Phenomenography
Map qualitatively different ways of understanding
Phenomenography investigates the qualitatively different ways a group experiences or understands a particular phenomenon. Analysis develops a limited set of categories and their relationships, often called an outcome space. Its focus is variation in the relation between people and phenomenon. It differs from phenomenology’s traditions of examining lived experience and from measuring individual traits.
Choose it when you want to understand how learners conceive a concept or activity in different ways, and purposive recruitment can expose meaningful variation through detailed, phenomenon-focused accounts.
Strengths
- Reveals differences that simple attainment scores may conceal
- Can inform teaching by identifying contrasting ways of understanding
Limitations
- Category development requires substantial interpretive judgement
- A sampled outcome space may omit other possible understandings
Know the boundary
Categories describe ways of experiencing a phenomenon, not fixed types of people or stages everyone must pass through.