Hermeneutic Phenomenology as a Research Method in Psychology: Socio-Historical Ways of BeingAbstract
This article is based on a narrative literature review to explore Hermeneutic Phenomenology as a methodology for qualitative empirical research in Psychology. Grounded on the works of philosophers such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, the method emphasizes the understanding of socio-historically situated human experience. The article discusses the origin of Hermeneutic Phenomenology and its contributions to Psychology, addressing the importance of cultural and historical interpretation in research. The method involves interviews, transcription and analysis of experiences, highlighting the influence of the researchers’ preconceptions and the provisional nature of the results. Research examples illustrate practical application of the method, such as the experience of being a university student in contemporary times, a homeless person, a woman in contemporary Brazil, or of controlling relationships. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of openness and dialogue in research, promoting new understandings of lived reality and ways of being.
Keywords:
phenomenology; hermeneutics; qualitative research; psychology
Resumo
Este artigo apoia-se em revisão narrativa de literatura para explorar a fenomenologia hermenêutica como metodologia de pesquisa empírica qualitativa em Psicologia. Baseado nas obras de filósofos como Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger e Gadamer, o método enfatiza a compreensão da experiência humana situada sócio-historicamente. O artigo discute a origem da fenomenologia hermenêutica e suas contribuições para a Psicologia, abordando a importância da interpretação cultural e histórica na pesquisa. O método envolve entrevistas, transcrição e análise de vivências, destacando a influência dos preconceitos do pesquisador e a natureza provisória dos resultados. Exemplos de pesquisas ilustram a aplicação prática do método, como a experiência de ser estudante universitário na contemporaneidade, de ser pessoa em situação de rua, de ser mulher no Brasil contemporâneo, do controle nos relacionamentos. O artigo conclui enfatizando a importância da abertura e do diálogo na pesquisa, promovendo novas compreensões da realidade vivida e modos de existir.
Palavras-chave:
fenomenologia; hermenêutica; pesquisa qualitativa; psicologia
Resumen
Este artículo está basado en una revisión narrativa de la literatura para explorar la Fenomenología Hermenéutica como metodología para la investigación empírica cualitativa en Psicología. Sobre la base de los trabajos de filósofos como Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger y Gadamer, el método enfatiza la comprensión de la experiencia humana situada socio-históricamente. El artículo discute el origen de la Fenomenología Hermenéutica y sus aportes a la Psicología, abordando la importancia de la interpretación cultural e histórica. El método involucra entrevistas, transcripción y análisis de experiencias, destacando la influencia de los prejuicios del investigador y el carácter provisional de los resultados, con ejemplos que ilustran la aplicación práctica del método, como la experiencia de ser estudiante universitario en la actualidad, de ser una persona sin hogar, de ser mujer en el Brasil contemporáneo, o del control en las relaciones. Concluye enfatizando la importancia de la apertura y el diálogo en la investigación, promoviendo nuevas comprensiones de la realidad vivida y las formas de existir.
Palabras clave:
fenomenología; hermenéutica; investigación cualitativa; psicología
The expression “Hermeneutic Phenomenology” denotes an understanding of socio-historical human reality and a way of researching it. Originating in Philosophy, it has influenced all human sciences, including Psychology, serving as the foundation for a qualitative research method focused on people’s experiences necessarily situated in a shared historical (social) context. Thus, the results of this research method reveal what it means to be in a given context, offering insights into both the research participants’ unique experiences and the common experience of sharing a particular setting.
The objective of this article is to present the theoretical-methodological axis that links the research undertaken by the ANPEPP workgroup Psicologia Fenomenológico-Hermenêutica e Questões Contemporâneas (Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Psychology and Contemporary Issues). Although the authors’ research fields are different, adopting the phenomenological-hermeneutic qualitative research method in Psychology promotes their intersection. To fulfill this objective, the method used in this article is a narrative review. According to Costa et al. (2022), it is a non-systematic search for references organized from the authors’ perspective. Thus, the works chosen to present the phenomenological-hermeneutic qualitative research method, as well as those herein illustrating it, are those that have been representative for this group of researchers. Agarwal et al. (2023) define narrative reviews as “syntheses of information and existing literature in relation to a focused topic. They are generally non-quantitative, thematic, educational and, where appropriate, opinionated” (p. 1,162). Greenhalgh et al. (2018) emphasize that narrative reviews have variations, and the type that best characterizes the one implemented in this article is the Hermeneutic Review, which aims at creating an interpretive understanding.
Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Researching Human Knowing
The literature oftentimes traces the etymology of the word “hermeneutics” up to God Hermes (messenger of the gods), though this origin has been questioned (Schmidt, 2014). The term is a transliteration from the Greek verb hermeneuein, which means “to express through speech” and “to translate”. In Latin, it was rendered as interpretatio, from which the English and Portuguese words interpretation and interpretaçãoderive.
In Philosophy, Schleiermacher was the first author to make an attempt at establishing universal hermeneutics, that is, a systematic understanding of the human process of comprehending spoken and written language. His aim was to uncover an author’s creative process by analyzing both their entire body of work and their biography. This approach established one of the distinctive Hermeneutics movements: the dialectical interplay between the part and the whole; in this case, between an individual work, the totality of the author’s oeuvre, and the specific text under analysis (Schmidt, 2014).
Schleiermacher was succeeded by Dilthey, whose work is “both a foundation for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and a critique of historical reason” (Casanova, 2011, p. 9). Dilthey clearly delineated the distinct fields and methods of the natural and human sciences. In summary, whereas natural sciences necessarily operate through hypotheses that break reality down into smaller, fragmented elements, human experience is a total and complex phenomenon that “encompasses material and physical elements as well as linguistic, historical and psychological dimensions” (Casanova, 2011, p. 12). As such, the study of human phenomena cannot rely on hypothetical-deductive methods but must instead adopt comprehensive-descriptive approaches. In other words, human beings express themselves autonomously, and it is the role of human sciences to understand their ways of being through their cultural productions.
The concept of “lived experience” (Erlebnis) is central to this perspective. It is later revisited by Heidegger, who asserts that existence (a term referring exclusively to human beings) is being-in-the-world, meaning that human life is immersed in a historical, social and cultural horizon that both shapes its expression possibilities and is in turn shaped by them. In other words, what Dilthey highlights with the concept of Erlebnis is that human experience is necessarily mediated by the shared interpretations of its cultural context.
The Hermeneutic Imperative: Interpretation and the Situated Nature of Human Existence
This fact makes Hermeneutics’ concern with interpretation even more urgent, as it demonstrates that, just as every human existence mode (behavior, language, artistic expression, etc.) is permeated by a hermeneutic horizon, so is every interpretation. This is what philosopher Heidegger (2012) calls the “hermeneutic circle”, which would later on become the foundation for Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Philosophy (2015). According to Heidegger (2012), existence is inherently interpretive, both of one’s own being and of the being of things around, with meaning projection acting as the structuring force behind preconception, prefiguration and predisposition. Human beings are born and grow immersed in a “tradition” that transmits inherited interpretations. As Heidegger explains, the ways of engaging with reality inherited from tradition “open up and regulate the possibilities of one’s being” (p. 81).
Gadamer extends the hermeneutic condition of existence, stating that “A person’s preconceptions, much more than their judgments, constitute the historical reality of their being” (2015, p. 368). The tradition in which all understanding takes place consists of “preconceptions”, a term that does not necessarily imply false judgment. Instead, preconceptions are prior understandings that guide everyday interactions and interpretations. They may be legitimate (meaning they emerge from genuine engagement with what they interpret) or illegitimate, rooted in historical reception through cultural conditioning (Schmidt, 2014). Genuine understanding, one that reveals a subject matter in itself rather than through preconceived notions that obscure it, requires achieving an appropriate interpretive stance.
Given that everyday existence unfolds within historically and socially shared interpretive contexts, hermeneutic phenomenological research is necessarily cultural. Here, “culture” is understood as a web of meanings collectively woven and sustained, in line with Critelli’s (1996) sense analytics.
