Different understandings of the nature of ‘structural relationships’ in phenomenographic research: views of educational researchers

ABSTRACT

Phenomenography, as a qualitative research methodology, is distinguished by its simultaneous focus on investigating (a) variation in ways of experiencing phenomena in the world, and (b) structural relationships that link and separate the different ways of experiencing. The focus on structural relationships is often regarded as the most distinctive and useful aspect of the methodology, but it is also the least well understood aspect. To help explicate the nature of structural relationships in phenomenographic research, this paper reports the outcomes of an empirical study of different understandings of structural relationships amongst educational researchers. Structural relationships were variously described as: (1) hierarchical relationships; (2) hierarchically-inclusive relationships; (3) meaning-structure relationships; (4) part-whole relationships; and (5) multi-faceted relationships. The outcomes of the study highlight a number of critical aspects of the notion of structural relationships that researchers need to become aware of in order to use the methodology in a sophisticated way.

KEYWORDS:

• Phenomenography
• structure
• structural relationships
• qualitative methods

Disclosure statement

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

Ethics approval

This research received ethics approval from the University of Canberra Ethics in Human Research Committee – Protocol Number EC00108.

Notes

1. At any one point in time, collective experience will also be limited, due to limitations in the experience available in particular sociocultural contexts. So, a phenomenon may also be experienced differently by different collective groups of people, as well as by different individuals.

2. The complex, or collective ways, of experiencing a particular aspect of (or phenomenon in) the world can be considered at multiple levels depending on context: all of humanity; all of a specified population; or all of a specified sample of a population.

3. Phenomenography takes a non-dualistic perspective on human experience. By non-dualistic, we mean that human experience is not separate from the world being experienced; person and world do not exist independently, but in relation to each other.

4. Approval of the ethical conduct of this research was received from the University of Canberra Ethics in Human Research Committee.

5. The theme is also referred to as the ‘internal horizon’ of awareness, and the thematic field and margin as the ‘external horizon’ of awareness.

6. From a phenomenographic perspective, there are two collective groups (and thus two collective ‘wholes’) in a study: the whole population from which the sample is drawn, and the whole set of responses within the sample. Each represents a collective group of people, even though one is a subset of the other.

7. I distinguish between critical and non-critical variation here because there always has to be some variation in how people have expressed themselves within a category of response, but it must not be significant variation.

8. I should acknowledge here that the structure of an outcome space need not always take the form of a simple linear hierarchy of inclusiveness. It is not a hard and fast rule, and branching structures are also a possibility. But the most common outcome is a linear hierarchy (Åkerlind, 2005/2005; Marton & Booth, 1997).

9. It is relevant to note that the contextual embeddedness of phenomena is relatively unpopular as a framework for analysis in phenomenography, though examples do exist (e.g Jarrett, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerlese S. Åkerlind

Gerlese S. Åkerlind is Professor Emerita at the Australian National University. She was previously Director of the Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods at ANU, Director of the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University of Canberra, and an honorary Research Associate of the Oxford Learning Institute at Oxford University.