RESTRICTIONS
The disadvantages of the phenomenological research is that it makes interpretation of the data very time consuming and difficult to analyse. Given the lack of restrictions on phenomenological research the researcher can find themselves with lots of material to sift through to find common themes. Police have to do this when going through pages and pages of witness testimony, a job which many police officers say is some of the hardest and time consuming parts of their job (NCBI 2013).
Another disadvantage to phenomenological research is that ensuring anonymity and confidentiality can be hard. When participants agree to phenomenological research often they will be quoted or have their quoted freely published (Learn Higher 2008).
Phenomenological research is quite taxing compared to a lot of other research methods. Whilst surveys can be distributed by the hundreds and collected within the hour, a phenomenological research requires time for the participants to explain as much or as little as they like about their experience to the researcher who must give their whole and undivided attention. Also due to this laborious method often phenomenological research is small in scale and their results not reflecting the greater picture (Learn Higher 2008).
Phenomenological research looks for themes in how participants describe an experience. Presenting the findings of this can be difficult because they can ignore the outliers if the outliers do not have represent the major theme detected by the researcher. Presenting the total findings visually is also challenge because often the findings summarise the main themes and use selected quotes to back it up. Using this presentation method can ignore some of the findings and restrict some of the details of their description to nothing more than a general summary (Occupy 2014).
Another disadvantage is that this research methods relied heavily of description. Descriptions can be misinterpreted due to semantic shifts over time, simple syntax errors or cultural differences. These misinterpretations can therefore change the summary of findings completely differently to the view the participants actually wanted to convey. Words that have already changed over time include ‘Gay’, ‘Awful’, ‘Girl’ and ‘Nice’. Each of these words, if seen written before the 12th Century, will convey a completely different meaning to what we believe these words mean today. Historians find this to be one of their greatest challenges, reconstructing meaning through new interpretations to old account of history (Herman 2015).
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Griffin argues that it is easy to associate researcher bias with a qualitative research method, like the phenomenological method. It takes a skilled researcher to allow a participant to describe the details of their experience and not fall in the trap of asking questions (posing as clarifying questions) that funnel the description to the established theme (Griffin 2004).