Paweł Gwiaździński

The aim of this article is to describe the method of analysis of the microphenomenological interview and to compare this method to other similar methods. Microphenomenological method was proposed by the French phenomenologist Claire Petitmengin. The microphenomenological interview is a qualitative, second-person method of studying experience that responds to problems resulting from the study of subjective experience, such as, among others, distraction, preoccupation with the goal of action, inaccessibility of experience in real time, or difficulty in putting into words the lived experience. The aim of this method is to discover the structure of experience in its diachronic and synchronic dimensions. The interview is semi-structured and the questions asked are guided by the structure of the experience itself and cannot be suggestive. In this article, we present a method of analysis of the microphenomenological interview, although its first two parts are also devoted to the process of conducting it, in order to understand the idea of the interview. The process of analysis consists in identifying in structural sentences minimal units of meaning, which Petitmengin calls descriptemes, which create examples of descriptive categories. Moreover, this analysis also consists in the process of abstraction, which in the context of the microphenomenological interview means drawing from previously identified minimal structural statements, increasingly general descriptive categories. This is done on both synchronic and diachronic levels, through a series of abstraction operations. Abstraction operations are the main tools of analysis in this method. In this article, we present a method for analyzing the microphenomenological interview and we compare this method to other methods, such as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience (Stanghellini et al., 2021), Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), Front-Loaded Phenomenology (Gallagher, 2003), and Ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019). We show that the microphenomenological interview method is a unique and distinctive qualitative method for examining subjective experience.

The aim of this article is to present the microphenomenological interview method as a second-person method in the study of experience. Researchers in the field of cognitive science are beginning to realize that third-person methods of studying experience have their limitations, namely that the researcher does not know what is happening at the level of the subjective consciousness of the person being studied. On the other hand, first-person methods do not work in empirical research, because they are based exclusively on the first-person perspective of the researcher-expert, who is also the subject of the experience being studied. Meanwhile, science is looking for more objective research methods, as well as those that take into account the results of research on a specific research group. In the face of such challenges, the second-person method of studying experience – which consists in conducting an interview with the person being studied about their subjective experience – proposed by the French phenomenologist Claire Petitmengin (2006), becomes very promising. This method responds to the challenges of contemporary problems of cognitive science related to the need to study experience from the perspective of the person being studied. Petitmengin calls her method an explication interview or an elicitation interview (Petitmengin, 2006), and in later and more contemporary works – microphenomenological interviews (Petitmengin, Remillieux, Valenzuela--Moguillansky, 2018). This method is called second-person because the interviewer enters into a relationship with the person being examined, directing the interview in such a way as to extract the diachronic and synchronic structure of the experience being studied.