Phenomenography is a qualitative methodological approach that seeks to iden-tify and describe conceptions and qualitatively different ways of understanding a given phenomenon, enabling us to discover a hierarchical structure of the phe-nomenon by categorizing the themes emerging from the data (Marton & Booth 1997; Åkerlind 2005; Åkerlind 2008a).
Marton (1994) described phenomenography as follows: “Phenomenography is the empirical study of the limited number of qualitatively different ways in which var-ious phenomena in, and aspects of, the world around us are experienced, conceptualized, understood, perceived, and apprehended“. Later he stated: “[Phenomenography] (…) is a research specialization concerned with qualitative differences in how we see the world and how it shows itself to us” (Marton 2015, 106).
Phenomenography emerged in the field of educational research in the late 1970s in Sweden, as a reaction against the dominant positivistic, behavioristic and quantitative research tradition (Svensson 1997). It developed in research that concentrated on student learning (Marton & Säljö 1976) and its epistemology and
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ontology were clarified during the 1990s (Marton 1981; Marton 1986). Despite its name, phenomenography is not an application of phenomenology, although these terms contain ”phenomenon”, which means ”to make manifest” or ”to bring to light”. The suffix graph in phenomenography refers to aiming to de-scribe the different ways in which a group of people understand a phenomenon (Marton 1981), whereas the suffix logos of phenomenology aims to clarify the structure and meaning of a phenomenon (Giorgi 1999). However, Marton (1995) stated that ‘‘The simultaneous awareness of all the critical aspects comes close to the phenomenological essence…’’. Phenomenography can be philosophically placed be-tween phenomenology and hermeneutics. Both phenomenology and phenome-nography focus on human experience and awareness and explore them through people’s descriptions of the phenomena, but phenomenography is less interested in individual experience and emphasizes collective meaning. They have different underlying ontologies and analysis outcomes (Barnard et al. 1999; Stenfors-Hayes et al. 2013).
Phenomenography is an empirical research tradition and is not derived or deducted from a system of philosophical assumptions or thesis. This means that ideas about the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge first emerged as phenomenography developed. What came first were more specific assumptions and ideas related to empirical research (Svensson 1997).
Phenomenography builds on a non-dualistic ontology and assumes that the world is not constructed by the learner, but is constituted in differing ways as internal relations between the world and the persons experiencing it. Therefore reality cannot be explored as it is, but it can be described through the experiences of people and the meanings given to these experiences (Marton & Booth 1997, 122). Knowledge is assumed to be relational, a product of a thinking process, in-volving a continual interrelationship between thought, experience and a phe-nomenon; and to be dependent on the world, which is external to the individual (Svensson 1997). It is stressed that only a collective experience is enough to de-scribe a phenomenon (Marton & Booth 1997, 124).
Phenomenographic studies aim to elucidate the second-order perspective, which means exploring the world as experienced by people and focusing on the interactions between the person who experiences the phenomenon and the phe-nomenon itself. In contrast, the first-order perspective would mean a more posi-tivist approach investigating the world as it truly is (Marton 1986; Marton &
Booth 1997, 117-121). Thus, the aim is not to describe things as they are, but to characterize how things appear to people (Marton 1986). Marton linked this idea to what Kant described as distinction between a thing in itself (a noumenon) and a thing as it appears (or phenomenon). Research has traditionally adopted an ob-servational or “noumenal” approach, but phenomenography adopts an experi-ential or “phenomenal” approach (Marton & Svensson 1979).
Therefore, phenomenography is interested in exploring the variation in the ways in which people perceive different phenomena (Marton & Booth 1997). As it is a data-driven approach, the categories of description and themes arise from the data (Åkerlind 2005). Individuals are seen as bearers of the different ways of
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experiencing a phenomenon and as bearers of fragments of differing ways of ex-periencing that phenomenon (Marton & Booth 1997, 124).
Conceptions can be seen as abstractions from reality and they include a person's experiences and have a broader and deeper meaning than opinions.
Conceptions can be seen as an understanding of a certain phenomenon and they are thought to make up the unit of analysis in phenomenography and form a hierarchical structure (Marton & Booth 1997; Åkerlind 2005; Åkerlind 2008a).
Conceptions are subject to change and they arise from our beliefs, expectations, experiences and social imperatives (Barnard et al. 1999).
Themes of variation point to key aspects that delineate the different cate-gories of description. Themes of variation emerge from an iterative process of reading and looking for structure and meaning in quotes from transcripts and represent the central meaning of conceptions (Åkerlind 2005).
The categories of description are the researcher’s abstractions of the differ-ent ways of understanding which have been iddiffer-entified from the data (Larsson &
Holmström 2007). They illustrate variation in the conceptions of the interviewees, represent the expanding awareness of the phenomenon in question, have a struc-tural and logical relation to each other, and form a hierarchical whole (Marton &
Booth 1997, 124-128; Marton & Pong 2005; Åkerlind 2005). They describe the con-ceptions of the interviewees on a collective level instead of describing different types of individuals (Marton & Pong 2005; Åkerlind 2005; Åkerlind 2018). Dif-ferent people experience the same phenomena difDif-ferently because experience is always partial and the collective experience can be seen as a description of the phenomenon (Marton & Booth 1997, 124-128; Åkerlind 2008a). The categories of description can be inclusive, meaning that the categories higher in the hierarchy can be considered more complex than the lower ones (Åkerlind 2008a). Marton
& Booth (1997) stress that in forming these categories, number of expressions is not important; what matters is that the categories of description cover the varia-tion that rises from the data.
Critical aspects help constitute the logical relationship and differences be-tween the categories. They are critical in regard to moving from less complex understanding to a more developed or a complex one (Åkerlind 2018). This illus-trates the later progressions of the phenomenographic approach, which are re-lated to variation theory. This identification of internal and structural relation-ships among the categories is a feature not often included in other qualitative methods (Marton & Pong 2005; Stenfors-Hayes et al. 2013; Åkerlind 2018).
The outcome space of phenomenographic research is the sum of all the cat-egories of description that illustrate the range across which a phenomenon is un-derstood by the participants (Marton & Booth 1997, 136; Åkerlind 2005). The outcome space has been described by Marton (1986) as an empirical map of the ”qualitative different ways in which people experience, conceptualize, perceive and understand various aspects of and phenomena in the world around them”. The assump-tion that structural relaassump-tionships exist between different ways of experiencing, is one of the key epistemological assumptions of phenomenography (Marton &
Booth 1997).