Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

Self-Esteem Research Problems and Issues 53manipulations designed to elicit or test responses. Data are usually generatedby asking subjects for an initial description of the experience orevent, then expanding on this material via interview. Each initial descriptionand its related interview are transcribed as a single body of data.This narrative or “extended protocol” of behavior is then examined forindividual units of meaning, which are often identified by turning pointsin the narration.These results, in turn, are used to develop a description of a givensubject’s experience as a situated instance of the phenomenon, or how itis lived by a particular subject at a particular time. Next, these individualrecords of the phenomenon are examined for regularities that occurbetween subjects. The recurring themes that arise from this step arethen identified as being basic to the phenomenon and are known as itsessential or constitutive elements. Finally, these components, and therelationships between them, are worked into a final phenomenologicaldescription, usually identified as its fundamental structure, or that whichis necessary and sufficient to give rise to the phenomenon for any givenindividual. Of course, all the while the researcher attempts to suspend hisor her own judgments and preconceptions as much as possible, whichrequires considerable attention to the researcher’s own thinking processeseach step of the way. This method was the one that was used in analyzingthe self-esteem moments discussed in Chapter 1 and that led to thefundamental structure presented there.Like their natural science counterparts (Howard, 1985), human scienceresearchers recognize that in all cases the best research method is theone that is most suited to working with the particular phenomenon inquestion. When studying experience, this axiom means that the methodmust be flexible as well as rigorous, because experiences are more fluidthan experiments. These two characteristics of the phenomenologicalmethod allow it to be faithful to the phenomenon, wherever it may lead.Michael Jackson’s Self-Esteem and Meaning: A Life HistoricalInvestigation probably represents the most in-depth and articulate discussionof the value of using qualitative methods to research self-esteemin this way. In dealing with the problems and limits encountered whenresearching it from the natural science paradigm Jackson noted that,The problem seems rather to lie in experimentation itself—or morecorrectly, in the application of the experimental method to the investigationof self-esteem. . . . Self-esteem is not a determinate process likethe ones studied in the physical sciences; its nature lies rather in its subjectivecharacter and in its ever-changing manifestations and implications.Confronted by a phenomenon so elusive and so dynamic, theexperimental method is, as it were, overpowered. (1984, pp. 4–5)