Review of Educational Research Spring 1999, Voi. 69, No. 1, pp. 53-82 The Concepts and Methods of Phenomenographic Research John T. E. Richardson Brunel University This article reviews the nature'of "phenomenographic" research and its alleged conceptual underpinnings in the phenomenological tradi- tion. In common with other attempts to apply philosophical phenom- enology to the social sciences, it relies on participants' discursive accounts of their experiences and cannot validly postulate causal men- tal entities such as conceptions of learning. The analytic procedures of phenomenography are very similar to those of grounded theory, and like the latter they fall foul of the "dilemma of qualitative method" in failing to reconcile the search for authentic understanding with the need for scientific rigor. It is argued that these conceptual and meth- odological difficulties could be resolved by a constructionist revision of phenomenographic research. During the last 25 years research on student learning in higher education has benefited immensely from a distinctive qualitative approach known as "phenomenography." This is associated with Ference Marton and his colleagues at the University of Gtteborg in Sweden, although it has been taken up by many other researchers in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Marton (1986, 1988b) described phenomenography as an empirically based approach that aims to identify the qualitatively different ways in which differ- ent people experience, conceptualize., perceive, and understand various kinds of phenomena. Within this framework, learning assumes a central importance, be- cause it represents a qualitative change from one conception concerning some particular aspect of reality to another (Marton, 1988a). In this paper, I argue that a proper evaluation of the phenomenographic approach has in the past been bedevilled by a lack of specificity and explicit- ness concerning both the methods for the collection and analysis of data and the conceptual underpinning of those methods (cf. Francis, 1993). My aim is to provide such an evaluation by taking the publications of Marton himself as Initial work on this paper was carried out while I was on study leave from Brunel University as Visiting Research Professor in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. I am grateful to Martyn Hammersley, Michael Lynch, Ference Marton, Alistair Morgan, Jonathan Potter, Christina Toren, and Frederic Vandenberghe for their comments and advice. 53 Richardson primary sources. These show that the rationale for phenomenographic research was constructed post hoc from apparently cognate developments in the social sciences. However, this raises fundamental issues regarding the conceptual, epis- temological, and methodological basis of phenomenographic research. I shall consider each of these areas in turn and conclude that these issues can only be resolved by a radical revision and rereading of that research. In the same period of 25 years, there has been a considerable increase in the application of qualitative methods to research problems in education, psychol- ogy, and the social sciences more generally (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994), and at certain points in my account it will be useful to compare phenomenographic research with other approaches. Qualitative research has still to achieve parity with established, quantitative forms of inquiry in terms of prestige, access to funding and publications, and integration into the curriculum, and this is par- ticularly true in North America. This may be one reason why phenomenographic research is less well-known there. AccOrdingly, I begin with an overview of the key research findings, before turning to the conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues that they raise. The Results of Phenomenographic Research Levels of Outcome in Student Learning The very earliest research to be described as "phenomenographic" was a program of investigations carried out by Marton and his colleagues that was concerned with qualitative differences between individual students in the out- come and process of learning. The focus of this research was on "nonverbatim" learning: that is, students' memory for the content of academic texts. Students were instructed to read texts within rough time limits. Immediately afterwards, they were required to explain to the experimenter what the text was about. They then received a structured interview on the way in which they had approached the task, and, finally, they were asked general questions about their approach to academic studying. The first study of this nature was reported by Marton (1975; Marton& S~Ijr, 1976a), who asked 30 first-year students of education or educational psychol- ogy to read a newspaper article of about 1,400 words on curriculum reform in Swedish universities. Marton and two independent judges found it fairly straight- forward to classify the students' attempts to recall the article into four categories of learning outcome, reflecting qualitatively different ways of comprehending the text. In addition, the entailment relations among these categories defined a partial ordering, so that each category logically subsumed those categories be- low it: in other words, these categories defined a hierarchy in terms of the depth of the learning outcome. This general pattern was replicated in a number of other studies (Fransson, 1977; Marton & Sfilj6, 1976a, 1976b; Marton & Wenestam, 1978; S~lj~, 1975; Svensson, 1976, 1977). For any particular text, the logical relations amongst the different categories of outcome were taken to define what Marton and Dahlgren (1976) described as an "outcome space." Particular outcomes could be regarded as being more ap- propriate or desirable than others, insofar as they bore a closer relationship to the author's original conception (Marton, 1976). More generally, one could say 54 Phenomenographic Research that some ways of experiencing a phenomenon were better than others to the extent that they were more "efficient" in terms of some given criterion: for instance, it could be said to be more efficient in terms of using and developing arithmetic skills to appreciate that numerical addition was a commutative rela- tion, so that 2 + 7 = 7 + 2 (Marton, 1994). Other examples would be the con- trasts between commonsense and scientific conceptions of specific phenomena (Marton, 1978, 1981; Marton& Booth, 1997, chap. 4). Levels of Processing in Student Learning The broad aim of Marton's (1975) investigation was not merely to describe qualitative differences amongst individual students in terms of different levels of learning outcome, but also to derive a commensurable description of the levels of processing employed in student learning. Indeed, Matron and an inde- pendent judge once again found it fairly straightforward to classify the 30 par- ticipants in his investigation as having exhibited two different levels of pro- cessing (although a third judge was needed to resolve 10 cases of disagree- ment). The two levels of processing were differentiated by Marton and Salj~ (1976a) according to the aspects of the text on which the students' attention had apparently been focused: In the case of surface-level processing the student directs his attention towards learning the text itself (the sign), i.e., he has a "reproductive" conception of learning which means that he is more or less forced to keep to a rote-learning strategy. In the case of deep-level processing, on the other hand, the student is directed towards the intentional content of the learning material (what is signified), i.e., he is directed towards compre- bending what the author wants to say about, for instance, a certain scien- tific problem or principle. (pp. 7-8) As expected, there was a clear correlation between students' levels of pro- cessing and the levels of outcome apparent in their recall of the text. All of those who exhibited a deep level of processing achieved the two highest levels of outcome, but most of those who exhibited a surface level of processing achieved the two lowest levels of outcome. Moreover, as the quotation above implies, the distinction between different levels of processing tended to be correlated with different conceptions of the role of the learner and with different conceptions of learning itself. Those students who adopted deep-level process- ing generally adopted an active role and saw learning as something they did, whereas those who adopted surface-level processing generally adopted a pas- sive role and saw learning as something that just happened to them (see also Marton, 1976, 1979). Matron had also asked his participants about their general academic studies. On the basis of their responses, he concluded that approaches to studying in higher education could be categorized in essentially the same terms, and this was confirmed in subsequent work. In particular, students appeared to adopt a "deep" approach insofar as they acknowledged the more abstract forms of learn- ing demanded in higher education (Svensson, 1977) and were motivated by the relevance of the syllabus to their own personal needs and interests (Fransson, 1977); but they tended to adopt a "surface" approach insofar as they encoun- tered an overloaded curriculum and methods of assessment that emphasized the 55 Richardson superficial properties of the material to' be learned (Dahlgren & Marton, 1978). The distinction between deep and surface approaches was subsequently repli- cated by investigators in other countries