While in Heidegger’s work the unrepresentable experience of anxiety serves as the pathos that disrupts prior knowledge and opens the way for the emergence of new meanings, in Gadamer’s perspective, it is dialogue, with primacy of questioning, which enables legitimate knowledge construction. In his words, “To ask means to open. The openness of that which is questioned consists in the fact that it does not possess a fixed answer” (Gadamer, 2015, p. 474). As a foundation for qualitative research in Psychology, this perspective prioritizes the guiding question that triggers the research process.
Therefore, how can we comprehend a human experience in the way it unfolded when it differs from that of the researcher? This question was already present at the birth of Psychology at the end of the 19th century; however, the hegemonic response pointed to laboratories as privileged research sites and to formulation of hypotheses as its method. This approach established a biologizing and physicalist Psychology, determined to explain the causes of behavior. However, the concern with man’s being has led to a hermeneutic turn since then, shifting Psychology:
To define itself less through technical-scientific formulations and more as a transdisciplinary knowledge production domain, engaging with the ontological, aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of human existence as a historically constructed production of subjectivities and a spatiotemporal opening of meaning. (Sá, 2009, p. 71)
Hermeneutic Phenomenology in Psychology introduces certain tension that redirects research toward the social, historical and cultural situatedness of human phenomena. Its aim is to reveal the world and the beings who inhabit it with an intimacy that is encapsulated in the hyphenation of the term being-in-the-world. This approach fluctuates between focusing on shared contexts and on singular experiences, yet remaining committed to avoiding their separation.
The Hermeneutic Phenomenological Method applied to Empirical Qualitative Research in Psychology
The hermeneutic phenomenological research methodology has been developing over the past three decades, evolving alongside shifts in how the meaning of research and the contexts in which it takes place are understood. As Dutra (2021) recounts, the initial research efforts that drew on phenomenology were focused on individual experiences of interviewed participants, following the method designed by Amedeo Giorgi in the 1970s. This approach contributed to validating the scientific rigor of Phenomenology as a qualitative research method in Brazil from the following decade onward. It involved conducting interviews, transcribing them and identifying invariable, essential elements within the set of experiences analyzed - “units of meaning in the participants’ statements that stood out in the interviews” (Dutra, 2021, p. 57).
Although this method remains in use today, the growing influence of Hermeneutics has led to skepticism regarding both researchers’ neutrality and the objectivity inherent to the essences described in the findings. In other words, development of this method has emphasized the cultural dimension of lived experience in research, highlighting the biases of researchers, participants and thematic fields alike, as well as the preliminary nature of the results. This means that a phenomenological-hermeneutic research approach should be understood as one possible way of accessing the phenomenon investigated, one that is far more likely to trigger new questions than to provide definitive, universally valid answers (Leite & Barreto, 2018).
Moreover, narrative writing (Dutra, 2002) has become the privileged mode for communicating research findings, as it expresses the singular lived experience while articulating the shared meanings that emerged in the dialogue between researchers and participants. This research approach requires the former to adopt an active stance toward the reality under study, engaging in a dialogue with it to interrogate its possible meanings while also recognizing the effects and influences that this interaction exerts on them. To achieve this, researchers must be clear about the fundamental questions they aim to explore, making it essential for the method to begin with an open-ended inquiry or initial unease about the reality (person, institution, etc.) with which they will engage - including a critical reflection on the very method being used to approach the reality under study.
However, this reality is not conceived as an object to be known through intellectual or instrumental means, but rather as a situation with its own historical-cultural configurations. To understand it, researchers must adopt an open attitude, which constitutes both the condition of possibility for human encounter and breaking away from established norms. To do so, it is necessary to distance from an instrumental conception of method, which treats it as a set of pre-established technical-methodological procedures to be applied step by step. Instead, it is about conceiving the method as a path-method, one that “calls upon researchers to embark on paths that are not predefined or predetermined, but that reveal themselves in the very ‘birthing’ of that which manifests itself in response to the question” (Leite & Barreto, 2018, p. 276).
This means that knowledge production and research process go far beyond treating the subject matters researched as a mere study object, as if it existed independently and separately from the researchers. On the contrary, research conducted from this perspective, across its various contexts, seeks to develop an approach that aligns with the singular nature of each field. It considers the researchers’ own experience, as well as the marks left by their encounter with that reality, as fundamental to understanding it. More recently, Nunes (2024) proposed systematizing the transition from transcribed interviews to co-authored narrative texts, created by four (or more) people.
