Abstract
The purpose of the article is to provide a Swedish account of Amedeo Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological human scientific method as a necessary clarification for the Scandinavian researcher and student interested in using a descriptive qualitative method in their health science related research. First, key terms in phenomenological philosophy are presented. Terms such as intentionality, the phenomenological reduction, description, and essence are described in order to establish an introduction to the philosophical foundation. Second, Giorgi's human scientific method is outlined, i.e., from data gathering to data analysis. The data gathering section includes some aspects of the process of interviewing. In the section on data analysis, the methodical steps are presented successively. The researcher, using the phenomenological reduction, 1) reads the data to get a sense of the whole 2) divides the interview into meaning units 3) describes the phenomenological human scientific meaning 4) discovers the structure of the phenomenon. The overview is meant as an introduction to a forthcoming article articulating the application of the phenomenological method.