Participatory Hermeneutic Phenomenology — Collaborative Lived-Experience Research

Participatory Hermeneutic Phenomenology combines the interpretive, text-oriented tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology — rooted in Heidegger and developed by van Manen — with a participatory ethos in which research participants are treated as active co-inquirers rather than passive informants. The approach seeks to understand the meaning of lived experience through a collaborative hermeneutic circle where researcher and participants jointly interpret experience, text, and context across iterative cycles of dialogue.