While research on lived experiences oftentimes takes place in a relatively controlled setting for conducting interviews, the privileged site for accessing situated human experiences is where they occur. As previously noted, employing Hermeneutic Phenomenology in psychological research necessarily leads outward: both professional practice and research unfold in the world, in the field, where human existence reveals itself. Along these lines, one of the potential spaces for psychologists’ practice is within institutions.
From psychologists’ experiences in the field, questions may arise directly from their own daily performance. This is a defining characteristic of this practice and research school: research initiatives emerge from the very fabric of the researchers’ lived experiences. In this sense, they are deeply connected to the researchers’ position in the world, as well as to the web of meanings and interpretations that surround them-herein previously referred to as ‘culture’. Under the light of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, psychological research always carries along a distinctly authorial and artisanal character.
Drawing from the accumulated experience of various research centers and laboratories that employ Hermeneutic Phenomenology as methodological grounds, several key methodological tools have been developed over time: formulating a guiding question (Cabral & Morato, 2019), cartography (Aun & Morato, 2009; Braga, 2014; Oliveira et al., 2022), field diaries (Silva & Santos, 2017) and affective diaries (Azevedo & Dutra, 2021), all as means for exploring both the research field and the researchers in their unfolding discovery process.
Heidegger’s (2012) Phenomenology emphasizes the fundamental role of questioning in all research:
All questioning is but seeking. Every seeking has its predetermined direction based on what is sought. To question is to seek to know the entity in its being-what and its being-as-such. The seeking that knows may become ‘investigation’ as a determination that sets free that which is questioned. (...) In that which is questioned, there resides, as that toward which the questioning ultimately aims, that which is inquired into, in which the questioning reaches its goal. (p. 41)
Regarding questioning, Gadamer (2015) asserts that its essence lies in opening up the questionability of what is being asked. In this dialogue with Heidegger and Gadamer, questioning is understood as an inherent aspect of human existence: humans seek to know others and the world around them; questioning opens the world to its own questionability, enabling reflection. In this sense, research can be understood as a refined or specific way of exercising something intrinsic to human nature: questioning.
According to Cabral and Morato (2019), from a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective, research is a way of knowing through the interplay of sensing and thinking, a process that entails risk and uncertainty, navigated through lived experience. Beginning with their everyday reality, those who engage in research (attuned to their own sense of being in the world) may find themselves provoked by conditions that suddenly stand out: Why is this the way it is? How did we arrive here? How did this come to be? Why did it happen this way?
Questions emerge from the discomfort generated by something that appears enigmatic. It is through reflection on these concerns that the guiding question (compass-question) is formulated: its function is to orient researchers as they enter the inquiry field. However, it is preliminary and not intended to remain unchanged throughout the research process. A fundamental aspect of methodological rigor in this approach is allowing the world to present itself as it is. The guiding question points toward a specific horizon but it does not predetermine where researchers will arrive; it has direction and meaning, yet it may dissolve and be redefined along the way (Cabral & Morato, 2019).
Starting from a compass-question that emerges from the researchers’ experience in the field, another methodological tool becomes available: Clinical Cartography. Cartography is an investigative method that involves walking through an institution under study seeking to understand it from the perspective of those who are part of it. This approach is both research and intervention: getting to know the institution by moving through it and engaging in conversations with its members (Aun & Morato, 2009). These conversations themselves may serve as interventions. This is why it is referred to as Clinical Cartography: by focusing on the territory, researchers aim both at understanding and caring for it simultaneously.
From a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective, research is understood as experience, so that field and affective diaries are essential tools to record these experiential imprints gathered in the field. They reveal the researchers’ evolving understanding, already signaling the interpretive path of the inquiry. These diaries serve as a record of the researchers’ path, a narrative of their investigative process, as the experience unfolds (Maux & Dutra, 2020). Melo (2022) highlights that this understanding process is circular and continuous; it is the narrative of “a professional experiential biography, from the perspective of someone who communicates how the other revealed themselves to them as a researcher” (Aun & Morato, 2009, p. 123).
