This research takes a qualitative interpretative phenomenology approach to study the barriers that African-American women face when obtaining higher education. Scholars have concluded that the challenges that the target group faces are vast; however, there is not enough attention given to the problem in the social studies field. Phenomenology was established by Edmund Husserl initially as a form of descriptive psychology and later as an eidetic and transcendental field of research in the science of consciousness (Smith, 2013). Phenomenology is differentiated into two approaches, one of which deals with studying the meaning of experiences, thus entailing a phenomenological psychological approach that focuses on the way in which an individual processes their life occurrences. The other deals with exploring the meaning of being a person, thus yielding an existential or hermeneutic approach toward phenomenological exploration.
Classical phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty assumed an expansive view of phenomenological consciousness. Arguably, for the mentioned thinkers, every kind of conscious experience through which a person has lived has a distinct phenomenological character, and the task of the study field is to analyze the character (Smith, 2013). Thus, the “phenomena” that are the emphasis of phenomenology could be assumed to offer a rich character of live experiences. In this study, the first approach will be taken in order to focus on the lives experiences of African-American women within the educational setting. Therefore, psychological phenomenology will be used as a research method that is grounded in transcendental analysis to interpret the necessary conditions relating to the various possibilities of subjects’ experiences. Psychological phenomenology is expected to shed light on unanswered questions in such crucial areas of research as phycological attitude, including the very meaning of psychology itself, psychological phenomenology is expected to shed light on unanswered questions in such crucial areas of research as phycological attitude, including the exact meaning of psychology itself, ambiguities and rudimentary nature of descriptions of human experiences as well as the “proper levels of generality that are to be sought and achieved in psychological research” (Giorgi, 2009, p. 269).
The proposed psychological phenomenology approach is expected to align with the study goals as related to the aim of discovering what African-American women endure when seeking to obtain higher education, in terms of both what was experienced and how it was experienced. The psychological perspective of phenomenology will help the researcher identify the critical areas of study that relate to the way in which the study subjects have viewed their experiences and what emotional and behavioral outcomes of such experiences helped them form their opinions and perceptions of the educational process and the setting associated with it. Therefore, the psychological phenomenology perspective will show what it is like to experience barriers to educational attainment from the standpoint of a particular population. As suggested by Heidegger’s tradition of phenomenology, the study will relate to coping and dealing with the world as a method for revealing what it means to be African American woman in a higher educational setting.
When it comes to the sample size of the study, the goal of qualitative researchers is to attain the saturation of the sample, which occurs when adding more participants to research does not result in additional information or broader perspectives. The concept of saturation is essential to consider because of the need to achieve an appropriate sample size in qualitative studies. The sample size for the study will include fifteen participants, African-American women who have directly engaged with the higher educational setting and could share their experiences being in that setting. The sample size aligns with the characteristics of phenomenological studies. While Creswell (1998) recommended between five and twenty-five participants for phenomenological research, Morse (1994) suggested including at least six individuals. Convenience sampling is the most suitable approach for this study because it offers the researcher an opportunity to collect data from a conveniently available pool of respondents. While convenience sampling does not allow for the random selection of study participants, due to the limitations imposed by social distancing at the present time, as well as the need for a specified sample with peculiar characteristics, random sampling may not be possible.
The data for further analysis will be collected with the help of semi-structured interviews, which is reflected in the phenomenological inquiry of the study, moving “away from the positivist or objectivist idea of the “pure” interview conducted in a sterile environment to a view of the interview itself as an interaction within which both parties construct narrative versions of the social world” (Keenan, 2017, p. 3). By using semi-structured interviews in a phenomenological study, the focus is placed less on bias reduction by asking questions in a strictly controlled environemnt but rather by means of making researchers’ subjectivity a visible component of the project. In the phenomenological approach toward the study, semi-structured interviews will allow the researcher to make his or her lived experiences of respondents’ reality visible through facilitating the ability to both ask the right questions while also making legitimate claims.
References
Creswell, J. W. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modified Husserlian approach. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 41(2), 269-276.
Keenan, B. (2017). Phenomenological approach utilizing semi-structured interviews: Do early career researchers feel they are practicing in an environment that values research? SAGE Research Method Cases. Web.
Morse, J. M. (1994). Designing funded qualitative research. In N. K. Denizin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 220-235). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Smith, D. (2013). Husserl (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.