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7.6 Phenomenography has not escaped criticism, either
In this section, I paraphrase a few main criticisms of phenomenography from the literature and
phenomenographers’ responses to those criticisms.
Criticism 1: language and the nature of outcome spaces
Critics from both within the phenomenographic movement (e.g., Säljö, 1994) and outside (e.g., Webb,
1997) have criticized the perceived disregard of interview-based phenomenography for the role of language,
communication, and social construction. Scullion (2002, pp. 101–103) reviews this debate. According to
him, phenomenographers in Marton’s tradition see language as a relatively unproblematic device that the
phenomenographer must get past to learn about the interviewee’s conceptions. Critics such as Säljö call
for a more careful and explicit treatment of language:
To me, phenomenography has a weak spot in its lack of a theory of language and
communication, and in its almost dogmatic disregard for paying attention to why people
talk the way they do. The assumption seems to be that what is meant by what is said can
be construed as representing a conception of the phenomenon which one – according to the
interviewer – is talking about. (Säljö, 1994)
A related question is what phenomenographic outcome spaces really tell us. Some critics have argued
that it is impossible to genuinely explore and describe what other people really experience. For instance,
according to Richardson (1999), phenomenographers fail to deliver on their promise to describe the world
as people experience it: “they have to depend on other people’s discursive accounts of their experience
[and] are merely describing the world as people describe it.”
Some phenomenographers are happy to agree that outcome spaces are no more than descriptions of
how people describe things in a particular kind of situation. This does not mean they are not useful in
practice:
I don’t wish to assert that I ‘know’ an individual’s conception of a phenomenon. What I do
want to be able to say is that, following a given interview context, analysis of the transcripts
enables me to differentiate between a number of different ways of seeing the phenomenon
that are apparent in that kind of conversation. [. . . ] Also, it is not possible for the researcher
to ‘be’ that person; the researcher interprets the communication with the person. [. . . ] Iam
satisfied that phenomenographic research produces descriptions which owe their content both
to the relation between the individuals and the phenomenon (that is, their conceptions) and
also to the nature of the conversation between the researcher and each individual and its
context (which includes the relation between the researcher and the phenomenon). (Bowden,
2000, pp. 16–17)
Bowden’s pragmatic position seems a reasonable way to address criticism of this kind.
Criticism 2: value-loaded norms
Webb (1997), who writes from a post-modernist perspective, is critical of the way phenomenography
posits that some ways of understanding are qualitatively better or more correct than others. Webb calls
phenomenographic research hopelessly value-loaded and contaminated by the researcher’s own conceptual
apparatus. He accuses phenomenographers of making normative, even dogmatic judgments, and of
forbidding learners to develop alternative views.
Phenomenography does indeed posit that some ways of understanding are richer and better than
others in the sense that they enable learners to perform more effectively. Marton and Booth (1997, p. 2),
for instance, explicitly take a stand:
We are living in an age of relativism, but a fundamental principle we are assuming in this book
is that education has norms – norms of what those undergoing education should be learning,
and what the outcomes of that learning should be.
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