Phenomenographic Analysis

questionnaire are investigated in the present study with modern modelling techniques, namely Bayesian network modelling. These techniques are described more thoroughly in the next subsection.

situation and describes it tells as much about the phenomenon as it does about the experiencing and understanding subject (the person).

Marton (ibid.) calls the experience or a conception of a phenomenon the internal relation between subject and object and states that it is a “way of delimiting an object from its context and relating it to the same or other contexts and it is a way of delimiting component parts of the phenomenon and relating them to each other and to the whole.”

This internal relation can be further divided into the internal horizon (delimitation and relating of parts) and external horizon (delimitation from and relating to a context) and these parts “together make up the structural aspect of the experience.”

In phenomenographic research, the researcher is interested in exploring the different ways in which individuals can be aware of a certain situation or phenomenon. When people are aware of a situation, certain things are in the foreground and are explicit, while other aspects of the situation are in the background and are implicit. However, this is not an either/or question between these two classes, because there is continuous variation in how we observe situations in the explicit-implicit axle. We may be keenly aware of a learning problem, but we are simultaneously aware of other things that surround it in space and time, such as the working environment, our mood, other persons in the vicinity etc. Marton (1994) says that therefore the external horizon of the situation extends indefinitely in space and time. Any particular situation is always experienced through all of our experiences in the world, but the world is also experienced through the specific situation. In phenomenography, “we want to find out the differences in the structure of awareness and the corresponding meaning of the phenomenon or situation” (Marton, 1994).

The data in phenomenographic research is most often gathered in open interviews with the research participants, but other methods are also used, such as observation, drawings, written responses and historical documents. Individual interviews have the possible benefit of letting the researcher delve more deeply into the individual ways of experiencing a situation or a phenomenon, since the interview situation is open-ended and the researcher can ask the interviewee to explore and reflect on certain aspects of their experiences and awareness. The interview situation may therefore help the research participant consider such aspects of their thinking that have not been under scrutiny before. However, such

probing questions also pose the danger of leading the interviewee to think and respond in a certain manner, this ruining the reliability of the data.

In the present study, however, the research participants were asked to write study journals in which they reflected on their learning, collaboration etc. including their problems and successes. No one was forced to write the study journal, although they were encouraged to do so (see subsection 5.3.1). It is the author’s belief that such unforced and less stressful (to the participants) methods of data gathering will produce data that is more revealing of the learners’ way of experiencing and conceptualising the phenomena surrounding their learning activities. Whereas in an interview situation, the interviewer has the opportunity to lead the interview in directions that are of greatest interest to him/her, that may impose a bias on the data by making the research participant ponder or explore areas of their thinking that do not necessarily have as much of an effect on the situation or phenomenon under study as the researcher might think. By asking the research participant to explore these areas of their thinking, the researcher makes them more prominent in the research material and thus they receive more attention in the final analysis than they may deserve.

It has to be noted, however, that the present study gave the research participants almost a full year to write entries on their study journals. The interview method is certainly a faster and more efficient method of data gathering and ensures that the research participants provide data on the very phenomenon under research. In a written account, especially one that is produced in a process that takes almost a year, it is more likely that the research participants reveal their general ways of thinking and their general beliefs, rather than the thinking and beliefs that happen to be active in the interview situation. The method used in the present study might not have worked as well as it did if the time constraints had been stricter and there had been a need to have the data available by a specific date. In the present situation, however, the learners could write entries on their journals whenever they wished to do so and had something to say. The author provided encouragement and reminders for the learners to write on their journals over the year that the learning programme was running and sometimes did so by providing sample questions or topics that the learners might want to write about. These interventions were done carefully, though, to ensure that the sample questions covered an extensive enough area of interest that they would not lead the research participants to a certain way of thinking, but would only encourage them to write from their own point of view, about things that were

important to them, rather than to the researcher. In particular, this means that the author did not use specific terms, such as intrinsic motivation, learning strategies or resource management strategies etc. to lead the learner to write about such topics. Rather, the questions were general, touching on learning, cooperation, difficulties and successes.

In phenomenographic research, the researcher’s task is to explore variations in the way that a certain phenomenon appears to the participants. In the first part of the analysis, the researchers have to forget about their own preconceptions and the individual people that they are researching and concentrate on the variation within the data. The data is organised according to topic or phenomenon and then the specific topics and phenomena are studied individually. The study journals that the research participants wrote contained material on many areas that pertain to learning, such as their motivation, learning strategies, cooperation and collaboration etc. These were chosen as the various phenomena to be studied individually.

It has to be noted here, in preparation for the next few paragraphs, that as the author also used the APL questionnaire to derive data from the research participants, he was already considering the use of the categorisation of motivation and learning strategies in the final analysis of the material provided by the study journals. These categories are a result of extensive previous research on the said topic areas and proved helpful in the categorisation of the present research material. It has to be remembered, however, that the author prioritised the qualitative material and contrasted the evidence provided by the research material against the categories provided by the APLQ and accepted them only after careful analysis. In some areas of the study, the categories provided by the APLQ proved not to be sufficient, especially in the case of the so-called peer learning strategies and in those cases the analysis goes beyond these previous categorisations.

The next step is to explore the variation in the participants’ experiences of the particular phenomenon, by contrasting different viewpoints and conceptions against each other and finding separate categories within the continuum of experience. The NVivo analysis programme was used in both parts of the study to group the participants’ statements into themes and categories. Particular attention was paid to finding separate categories within the so-called pool of meanings within each topic. But it is also important to remember that it is not enough to study the phrases that the learners have used in their journals by

themselves, only in the context of the topic under which they have been “pooled.” It is also important to consider the phrases and meanings in the context of the individuals who wrote them, taking into account what else they have said and how it affects the meaning of the phrase that they have used to describe their experiences about a particular topic. The combination of individual and collective contexts of particular expressions is the hermeneutic element of phenomenographic analysis.

In the next phase of analysis, the different categories that were found under specific topics were compared with each other and the distinguishing features were explicated. This part of the research was done by hand, with the help of printed paper slips, as it was necessary to categorise the same material in several different ways, and the present researcher found it the easiest to do this by hand, using different colour codes to keep the material in order.

The distinguishing features were then used as a basis when descriptions for each topic and category were written. These qualitative descriptions form one result of the present study (Chapter 7), since one aim of the study is to understand the variation within the categories of learners’ strategic and motivational capabilities. These categories were compared to the categories suggested by the theoretical background (see Section 3.4). The preconception of the categories is mainly provided by earlier quantitative studies and theories based on them, and it is interesting to see how the qualitative findings compare to this background.

In order to achieve deeper comparison, the present group of research participants also responded to a questionnaire on their motivational and strategic abilities, which were then analysed quantitatively with Bayesian modelling methods.