Understanding research as experience also means recognizing it as a training process. Researchers learn, expanding their knowledge about the field or subject matter under study, while simultaneously learning about themselves. What leaves a mark? How does it affect them? What emotions arise from the situations encountered in the field? In this sense, diaries serve as a reflective tool for clinical researchers, providing invaluable material for those conducting research through a hermeneutic phenomenological lens.
Regarding the experience of being in the field, while bibliographic research studies and literature reviews are also part of the process, the core of this research is created among other actors. Studies are constructed in the company of interlocutors - people who are part of the research field. As research takes place in interactions with others, language, speech and exchange become essential; it is conducted through conversation.
The researchers’ comings and goings unfold as a hermeneutic circle (Frota & Dutra, 2021; Maux & Dutra, 2020), a concept that speaks to how, as human beings, we are always in a state of understanding within the world. Heidegger (2012) argues that the hermeneutic circle contains the possibility of an original way of knowing, as it brings forth the unveiling of meaning. In this sense, meaning is what structures prior stance, vision and conception. In the research context, understanding means being in the presence of a phenomenon and being questioned by it.
A Reflection on the Research Method
Recognizing that every question moves within the hermeneutic circle, it becomes essential to position researchers within the field. After all, both researchers and study subjects have life stories and belong to traditions. Therefore, raising awareness of the initial research perspective is fundamental to creating space for the emergence of authentic knowledge rather than merely reproducing pre-existing understandings.
In this sense, it is proposed that research studies should begin with a description of the researchers’ initial perspective, which, through a reflexive process, presents their historical and cultural background and examines their assumptions about the topic researched. For example, Escórcio (Escórcio & Dutra, 2020), a researcher from São Paulo, first had to revisit her own preconceptions to understand the experience of living in the northeastern semiarid region (sertão) with water scarcity.
Thus, it is crucial to ask the following question (and address it in the research): Who are the researchers? Which is their starting point? What assumptions do they bring? These initial reflections not only enhance methodological rigor of the research but also broaden its capacity for dialogue and openness, allowing for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon in its singularity and complexity.
It is also necessary to gather meanings and values sedimented in everyday practices, whether from literature that has already unveiled these hegemonic interaction modes or from the lived experiences shared by the participants. More specifically, shared engagement modes - understandings, affects and practices sustained by preconceptions - toward women, non-white racial groups, and those who are socially and economically marginalized demand particular attention (Mattar & Trzan, 2022).
As way of example, Mattar and Guimarães (2024) examine women’s situation in contemporary Brazil, offering a reflection that highlights the specificities of being a woman and suffering as such, of being a researcher, and of being a participant, all of which must be made explicit in order to ensure that research findings remain preliminary rather than final. They state:
To exist in a world that designates as ‘woman’ a sexed body marked as feminine - that is, the concrete world offers women a hermeneutic situation that defines womanhood as a naturally given fact, without questioning its destiny or the feminine itself. This female condition is subjugated by this historical world, and in impersonal everyday life, its potential for freedom is repeatedly curtailed, forbidding transcendence and reinforcing immanence. (Mattar & Guimarães, 2024, p. 165)
There are cultural modes that shape everyday interactions - the “impersonal daily life imperatives” referenced above - which constrain phenomena and prevent alternative ways of being from emerging. Within these constraints, individual suffering rooted in shared social conditions can be unveiled and made visible through research, thereby fostering the possibility of new ways of being.
This way of sewing research and researcher together demands that each step forward in the investigation be followed by a step backward. As researchers are embedded in a coexistence condition, their presence enables the phenomenon to be unveiled. The way in which the phenomenon manifests itself indicates one of many possible expressions of that relationship. Within the research experience, it is through the researchers’ engagement that the participants’ experiences unfold as phenomenon. Frota and Dutra (2021) explain that the hermeneutic phenomenological research method…:
…emphasizes the being and the existential dimension of living, seeking to understand senses and meanings. It signals that, to know a given reality, it is necessary to understand life and its phenomena from oneself and one’s own experiences. In this way, it is from existence that we will understand being-in-the-world. (Frota & Dutra, 2021, p. 7).
