Abstract
How should we understand meaning in relation to text in phenomenological research? What weight should we give to context or situation? How do we consider the words we use to name a phenomenon or those with whom we may engage? What are the limits and possibilities for text? In this article, we approach the meaning of textuality in phenomenological research. While phenomenological research cannot be reduced to textuality, we may appreciate how, through the engagement with language in writing and reading, we may gain insights and understandings for everyday and extraordinary experiences. This pairing of writing and reading should not forget that we do not get objective accounts from text but instead, interpretations. And so, we may specify the speaking of text to afford an interpretation: whereby the crafting of text affords the bringing out of a possible interpretation.
Introduction
The entrance of artificial intelligence into qualitative research appears to be shifting methodological judgments toward positivist perspectives (Chatzichristos, 2025; Monforte, 2025). Within this computational paradigm, there is a perception that qualitative inquiry can be reduced to a form of textual analysis performed on material derived from observation, interview, or other activity (Prescott et al., 2024; Williams, 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). In comparison, it is not uncommon for qualitative researchers to describe their scholarly contribution as limited to data collection or data analysis, recognizing that all authors are accountable for the work as presented (COPE Council, 2019; ICMJE, 2025). While such divisions of labor may be considered commensurate with content analysis and related approaches (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005), perhaps we should pause and reflect whether this is appropriate for those who aspire to research lived experience. We may consider the relation of meaning, speaking, and writing in such scholarship.
Within qualitative inquiry, phenomenology is a term used to describe research oriented toward understanding experience as it is lived through (see, for example, Churchill, 2022; Dahlberg et al., 2008; Vagle, 2024; van Manen, 2023). These traditions of human science research, while having important methodological distinctions, share a recognition that there are aspects to experience that resist simply being put into words. Conversely, with a nod to Ricoeur, we may understand written words as embedding the inscription of the meaning of a speech event, ‘the “said” of speaking’ (1976: 27). And yet, Ricoeur also tells us that ‘writing is much more than mere material fixation’ (p. 28). We may question: How should we understand meaning in relation to text in phenomenological research? How do we consider the words we use to name a phenomenon or those with whom we may engage? What are the limits and possibilities for text?
The focus of this article is on the meaning of textuality for phenomenological research. While phenomenological research cannot be reduced to textuality, we may appreciate how, through the engagement with language in writing and reading, we may gain insights and understandings for everyday and extraordinary experiences. This article is organized into four sections to show how speaking, writing, and textuality may be understood to deeply relate to one another through joined movements of orienting to a lived experience, phenomenological questioning, explicating experiences, and writerly reflection. With the aim of showing, rather than simply telling, I draw on material from a study exploring phenomena of Trisomy 18. 1
Orienting to a lived experience
Let us begin with someone else's words, All the days that we were there, every day of her life, we had to rethink our decision that we made for her. We had to live with others asking us, and us asking ourselves, whether it was the right thing to carry on with hospital care. It was really hard, and it’s like a roller coaster, because some days she is ok, but most of the days she's not. Especially, we are trying to feed her, and then she's just throwing up everything that we feed her. It was really hard for me as a mom, to see your daughter in that situation, because it, I don’t know how she feels, or how is she feeling at that time. (Armour et al., 2025: 355)
For healthcare providers, this parent's words may be valuable to hear. The words speak to an experience of hospitalized care from this mother's perspective. The reflective practice of providers may benefit from being attuned to the experiences of those for whom they care, so they are ‘sensitized to the human dimensions’ of health-related conditions and concerns (Todres and Galvin, 2008: 575). Although we cannot generalize the mother's words, the anecdote may sensitize us to what the experience may be like: living with uncertainty, worry, and responsibility as medical and surgical interventions are tried. Yet, the words are fragmentary. They do not tell the whole story: neither how it all began nor how it all ended. We know very little from them about the life history of the mother: her pregnancy, her vocation, her beliefs, or other personal aspects. The words also do not give a clear voice to the perspectives of the involved healthcare providers, other family members, or even the child. And yet, the words are expressive of meaning: not the entirety of meaning but glimpses of it. We may say that the words speak to the child's life and of a life of caring for a hospitalized child. We recognize meaning because we can relate to the human experience that the words convey, even if the experience is singular in its uniqueness (Ricoeur, 1992: 166), belonging to this mother and this child in this moment. So, we can say that the words of this text point methodologically to a phenomenon. 3
