A developmental or a 'pure' phenomenographic interest - are there methodological implications?

I want to contrast what I call developmental phenomenography with what Marton (1986, p.38), calls a 'pure' phenomenographic interest, describing "how people conceive of various aspects of their reality". Marton suggest that the concepts under study are mostly "phenomena confronted by subjects in everyday life rather than in course material studied in school".

The phenomenographic research that I engage in is situated within a particular kind of context. I focus on research which, through finding out how people experience some aspect of their world, will enable them or others to change the way their world operates, normally in a formal educational setting. My perspective is developmental. My reasons for undertaking the research are concerned with how I can use the research outcomes to affect the world I live and work in. The research outcomes are not the objective per se. This developmental, phenomenographic research notion is reminiscent of the idea presented by Säljö when he contrasts earlier and more recent approaches:

...what appears to be lost in the 'pure' phenomenographic interest, was the notion of people as hermeneutic beings making sense of what they see, hear and read. Thus to read a particular text and to interpret it roughly as it was intended under specific social and communicative constraints, is to attempt to achieve something. /.../ What the studies were about, thus, in a sense had to do with how people as cultural beings decipher and render meaningful messages mediated through writing. (Säljö, 1994, p.73)

Developmental phenomenography is different from the 'pure' phenomenographic interest in a number of ways. Consider, for example, a project that I have been involved in since 1988, which investigated students' understanding of fundamental physics concepts. Various aspects have been published (e.g. Bowden et al., 1992; Dall'Alba et al., 1993; Walsh et al., 1993; Ramsden et al., 1993), each dealing with a different perspective such as the relation between students' understandings and textbooks' treatment of acceleration, or implications for physics teaching and assessment, of students' understandings of frame of reference.

The approach that our project team took was intended to enable subsequent use of the outcomes of the phenomenographic research, in a teaching and learning context. To have interviewed people who had never studied physics would not have enabled us to use the outcomes to comment on textbook treatments of the physics phenomena concerned or the way in which physics students are taught and assessed. Such research results would have been regarded by science educators as irrelevant to the pedagogical issues because those interviewed would have been deemed inappropriate. Indeed, it was vital that the people interviewed had studied their physics in the particular educational system under scrutiny.

If you take this line, you must conclude that particular methods used in developmental phenomenography are affected both by the intended use of the research outcomes and by the internal requirements of phenomenographic research per se. It may be that the same limitations do not apply to 'pure' phenomenography. However, I think that they do and that is an issue which deserves to be explored further elsewhere.

I describe the kind of research that I do as developmental phenomenography because it is undertaken with the purpose of using the outcomes to help the subjects of the research, usually students, or others like them to learn. The insights from the research outcomes can help in the planning of learning experiences which will lead students to a more powerful understanding of the phenomenon under study, and of other phenomena like it. The outcomes from these research studies can also be used to develop generalisations about better and worse ways to organise learning experiences in the particular field of study. The research outcomes and the way they are obtained can be used in training or development programmes for teachers as an analogy to demonstrate ideas about teaching and learning. The focus of the research is therefore as much on the participants in the study and on the nature of the data collection process which triggers their contribution, as it is on the phenomenon under study. In every sense the research is relational and therefore the full range of methodological issues becomes important, as I will elaborate in this paper.

Consider two examples from the physics project that I referred to earlier. In one study (Bowden et al., 1992) the project team compared students' ways of seeing a number of similar phenomena concerned with the concepts of displacement, velocity and frames of reference. In each case, an initial question involving these concepts was presented in written form to individual students who were each asked to talk about it in a phenomenographic interview. The questions were quite different in form with two being entirely qualitative while the other two provided quantitative data, for which there were numerical solutions. The outcomes from the four cases were compared, the differences among them were noted and implications for teaching these concepts to students at the end of high school and the first year at university were explored. That the students in the study were from that same population was vital to the research, just as the precise nature of the question in each case was significant. What went on in the interviews was important also; that there were particular interventions that were planned to be made and those that it was decided should not be made were equally relevant. There are important issues of validity and reliability which go beyond the familiar question of whether the categories are reproducible and truly represent the way the interviewees see the phenomenon. This raises the question of when the phenomenographic research process actually begins and ends, an issue which will be addressed later.

In another study (Dall'Alba et al., 1993), our team explored students¹ understandings of the concept of acceleration and compared the outcomes of the study with the ways that textbooks treated this concept. Some less powerful understandings that some of the interviewees displayed were related to some particular ways in which the concept had been treated in the textbooks. The textbooks chosen for analysis were those that the students who were interviewed had used in their high school and university courses. Thus, it mattered to us who our interviewees were; it mattered what their previous learning experiences were.

What these examples demonstrate is that in carrying out developmental phenomenography it is important that the studies, like any other research, be planned and carefully managed from beginning to end, if the purposes are to be achieved. It would be merely coincidental for analysis of opportunity data to be able to be used for the developmental purposes described above; generally, it could not be used in this way.

What about research in which interest is focused instead on the phenomenon per se and whose ultimate goal is to develop descriptions of the range of ways of experiencing that phenomenon, in as full a way as possible, but with no intention of using those outcomes to effect change? In such 'pure' phenomenographic research, is there less need to focus on some of the aspects of methodology which, I have suggested, a developmental phenomenographic perspective demands? I believe the same demands do apply to pure phenomenographic research; at the very least, the question needs further consideration by those who engage in such research.

References
Bowden, J., G. Dall'Alba, D. Laurillard, E. Martin, F. Marton, G. Masters, A. Stephanou & E. Walsh, 1992: Displacement, velocity and frames of reference: Phenomenographic studies of students' understanding and some implications for teaching. American Journal of Physics, 60, 262-269.

Dall'Alba, G., E. Walsh, J. Bowden, E. Martin, G. Masters, P. Ramsden & A. Stephanou, 1993: Textbook treatments and students' understanding of acceleration. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 30, 621-635.

Marton, F. 1986: Phenomenography - A research approach to investigating different understandings of reality. Journal of Thought, 21, 28-49.

Ramsden, P., G. Masters, A. Stephanou, E. Walsh, E. Martin, D. Laurillard & F. Marton 1993: Phenomenographic research and the measurement of understanding: An investigation of students' conceptions of speed, distance, and time. International Journal of Educational Research, 19, 3.

Säljö, R. 1994: Minding action. Conceiving of the world versus participating in cultural practices. Nordisk Pedagogik, 14, 2.

Walsh, E., G. Dall'Alba, J. Bowden, E. Martin, F. Marton, G. Masters, P. Ramsden & A. Stephanou, 1993: Students' understanding of relative speed: a phenomenographic study. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 30, 1133-1148.