When analysing data, the phenomenologist’s task is to mine the naïve descriptions given by participants for the meanings that are secreted. We aim to capture something of the experiential (embodied, intersubjective, prereflective) sense of the phenomenon. “When we stop and linger with something, it secretes its sense and its full significance becomes…amplified” (Wertz, 1985, p. 174).
To accomplish this, the researcher needs to take time and dwell with their data, intuitively moving, feeling and sensing before active sense-making. In this space, the researcher slows down, staying with moment of experience, while also holistically magnifying its significance. The challenge is to postpone any rush to impose meaning, clarity or certainty.
The aim of the phenomenological task is to transform lived experience into an evocative textual (or use of another creative form) expression of its essence. If a participant says they are “in pain,” what does that actually mean to them? (Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2019). It’s about staying present to the phenomenal world that the participant is describing in order to intuit their lifeworldly meanings (Ashworth, 2015). It’s about eidetic intuition – the seeing of essence (Wertz, 2010). van Manen (2014), describes the process as starting with reflecting on the unique meanings of the phenomenon to gain an eidetic grasp or inceptual insight. Here, the lifeworld is shown in its “full ambiguity, irreducibility, contingency, mystery, and ultimate indeterminacy” (van Manen, 2011).
Whatever variant of phenomenology is employed, the process of dwelling with and understanding participants’ words involves opening up meanings: Here, we "fully welcome it in its sonorous being . . . to hear what it says. . . . The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of 'psychic reality' spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said . . . it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear." (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 155).