Now, let us draw phenomenologically near these words, to get close, to be touched by the experience of which they speak. Let us read them not merely as statements but invocatively as poetic text—to feel the self-conscious rhythm of each phrase, giving each word its deserved weight, to sense the spatial features between the words. While the meanings of words (like silences) may be considered as varied, contingent, and open to interpretation (Poland and Pederson, 1998), a phenomenological method may appreciate that each fragment of text says more than what is plainly written. We may say that to do phenomenology is to mobilize the vocational relations between the written text and the orality of the speaking of the text. And like a poem, we may trust the validity of the implicit experiential meanings of these words (van Manen, 2025b). Validity not in the sense of their empirical factuality, but rather, we may read the words as expressing evocative truthfulness (van Manen, 2023: 236). We can read them as poetic even if they seem prosaic. As Heidegger reminds us, the opposite of a poem is not prose but pure prose can be as poetic as any poetry (1971: 208). So let us read these words poetically to hear how the vocative refiguring of the above prosaic text phenomenologizes our understanding of lived experience. All the days that we were there, every day of her life, we had to rethink our decision that we made for her. We had to live with others asking us, and us asking ourselves, whether it was the right thing to carry on with hospital care. It was really hard, and it’s like a roller coaster, because some days she is ok, but most of the days she's not. Especially, we are trying to feed her, and then she's just throwing up everything that we feed her. It was really hard for me as a mom, to see your daughter in that situation, because it, I don’t know how she feels, or how is she feeling at that time. (Armour et al., 2025: 355)
Listening to this mother's words, we may pause to reflect on the phenomenology of caring for a child with Trisomy 18. What is it like to live day-to-day, wondering whether you are doing the right thing? To hold their body, to feel their breaths, wondering if they are in pain, hurt, or suffering? To hear the words of the doctor say, ‘everything has been done’, knowing that this is not quite true? Because what can still be done is to stop and allow her body to pass away. Yet as a parent, that thought may be unbearable, because hope may persist in spite of it all that she will get better.
Phenomenological questioning
At the center of much empirical phenomenological research is the directing of our attention to a particular experience through words; we may think of such words as composing a research question (see, for example, Churchill, 2022; Dahlberg et al., 2008; Vagle, 2024; van Manen, 2023). Human science phenomenological traditions vary in their prescriptiveness; there are multiple ways to engage in phenomenological qualitative research (Ranse et al., 2020). Yet perhaps the shared, distinguishing feature of these traditions is the engagement in a form of questioning not to find answers but to explore meaning that is always already there (Dahlberg and Dahlberg, 2020). We may ask, what is the lived meaning of this phenomenon that healthcare providers name Trisomy 18? But is this right? Is this an appropriate starting place? Experientially, how should we understand a diagnosis as a phenomenon?
More details concerning the opening anecdote: For the weeks of this baby's life—day, after day, after day—her parents lived their lives in shifts, taking turns, spending hours of each day at their child's bedside, seeing each other only at the beginning and ending of each day as they swapped-out with one another to be there for her, not knowing if she would live one day more.
Can you imagine such an experience?
For serious medical diagnoses, like Trisomy 18, we may name ‘uncertainty’ as an aspect of this experience (Armour et al., 2025: 355). There is uncertainty in knowledge: ambiguity in knowing what to expect, will she get better, different possible outcomes, or simply not knowing. There is uncertainty in action: what to do or what decision to make. And there is uncertainty in time: life being bounded by an unclear amount of time left, the time left in the child's life, a child who the parents will likely outlive. Or perhaps a relational uncertainty: not knowing how she feels, what kind of parent am I, what should I do for her, and when should I stop. Even the combination of all of these phrases is not quite adequate at expressing this uncertainty. They leave so much out, for we cannot reduce a phenomenon to the language we use to name it (just as we cannot reduce a phenomenon to a singular subjective experience) (van Manen, 2025b). And yet, we may gain understanding from this effortful naming.
I use this example to show that an analysis of the phenomenology of Trisomy 18 may begin with experientially approaching the question itself: a questioning of those words that point toward a phenomenon. This is if we understand analysis as ‘a detailed examination or study of something so as to determine its nature, structure, or essential features’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024).
