Gilbert Garza

Previous literature has examined teachers’ motivations to teach in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motives, personality dimensions, and teacher burnout. These findings have been cast in the rubric of differences between teachers and non-teachers and the linear relations between these measures among teachers. Utilizing a phenomenological approach (Giorgi, 1970) to analyze data generated in structured interviews with four tenured professors from small, liberal arts universities whose central mission is teaching, this paper presents the telic or project-ive horizons of teaching – those motives aimed at what is ‘not yet’ (Heidegger, 1927/1962). Results revealed that teaching is understood by teachers to be a dialogical enterprise between a teacher and learners across dimensions of transformation, knowledge, and personhood. This dialogue entailed an abiding tension between self and other, activity and passivity, giving and receiving, preparation and spontaneity, instructing and learning, leading and following, asserting and withdrawing. It comprised an orientation to a teachers’ vision for the possible future personhood of the teacher and their students and to the character of the world which teachers and learners inhabit together. These findings are discussed in terms of the reviewed literature and as a case in point for a vital complementarity of research approaches.

Existential phenomenological research in the Duquesne school has been rooted in experiential research but also includes what von Eckartsberg (1998b) and Garza (2007) have described, respectively, as hermeneutic or archival research (for more detailed accounts of this lineage, see Polkinghorne 1989; Smith 1983, 2002; and von Eckartsberg 1998b). In such research, human cultural objects such as films, novels, and, in this case, television shows are taken up as capturing “understandings” expressive of “projecting” (Heidegger 1927/1962) and as manifesting meaning horizons of the worlds from which they are drawn and of which they are expressive (Garza 2007). This article will examine meanings of compulsive hoarding, as manifest from multiple perspectives depicted in an episode of the A&E television series Hoarders (Barnes et al. 2010), as comprising lived worlds of intersecting project-ive horizons of meaning. These results are discussed in light of contemporary psychological literature on the topic and in view of the specific knowledge claims and limitations of archival phenomenological research.

Following the theoretical and methodological trail blazed by the “Duquesne School” (see Garza 2007 Garza, G . 2007. Varieties of phenomenological research at the University of Dallas: an emerging typology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 4: 313–42. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar] ; Polkinghorne 1989 Polkinghorne, DE . 1989. “Phenomenological research methods”. In Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology: exploring the breadth of human experience, Edited by: Valle, RS and Halling, S . New York: Plenum Press. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ; von Eckartsberg 1998b von Eckartsberg, R . 1998b. “Existential-phenomenological research”. In Phenomenological inquiry in psychology: existential and transpersonal dimensions, Edited by: Valle, R . New York: Plenum Press. [Google Scholar] ), this article presents a procedure for phenomenological data analysis. After describing its approach, this article lays out the procedure for thematic collation analysis using the work of Giorgi (1970 Giorgi, A . 1970. Psychology as a human science: a phenomenologically based approach, New York: Harper & Row. [Google Scholar] , 1975 Giorgi, A . 1975. “Convergence and divergence of qualitative methods in psychology”. In Duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology: vol. II, Edited by: Giorgi, A , Fischer, C and Murray, E . Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. [Google Scholar] , 1985a Giorgi, A . 1985a. “Sketch of a phenomenological method”. In Phenomenology and psychological research, Edited by: Giorgi, A . Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. [Google Scholar] , 1985b Giorgi, A . 1985b. “The phenomenological psychology of learning and the verbal learning tradition”. In Phenomenology and psychological research, Edited by: Giorgi, A . Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. [Google Scholar] ; Giorgi & Giorgi 2003 Giorgi, A and Giorgi, B . 2003. “The descriptive phenomenological psychological method”. In Qualitative research in psychology: expanding perspectives in methodology and design, Edited by: Camic, PM , Rhodes, JE and Yardley, L . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ) and this author's thematic moment analysis ( Garza 2004 Garza, G . 2004. Thematic moment analysis: a didactic application of a procedure for phenomenological analysis of narrative data. Humanistic Psychologist, 32: 120–68. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar] ) as a point of reference. Idiographic results of a single datum describing an experience of regret are presented along with the steps through which this idiographic thematic narrative was developed. Procedures for arriving at comparative analysis of more than one piece of data are presented and distinguished from claims of generality sought by works drawing on larger data pools. Finally, this work discusses the usefulness of this procedure for lengthy and complex data and situates this procedure within the phenomenological tradition of psychological research.

This article seeks to describe what characterizes phenomenological research as ‘phenomenological,’ especially in relation to the more general term, ‘qualitative research.’ Following research techniques being developed at the University of Dallas as a legacy of the ‘Duquesne school’ of phenomenological research, this article presents Giorgi's description of what he takes to be central features of a phenomenological method: description, use of the phenomenological reduction, consideration of intentionality, the disclosure of essences or structures as results, and the necessity that the researcher holds a psychological perspective in reference to the data (1985, 2003 [with B. Giorgi]). The article then describes several varieties of phenomenological research being practiced at the University of Dallas in terms of their subject matter, data, intentional or meaning relations being investigated, and the knowledge claims made. Common threads amongst the presented variety of phenomenological inquiry are discussed.