Critique of the article, ‘Theoretical foundations of phenomenography: a critical review’

ABSTRACT

This is a critique of the paper, Theoretical Foundations of Phenomenography: A Critical Review (Hajar, 2021. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(7), 1421–1436. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1833844). This critique highlights misrepresentations of phenomenography within the paper, in particular that the example of phenomenographic research outcomes presented in the paper misrepresents both the object of study and the structure of the outcome space in phenomenographic research. Issues raised by Hajar with respect to the role of the researcher in phenomenographic research, the relative functions of bracketing and interpretive awareness during phenomenographic analysis, and the use of sociocultural perspectives and the notion of individual lifeworlds in phenomenography are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Phenomenography
• object of study
• structure of outcome space
• role of researcher
• misinterpretations

This article refers to:

Theoretical foundations of phenomenography: a critical review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hajar (2020) is cited as Hajar (2019) in his 2021 article, because he cites the pre-publication online version provided by the journal upon acceptance of the article, whereas I cite the published version.

2 Whilst there has been an increasing trend following publication of Marton and Booth (1997) towards highlighting structure within categories, showing the structure between categories is still paramount.