When parents are told of a diagnosis of Trisomy 18 during pregnancy, they may also be told to expect that their pregnancy may not make it to term, that their pregnancy may end in stillbirth (Leuthner and Acharya, 2020; Weaver et al., 2021). A mother recounts, The pregnancy was really hard for us, especially for me. Every day I was worrying that she might die; questioning whether she was still alive inside my belly. I have to check, to know that she is ok. When I go for an appointment, they use a Doppler to check her heartbeat. When I hear it, I know that she is ok. At home, I have to check if she is still moving, counting her movements that I feel, to make sure she is ok. We are always aware that at any time, she may die, that she may not live inside me. So, it's a worry, every day for me. It's really hard for me as a mom, to think that you are carrying a baby, that you will not know if she will live or not. (Armour et al., 2025: 354)
The word worry derives from wirien, ‘to slay, kill, or injury’, and wyrgan, ‘to strangle’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). Its etymology points to the pain, distress, and harm of worry that is hard. Simply put, it does not feel good to worry. And yet, we know that worry may be born from caring about or caring for something or someone (van Manen, 2002). For the expectant mother, perhaps worry arises from caring deeply for the expected child that she is carrying inside. In a situation where pregnancy might precipitously come to an end, there may be very little that an expectant mother or the healthcare provider can do. We may appreciate that the actions of auscultating heart rate and counting kicks relate to a deep-seated ‘care-as-worry’ (van Manen, 2002: 262). Does all care have an element of worry associated with it? Perhaps this is why being carefree may be experienced as a freeing condition, if carefree means being free of the uncertainty that worry brings with it.
How appropriate are other words, such as undeterminedness, undecidedness, or other uncertainties, which express a volatility that is unsettled, that the parents may live with? Or how about the language of checking, hearing, feeling, or carrying? I ask these questions to emphasize how a phenomenological questioning may be understood to express an interpretative questioning as it tries to name a more originary mode of experience (Adams, 2014). In this way, the questioning opens to excess. As Bernasconi writes, Phenomenology opens onto the excess beyond philosophy from which philosophy draws. Different philosophers name that excess differently: experience, Being, the concrete, the ethical, the trace, and so on. (2020: 6)
And yet, as researchers, we may appreciate that we are confronted not only with methodological but practical considerations (Morse, 2000). Exploring a phenomenon in depth may benefit from a sharper focus. For example, methodologists like Churchill (2022) may have us tease apart a phenomenon from a situation: the ‘situation’ can be described as ‘that in the face of which’ a person experiences ‘something’ (pp. 8–9). This something is those meanings (the phenomenon) that permit us to name it as a phenomenon. On the one hand, this is very helpful for Trisomy 18, reminding us that the medical condition does not need to be regarded as a phenomenon in itself but instead a situation in which a phenomenon occurs; on the other hand, we may wonder whether this oversimplifies a division that does not exist. For in a way, the situation itself can become the phenomenon. The intent here is neither to be critical nor prescriptive but instead to deepen our understanding of what is involved in phenomenological questioning.
Explicating experiences
In Researching Lived Experiences: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (1997), van Manen refers to a passage from Composition and Interpretation where Gadamer makes a distinction between two senses of interpretation, We can distinguish two different senses of interpretation: pointing to something and pointing out the meaning of something. Clearly both of these are connected with one another. ‘Pointing to something’ is a kind of ‘indicating’ that functions as a sign. ‘Pointing out what something means’, on the other hand, always relates back to the kind of sign that interprets itself. Thus when we interpret the meaning of something, we actually interpret an interpretation. (Gadamer, 1986: 68) It's a small town where we lived. The whole community knew I was having this baby. You go shopping, they see that you're pregnant. But, when we came home, we didn't know what to tell people, and I don’t think they knew what to say to us. The day we came home, two neighbour kids, as soon as we were getting out of the vehicle, they came running. They're like, ‘You had your baby. Is it a girl or a boy?’ And I'm like, ‘It's a girl and her name is Jon’. And I just remember saying, ‘She's not healthy’. And they were kind of like, ‘Oh’. The kids were like, I don't know 11 and 14 years old. So, they just kind of scampered back home. The news travelled fast. The whole community knew. They knew that she was a girl and she was born but they knew something was wrong. And so, people just … it was like they never … they just kept their distance because they didn't know what to say. My husband's best friend, he brought us over a cheese and meat tray and that meant a lot to me because he wasn't afraid to come. My friends never called. And that was awful because, it was like, I needed them the most. I needed them to show up for me. And then, in time, around our small town to some of the people that didn't know me well, I was known as the lady who lost her baby. (Armour et al., 2025: 357)
Returning to Gadamer's distinctions, in a basic sense, we may say this mother begins by ‘pointing out’ what it may mean to live in a small town: the ‘whole community knew I was having this baby’. And then, she describes a particular day to ‘point to’ an experience of coming home that speaks to a particular experience of difference, not belonging, exclusion, or disappointment. None of these words is quite right because, in some sense, as a writer, I am drifting into a ‘pointing out’, an interpretation of an interpretation. To interpret what we earlier referred to as excess—‘experience, Being, the concrete, the ethical, the trace, and so on’—is to concentrate not simply on what someone says about something but instead on the thing itself which permits the saying.
