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Rajiv Gandhi national university of law

Sociology
Group 25 / semester 3rd

Topic: Phenomenology in Social Science ReSearch

Submitted to: Submitted by :

Ms. PamalPreet Kelly Rahul Danodia

Asst. Professor of Law 15213


CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT...............................................................................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................................................2
CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................................................................5

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I express my gratitude to the Ms. Pamalpreet Kelly for assigning us our project topics. The process of
completion of the project has taught me a lot. I also thank my friends and colleagues who have helped me
complete my project.

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INTRODUCTION

Social phenomenology is an approach within the field of sociology that aims to reveal what role
human awareness plays in the production of social action, social situations and social worlds. In
essence, phenomenology is the belief that society is a human construction.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) formulated
phenomenology both as a philosophical perspective and as a theory of knowledge. It had a great impact on a
variety of social sciences. To Husserl, reality is not given, but is constituted. It is thus apprehended in human
experience and given meaning and form. Humans look upon their reality as given in a natural and
unquestioned way. It is the task of the philosopher to penetrate beyond the taken-for-grant-edness of the
world of experience (Lebenswelt) through a bracketing procedure (epoche) in order to arrive at a deeper
understanding of the essence of phenomena. For example, the phenomenologist may look at the multiple
ways in which humans experience the color red and how they give meaning to it. He or she then has to
"bracket" the definitions of red as phenomena or appearances of essential redness.
In his endeavor to establish the basis for an interpretative sociology, Alfred Schutz (1899-1959)
critically adopted Max Weber’s insistence that understanding social action was the methodological and
epistemological foundation of sociology. However, understanding involved the two perspectives of the actor
and observer, and the sociologist most frequently occupies the latter position. Taking Husserl’s notion of the
everyday world of experience characterized by the natural attitude of uncritical acceptance, Schutz
accounted for social reality as one in which people cognitively suspend doubt. This is the domain of first
order constructs. The sociologist, on the other hand, suspends belief in the way Husserl bracketed the world
of appearances. This is the domain of second order constructs resulting from sociological reflection. Schutz
laid bare the structure of the life world in terms of typifica-tions people make in everyday life along the axes
of familiarity and strangeness in space and time. On the basis of these first order constructs the sociologist
embarks on the construction of ideal types through a rigorous procedure. Good examples of these ideal
typifications can be found in his essays titled "The Stranger" (1944) and "The Homecomer" (1945).

Schutz laid the foundations of social constructionism for a wide range of social, cultural, and feminist
studies. Widening the perspective beyond the social domain was one of the main contributions of his
students, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. In their seminal work The Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), they positioned phenomenology as a perspective rather than
as an alternative paradigm in sociology. In their rendering of a sociology of knowledge from a
phenomenological perspective, they demonstrate how reality as such, not just social reality, is constructed
and installed as objective reality, which in turn affects society’s members subjectively through processes of
internalization and socialization. Other social thinkers such as George Psathas adhere to the idea of a
phenomenological sociology as an alternative paradigm to functionalism.
Ethnomethodology seeks to problematize the everyday world taken for granted. Its objective is not the
interpretation of first order constructs, but exploring how and by what methods people achieve and sustain a
sense of order, normality, and morality in their lives. Aaron Cicourel and Harold Garfinkel pioneered this
approach. Garfinkel adopted a methodological procedure akin to bracketing through his breaching
experiments, during which the investigator acts as a stranger in familiar situations. Society’s members’
reaction to the breaching of social order and rules demonstrate their background expectations about this
order and their desire to restore rule-governed situations.
The phenomenological perspective’s focus on the subjective and everyday aspects of human existence
proved attractive to investigators from a spectrum of inquiry including medicine, law, architectures,
literature, the environment, ethnicity, gender, embodiment, history, and technology. Methodologically
phenomenological investigations rely heavily on ethnographies and other qualitative measures.

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With its emphasis on reality as a social construct, phenomenologically oriented social science provides
fresh insights on local and global issues. Looking at race and racism, for example, it exposes racial orders, in
whatever society they occur as historically constructed entities objectified as real. To society’s members it
demonstrates how a specific racial order appears cognitively as common-sense and legitimated as natural
and how they are made to believe in its inevitability and normality. Finally it throws light on how
empowered insiders construct and maintain racial hierarchies and their predominance in them by remaining
racially invisible while racializing other groups and assigning them to their "proper place" in society.
Some have criticized phenomenological approaches as conservative due to their preoccupation with the
mundane and commonsense aspects of life. This may be true for some studies, but phenomenology’s
insistence on a radical critique of knowledge resists any social structure’s self-interested appropriation of
social science.

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Types of Phenomenology

Transcendental Phenomenology

This approach to phenomenology concentrates on the process of revealing the essences of phenomena.

Transcendental phenomenology effectively denies the subjective-objective distinction, and indeed, argues
that (positivistic) 'science' deals with surface appearances and conceals the essential nature of the world.

Although transcendental phenomenology is usually seen as having first come to light in the work of
Brentano, it is Husserl (a student of Brentano's) who is acknowledged as the major theorist of this
perspective.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) set out to develop phenomenology into a pure non-empirical science. Husserl
argued that the use of words should rest on insight and not generalisations from experience. In this sense he
opposed the prevailing trends of naturalism and psychologism.

Transcendental phenomenology is concerned with the systematic investigation of consciousness and its
objects. Consciousness is the fundamental undeniable existent. There is no distinction in transcendental
phenomenology between the object of consciousness and the process of cognition. That is, no distinction is
possible between what is perceived and the perception of it.

Non-Transcendental Phenomenology

Non-transcendental phenomenology (or mundane phenomenology as it is sometimes labelled) does not


require the double époché of transcendental phenomenology. Whereas transcendental phenomenology
plumbs essences, non-transcendental phenomenology seeks clarification of what is apparent.

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CONCLUSION

Phenomenology is probably the most significant philosophical movement of the twentieth century, as far as
the social sciences are concerned. Husserl's ideas, amended and developed, have informed research in
sociology, psychology, social psychology, education, health sciences, and many other fields.
Phenomenological ideas underlie virtually all of those schools of thought that hold that it is necessary to
understand the meaning attributed by persons to the activities in which they engage, in order to understand
their behaviour.

From this point of view, the move towards the adoption of qualitative methods in social research was
prompted by the rise of phenomenological sociology, particularly through the social constructionism of
Berger and Luckman- students of Schutz. Other approaches in the social sciences, such as Blumer's social
interactionism - the source of Dervin's ideas on 'sense making' , have links to and much in common with
phenomenology. For example, George Herbert Mead, Blumer's teacher, studied in Freiberg, and must have
come into contact with the ideas that led Husserl to develop phenomenology as a philosophical discipline in
the same institution. We see the connection, also in Kuhlthau's use of the Kelly's 'personal construct theory '
Boeree suggests that this method is part of the armoury of the phenomenological investigator.

The intention of this paper has been twofold: to bring phenomenology into the general debate on theories of
information behaviour, and to emphasise the distinction between methodology and method. Over recent
years more attention has been devoted to research methods than to the underlying methodological principles
of different research frameworks. I believe that Schutz's attempts to create a phenomenological sociology
provide us with a useful framework to guide research into people's information behaviour and, thereby, to
guide us to the choice of appropriate methods.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 www.thoughtco.com

 www.socialsciences.scielo.com

 www.socialresearchmethods.net

 www.qualityresearchinternational.com

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