As already discussed, hermeneutic phenomenological research is a methodological approach that acknowledges researchers as an integral part of the process. Therefore, certain craftsmanship of research and of researchers can be conceived, as suggested by Maux and Dutra (2020). Their initial ideas-which take shape as preconceptions about the phenomenon under investigation-serve as the driving force behind the researchers’ engagement with the study. As these authors assert: “It is through investigating, or... by setting their inquiries into motion, that researchers craft their art.” (p. 3).
Revealing Situated Human Experience
To illustrate the qualitative empirical research hermeneutic phenomenological method, the following section presents a selection of studies conducted by the research group that articulates the premises and methodological steps outlined above. Following the experiential research model, Alvares (2025) explored how using technology for monitoring love partners has influenced contemporary relationships and the possible meanings behind this desire for control. The study included five women and one man aged between 24 and 50 years old, who had been in relationships ranging from 2 to 25 years. After transcribing and analyzing the material, the results revealed five thematic axes that structure the meanings behind pursuing control over one’s partner: 1. Perceptions of checking a partner’s social media; 2. Motivation drivers behind this behavior; 3. Factors sustaining this behavior; 4. Distress caused by this behavior; and 5. Perspectives on the possibility of controlling another person.
The analysis revealed that the participants sought to escape the anxiety inherent to unpredictability by pursuing control. Faced with the fear of betrayal, deception or the end of the relationship, they attempted to prevent these outcomes by demanding transparency and supervision. However, instead of providing relief, this pursuit resulted in significant distress for most participants. Among the meanings that contributed to the difficulty dealing with unpredictability, the most prominent was certain sense of insecurity about oneself and a tendency to compare oneself to others.
Bezerra and Dutra (2021) researched psychological distress in university students. Instead of assuming that mental health is accessed through standardized scales, like traditional research studies, the authors conducted, recorded and transcribed semi-open interviews. The phenomenological-hermeneutic method requires understanding the situation in which the phenomenon takes place: contemporaneity in this case, marked by rapid technological advancement and appreciation of competitiveness and success, which can lead to overload. According to the authors, “[technologies] enable increased access to information and knowledge but, at the same time, can generate certain sense of domination on the part of the person who has difficulty disconnecting from the virtual world.” (Bezerra and Dutra, 2021, p. 70). The analysis in this publication revealed the lived experience undergone by one of the students interviewed. It shows ways of being of so many others: discomfort, concern and anxiety for not being able to keep up with the fast and demanding pace of the course, related to difficulties generated by the dispersion caused by excess of technological resources and parallel conversations on various platforms.
Gomes and Dutra (2021) investigated the experience of being a homeless person. In accordance with the hermeneutic-phenomenological method used, the researchers worked with narrative interviews conducted on the streets, where the participants lived. They were not recorded but written down from memory afterwards. Besides the written narratives, the researchers considered the logbook made after the various visits to the streets to understand this experience. According to Silva and Santos (2017), field diaries are instruments in anthropological research that were originally aimed at recording phenomena inherent to the field investigated, whereas logbooks record how the researchers experienced the field and how they were affected by it. Consequently, researchers are a lot more involved in their writing.
The authors described two homeless individuals, starting from their motivation to leave their houses and family. One of them sought shelter in the streets, as she was a victim of marital violence at home. This finding led the researchers to reinterpret the preconceived opposition between safety at home and vulnerability on the streets. However, living on the streets emphasizes a person’s existential vulnerability and renders them more exposed to police violence. They also found that the interviewees did not break ties with their families, contrary to what the scientific literature indicates. In conclusion, “The street emerges as a place marked by insecurity, inhospitability and vulnerability; it welcomes those who decide to live in it, whether by choice or lack of it, to avoid a situation of suffering and violence, or for any other reason.” (Gomes & Dutra, 2021, p. 135).
Melo and Azevedo (2025) sought to understand the childhood suicide experience through the narratives of children who had expressed suicidal ideation or attempted suicide. The interpretive moments of the encounters with the children were constructed through narrative writing in an affective diary, where the researchers reflected on their understanding of these encounters.
The findings presented excerpts from the four meetings with two of the participating children, aged 10 and 11, revealing stories marked by loneliness and narrative testimonies shaped by violence and conflict. Faced with the inhospitability of a world that imposes rigid expectations on ways of being and the difficulty finding familiarity and belonging, existence became a burden and death emerged as a meaningful possibility for coping with suffering.