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger writes, ‘in order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation [Interpretation] must necessarily use violence [Gewalt]’ (1997: 141). There is, of course, almost always more than one way to read Heidegger, but I would encourage you to consider reading violence not solely as expressing physicality (abuse, brutality, aggression) but instead as senselessness (Breazu, 2022). Following, we may say that to interpret is to break from the sensefulness of lived experience. Said differently, whenever we reflect on an experience, whenever we pause to question what something is like, there is the briefest of moments of senselessness: a tear in the fabric of unreflective consciousness, whereby we shift from experiencing something to reflect on that experience. In this sense, to interpret—to bring an experience to words—we break from our unreflective conscious experiencing of the world. And in this moment, in this break, we find ourselves wondering, an attitude of sublimity (Hepburn, 1984: 131).
Now, human science phenomenological scholarship is even more complicated. For in the engagement with other's experience—their words as written or spoken—we may experience the text as provocative in its ability to disrupt our taken-for-granted understandings, yet nonetheless also invocative as read from our subjective sense-making (van Manen, 2023: 238). We are both distant and near to an experience that touches (van Manen, 2025b). It would appear that language affords a pointing to a more originary, possibly shared, meaning that touches us even if it resists our grasp. This reflects both the complexity of researching the lived experiences of others and the complexity of languaging lived experience. Phenomenology is not as naïve as some people pretend. It does not presuppose that what appears is completely outside of language, but it does presuppose that what happens and appears to us is more than what can be said about it and what can be argued for or against it. The crucial point is not to assume that there is something given outside of language, but to concede that language precedes itself. (Waldenfels, 2007: 88)
What does this mean for engaging with others in qualitative inquiry, exploring and researching lived experiences? We can begin answering by affirming that the words of participants are not simply data, just as phenomenological research is not simply textual analysis. Instead, attention is focused on the experience itself, which gives rise to words yet whose language is formative of it. Practically, this means there is value in striving to elicit concrete, experiential accounts that point to an experience in its meaningfulness (van Manen, 2023: 210). And yet, for certain phenomena, such as the experience of Trisomy 18, this also means recognizing that phenomenological studies cannot help but be incomplete, as not only is there so much meaning to every experience but also every experience is composed of manifolds of meanings (Armour et al., 2025).
Practically, what questions should we ask to explore and explicate the experience of others? Without being prescriptive, we may say that there is a tension between phenomena that stand out in their meaningful significance and those that are so fundamental that we pass over them in their everydayness (van Manen, 2025b). I suggest to students and colleagues that they aim for both, recognizing also that there is value in supporting participants to direct an interview, writing, observation, or other activity; and yet also for the researcher to support the telling of those experiences that may otherwise be taken-for-granted that nonetheless are deeply meaningful (Beck et al., 2024; Lauterbach, 2018).
For our study on Trisomy 18, we started out with the most open questions possible when exploring a phenomenon: ‘Could you tell me about your story of Trisomy 18?’ Openness here means asking questions that not only allow more than a closed response (i.e., a ‘yes’ or ‘no’), but rather, questions that support others to recount their experiences in their own words, to attend to the givenness of an experience from their perspective, to direct where an interview goes, and so forth. And yet, even this question—‘Could you tell me about your story of Trisomy 18?’—perhaps suffers from a particular directedness. By naming Trisomy 18, we orient the interview to a particular medical direction or a medical context. In comparison, we may also appreciate how changing the phrase ‘your story of Trisomy 18’ to ‘Neveah's story’, ‘Jon's story’, or otherwise orienting to a child is also complicated. In pregnancy, a child may or may not be named, such that to ‘name’ them before birth’ may prematurely make them a person or a child (van Manen, 2021: 25). And, to be candid, we generally approach a topic with a particular concern. For example, healthcare providers may be primarily interested in these families’ experiences of Trisomy 18 in the context of the medical care they received, this child's life, considering their diagnosis of trisomy, and so forth. 4 And yet, we need to be constantly attentive to language and meaning in explicating experiences.
