Descriptive Phenomenology

Descriptive Phenomenology, systematised by Amedeo Giorgi at Duquesne University, is a rigorous qualitative method for uncovering the general psychological structure of a lived experience. Drawing directly on Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, Giorgi's four-step procedure — epoché, whole reading, meaning-unit discrimination, and transformation into disciplinary language — produces a stable, replicable description of what makes an experience essentially what it is, without theoretical interpretation or causal explanation.