Above all, there is always a denunciation in childhood suicide. When a child engages in self-harm as an expression of suffering, thinks about dying or considers taking their own life, they are signaling that something within our historical horizon of meanings has made their existence profoundly difficult.
Melo and Santana (2024) aimed at contributing to promoting care for residents undergoing professional training in hospital settings. Their study was conducted during the COVID-19 health crisis. In this context, the authors examined residents’ experiences, conducting narrative interviews guided by the following triggering question: What was your experience in the multiprofessional residency program during the COVID-19 pandemic like? Additionally, they recorded their reflections in a field diary.
As key contributions, the study highlighted the importance of exploring alternative approaches and possibilities for supporting residents during their training, transcending established patterns to foster a more open and attentive listening process-a need oftentimes neglected. The study also evidenced, and to some extent denounced, the “inhuman” conditions experienced by residents in this context.
Rodrigues and Evangelista (2024) explored the concept of corporeal existence, a term used in existential phenomenology to describe the experience of bodily being in the world, as experienced by women who engaged with body-positive content or the “Body Positive Movement”. The study was based on four narrative materials collected through conversations with women, revealing that their engagement with body positivity contributed to reducing emphasis on thinness and a more critical stance toward harmful societal messages affecting their personal experiences and those of women more broadly.
Final Considerations
Originating in Philosophy, Hermeneutic Phenomenology has significantly influenced Psychology research over the past three decades, providing epistemological grounds for understanding the researchers’ intimacy with both the world in which research takes place and the individuals with whom they interact and dialogue. In this context, doing science means engaging in dialogue and collectively creating new understandings of lived reality, enabling new ways of inhabiting the world. The starting point for research is existence itself, and its initial project is guided by (preliminarily) establishing a guiding question.
Research is a human experience. The realization of this existential possibility may be accompanied by a historical record of the researchers’ experience. By traversing different territories and clinically engaging in various psychological care settings, phenomenologists are affected by their experiences while simultaneously leaving their own marks. Logbooks or affective diaries serve as records of this path, documenting the triggering factors emerging from the field, the shared ways of being and aspects that oftentimes elude theoretical reflection. Thus, they are essential elements for elucidating ways of being in social contexts.
Narrative testimonies constitute a privileged means of unveiling lived experiences. They preserve the living essence of dialogue that takes place between researchers, participants and research settings, resulting in a co-authored written account that, when communicated, can lead to new (re)cognitions. These narrative materials also serve as starting points for further development, given that research findings are always and necessarily preliminary.
The research examples conducted by the research group reflect inquiries that emerged from psychologists’ professional practice, particularly in relation to the contemporary world we live in, which shapes and provides the limits for our existence possibilities. By historicizing our tradition, we strive to remain open to new perspectives and, consequently, to new professional and personal ways of engaging in the world. This process involves revisiting preconceptions and distancing ourselves from illegitimate biases.
Narrative reviews tend to be criticized for being unsystematic and presenting the authors’ perspective, in such a way that the conclusions reached are biased. This may indeed be a limitation of this study, which can be overcome in future surveys aimed at describing the state-of-the-art. Another limitation is that no comparison with other methods also highlighting the situated character of research and researchers (such as the Grounded Theory and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis) was made in this study. Such comparison may expand its contribution to the research community.
The scope of this narrative review was limited to presenting selected research studies. Currently, the research group comprises multiple researchers conducting surveys at undergraduate and graduate levels, all adopting Hermeneutic Phenomenology as their epistemological grounds. This presentation aims at inviting new researchers to engage in situating themselves within their research and documenting the uniqueness of their scientific endeavors and the experiences they seek to understand.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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How to cite this article:
Evangelista, P. E. R. A., Azevedo, A. K. S., Barbosa, C. G., Leite, D. F. C. C. S., Vaz Velho, C. M. S., Chohfi, L. M. S., & Cardinalli, I. E. (2026). Hermeneutic Phenomenology as a Research Method in Psychology: Socio-Historical Ways of Being. Paidéia (Ribeirão Preto), 36, e3619. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-4327e3619
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