‘What events stand out in your memories?’ may be another helpful interview question. However, it is important to make a distinction between a narrative, idiographic focus and one centered on the speaking of a phenomenon. For phenomenological inquiry, the focus may not be on an individual's narrative but a narrative as a means of entering into a phenomenon (Høffding and Martiny, 2015). In comparison, Moules and colleagues write, Hermeneutic research does not involve an attempt to conserve the individual ‘stories’ of participants, but what it tries to keep central is the topic or phenomenon itself. Therefore, in representation of the data, it is not required that each participant be individually identified, rather, their experiences are represented as a whole. (2012: 122).
The aim in discussing different possibilities for asking questions in an interview is to try to show considerations for the complexity of the language we use to explicate a phenomenon. Even those questions that aspire to be descriptive cannot help but call for interpretation, recognizing that there are different levels, degrees, or layers to interpretation (Willig, 2017).
Writerly reflection
Up to this point, I have resisted writing about thematization. The notion of theme is both deceptively simple and profoundly challenging for phenomenological inquiry. The term ‘theme’ is generally described as ‘a subject or topic on which a person writes or speaks’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). I understand the notion of theme as a ‘figure of meaning’ (following van Manen, 2023: 406). We may recognize a theme may recur, reflect a pattern, or otherwise be found throughout, like in music, where the theme is the principal melody of a song, the canto fermo forming the basis of contrapuntal parts, or the motif of which variations return and depart from. And yet, the term theme for phenomenological research is perhaps appropriately thought of as a fragment of text that helps the reader to see something, to point to a phenomenon, whether the theme recurs or not.
As a pointing to something, we should be mindful that a theme on its own may risk being abstract, conceptual, or theoretical (van Manen, 1997: 87). This can be seen as contrary in movement to an aim of depth. Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘Depth is the means the things have to remain distinct, to remain things’ (1968: 219). It is the whatness of a phenomenon that makes it recognizable, and it is this whatness to which a phenomenological study aims to draw near. A theme cannot achieve this on its own. For Heidegger, phenomenology fulfills its ambition only by resisting ‘the drift of ordinary language’ toward abstraction: ‘Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!’ (1985: 248). So, we should show and consider what may come about by pointing out a theme.
If we return to our last anecdote, we may ask what theme does it express? How may we understand its meaning? What phrase is expressive of it? Here, the focus is not on the text so much as the experience which the text points to. From a holistic reading, we pull out particular phrases that seem to express a certain meaningfulness of the text as a whole: ‘I don’t think they knew what to say to us’ or ‘they just kept their distance’, or ‘My friends never called. . . I needed them the most’
Like a title, a dedication, or an epigraph, if we read the anecdote yet again with one of these phrases in mind, the phrase itself cannot help but intimate meaning. In other words, in a way, the anecdote becomes about ‘I don’t think they knew what to say to us’ or ‘they just kept their distance’ or ‘My friends never called. . . I needed them the most’. And it is as if the meaning of the text is benefited by a circularity of understanding: anecdote intensifying theme and theme intensifying anecdote. Of each of these phrases, we may ask, does it help us to get near to something of which the text speaks? Does it direct our readerly sense-making to an aspect that was otherwise passed over? Does it support a particular meaningful understanding of the text? I am not asking for an explanatory answer to any of these questions but instead one that is of an affirmative quality, like a nod, because, like a dependent clause, none of these phrases stand on their own. And yet, they may point to a particular experience.
