Chapter Summary

This chapter was a description of the phenomenological analysis of the qualitative data. It began with a discussion of the history and philosophy of phenomenology, then continued with a discussion of the methods of phenomenology embedded in the actual results of the analysis.

The chapter described the first task of the phenomenologist as bracketing by describing in detail his or her own experience with the phenomenon in question. The next section was a description of how the data were analyzed, first by a thorough reading of the data, then categorizing significant statements in the data by applying codes. From there the chapter described the process of horizontalization, where the researcher eliminated overlapping or repeated statements. The next section of the chapter was the textural description where the researcher gathered the significant statements into themes and provided a formulated meaning statement for each of the themes. This investigation resulted in four themes, which aligned with the three research questions as well as a small theme related to the views of non-participants. The textural description was a description of the researcher’s interpretation of what happened during the phenomenon. Following the textural description was the structural description, which described the context of the phenomenon and how it happened. The final section of chapter 5 was the composite description, which combined the textural description and the structural description, capturing the essence of the phenomenon.