Colaizzi's descriptive phenomenological method

Abstract

Descriptive phenomenology is concerned with revealing the “essence” or “essential structure” ofany phenomenon under investigation – that is, those features that make it what it is, rather thansomething else. By far the best known descriptive approach in psychology is that of AmedeoGiorgi (1985), who is widely credited as a pioneer in bringing phenomenological thinking intopsychology. Giorgi’s method can be seen as a form of distillation, in which the analyst step bystep sifts away everything that is not essential to an adequate description of the phenomenon. Itis, however, not the only descriptive phenomenological method in the social and humansciences. We focus here on a method proposed by Colaizzi (1978), which is little-known inpsychology but widely used in other disciplines such as the health sciences. We argue that themethod has considerable potential for qualitative psychologists, especially those coming freshto descriptive phenomenology.