Alternatively, we may craft our own thematic expressions to bring out a possible interpretation. Homecoming without welcome, or Unseen and unspoken to, or Absent friendship
Returning to the anecdote, following van Manen (2023: 407), we may listen to each word and phrase in a selective reading of the anecdote to ask, what does the text reveal about the experience being described? As an example, consider what each phrase may say about the theme of homecoming, of the possible experience of bringing home a baby with Trisomy 18: ‘It's a small town where we lived’. … homecoming as a happening in a specific place where we have previously made a home, a place where we have a past, a place where we have lived … ‘The whole community knew I was having this baby’. … homecoming as a coming home to a people, people who are connected with one another, and also people who knew me … ‘You go shopping, they see that you're pregnant’. … homecoming as having past everyday moments of having dwelled in a place, a prior experience of being seen … ‘But, when we came home from, we didn't know what to tell people, and I don’t think they knew what to say to us’. … homecoming as both a coming home and a welcoming home, aspects of being greeted and being received, seeing and being seen, action and response, that may or may not match, correspond, or fit … ‘The day we came home, two neighbour kids, as soon as we were getting out of the vehicle, they came running’. … homecoming as a coming home on a particular day and time, to a particular person or people, which may or may not be anticipated … ‘They're like, ‘You had your baby. Is it a girl or a boy?’ And I'm like, ‘It's a girl and her name is Jon’. And I just remember saying, “She's not healthy.”’ … homecoming as a bringing home of something or someone, whereby we may be different from when we left, where we may introduce someone … ‘And they were kind of like, ‘Oh’. The kids were like, I don't know, 11 and 14 years old. So, they just kind of scampered back home’. … homecoming as normative, a not good homecoming, a homecoming that does not go well …
Philosophers like Derrida remind us that the relationship between signifier and signified in language is complex (see, for example, Derrida, 1976, 1978). He draws on Saussure's pairing of synchronic and diachronic meaning to approach and distinguish language as an ever-changing movement (Derrida, 1976: 27). By synchronic, he points to how the meaning of a word derives its meaning from how it is found within a text, juxtaposed to neighboring words, formative of phrases, and so forth. In comparison, by diachronic, we refer to the history of all possible meanings of a word that we may or may not read into those words. Derrida's notion of difference—a play on ‘difference’ and ‘deferment’—is an attribute of language, by which meaning is generated because of a word's difference from other words in a signifying system, and at the same time, meaning is inevitably and infinitely deferred or postponed (Derrida, 1976: xliii). We may say that meaning is disseminated across the text and can be found only in traces, in the unending chain of signification. In the free play of meanings, one signifier leads to a signified, which itself becomes a signifier for another signified and so on, such that the ultimate signified, which transcends all signifiers, is never attained. I am hoping that it is obvious how linguistic reflection is critical for phenomenological writing, both in attending to the words of others and, in turn, the words we use to explicate and explore a phenomenon.
Further thoughts
I hope that through this article on speaking, writing, and textuality in researching lived experience, I have conveyed a sense that these are not disparate things but rather they ultimately entangle and bleed into one another. Hopefully, it is also clear that phenomenology, as a human science inquiry, does not necessarily adhere to procedural methods in the sense of neatly following stepwise activities, such as posing a research question, collecting qualitative material, and performing some form of analysis. Instead, what I have tried to show above is that these activities may be drawn together in a laboring with language, the writing and rewriting of a phenomenological text (see van Manen, 2023: 464).
It is worth considering how empirical concerns, at times, may relate to the so-called validity of an interpretation (i.e., that there is a correct interpretation) (Angen, 2000; Cho and Trent, 2006; Morse, 2009). There may be a sense that researchers can simply expel their biases, explicate their positionality, or otherwise tell the reader that their work is trustworthy by virtue of writing a few sentences or a paragraph about themselves (Savolainen et al., 2023). Or that a coding program can be developed and applied that is robust, such that it leads to a single, valid interpretation (Jalali and Akhavan, 2024; Smirnov, 2025). The challenge with these approaches is that they are naive to the relation of speaking, writing, and textuality. There is always more than one possible interpretation, such that writing on lived experience as definite, precise, and conclusive risks essentializing the rich tapestry of varied life experiences to the order of the same. And yet, we can consider one interpretation as having more depth or insight compared to another, which is a different, although related topic.
We may reflect that phenomenological writing may benefit from an engagement that transcends a totalizing reading of the inscription of words to instead reflect a disposition of humility (van Manen, 2025a). Here, interpretation may be understood as exploratory, questioning, indefinite, or otherwise kept open to alternative interpretations. In this way, it is perhaps appropriate to think of a phenomenological analysis as engaging the sensibilities of both writer and reader in a sustained reflection (van Manen, 2025b). Said differently, we may understand both phenomenological writing and reading as reflective activities oriented to the possible meaning of an experience. As Bernasconi writes, Because phenomenology is always concerned with questions of access and particularly questions of gaining access to what is largely inaccessible, that it retreats as we approach it, is almost always struggling with language. (2020: 3)
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The empirical material included in this article comes from the article ‘Trisomy 18: Common threads of a life-limiting diagnosis’ authored by Evelyn Armour, Melissa MacPherson, Cheryl Mack, and myself (2025). The author is grateful to these colleagues for this work, as well as the families who participated in this study and who openly shared their child and family experiences.
Ethics statement
The Human Research Ethics Board of the University of Alberta approved the study (Pro00138011). Informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.