot of people—straight people—were involved in celebrating diversity./ My opponent in the class elections found out I was gay. I can’t remember how... but he used that to his advantage. He demanded I withdraw from the elections or else he would expose me./ I wasn’t ready to be openly gay. So, I dropped out of the race. Too bad./ I know I would have been a good representa- tive for my class. But I couldn’t risk being ridiculed or attacked. I was ashamed of my decision, but I was more ashamed of being gay./ I also stopped hanging out with my gay friends from outside the school. I had been active in a gay-friendly group from the Catholic Church, and volun- teered once a week at the Food Bank which was specifically for people living with AIDS./ But I stopped going. I made excuses for not showing up. My therapist says it’s typical—dropping out in order to hide from exposure. Expo- sure makes you vulnerable to ridicule and violence./ No one called to follow up. At first I was angry but then I realized the people from the church and from the Food Bank probably understood more than I about respect and confi- dentiality./ I’m pretty open now, but only in certain situations. I do this volunteer crisis line counseling once a week which, now that I think about it, probably helps me deal with issues of my own that I don’t recognize in myself until after I hear about them from someone else who has had a similar experience./ I am grateful to have a committed relationship. We don’t go to the bars. We have a few good friends, who are also in committed relationships./ We would like to think we live pretty normal lives—but I don’t think we ever will. I guess I’m still pretty scared about what might happen if I’m really open about being gay, especially with the hate crimes that keep happening./
