As Groenewald (2004, p. 49) stated that “data analysis” should be deliberately avoided to use in phenomenological research, because that the “term (analysis) usually means a ‘breaking into parts’ and therefore often means a loss of the whole phenomenon”, while explicitation presents an investigation which contains all components of a phenomenon within the context of the whole. There are five stages of explicitation process, which are claimed in Groenewald (2004):

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1. Bracketing and phenomenological reduction

Bracketing is when researchers bracketed their own experiences, prejudices, assumptions, in order to examine how the phenomenon intrinsically was perceived by individuals rather than how the phenomenon is defined by the researcher. Phenomenological reduction is the process of tracing back to the essence of the experience to obtain the internal structure or significance in and of the experience itself (Merriam 2009, p. 26).

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 2. Delineating units of meaning

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 3. Clustering of units of meaning to form themes

  

4. Summarising each interview, validating it and where necessary modifying it

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5. Extracting general and unique themes from all the interview and making a composite summary