Interpretative Phenomenology : A Study Essay

With a missing male role model (father figure), the oldest child of a set of multiples tends to take on the other parents responsibities making the younger siblings look at them as a parental figure. This could mean doing simple chores like keeping the house clean, all the way to helping out financially. This phenomenon is called parentification. Parentification is all too common in African American families today. The missing father figure is seen as one of the main reasons for African Americans disciplinary problems, psychological health, and lowered academic success. Without the knowledge of how to behave in certain situations, the mental/emotional strain, and the already low academic achievement, many black students feel that college is unnecessary and causes them to bring up the question, “How will my family survive without me?”

The research topic I plan to focus on involves studying the experiences of African American males who have formed mentoring relationships as undergraduates, particularly when the mentor is a Black male and the relationship takes place at Clemson or other PWIs in the south. In my opinion, these relationships can have a profound impact on a student’s ability to persist towards graduating from college. Though my research, I want to hear the experiences of Black males who have benefited from successful mentoring relationships with other Black men. As a mentor, I believe that establishing a strong mentoring relationship with Black males at a young age can greatly improve their chance of academic success. Furthermore, I believe that mentoring is a strong early intervention mechanism to prevent Black males from dropping out of high school and deterring them from pursuing degrees in higher education. At the same time, I would like my research interest to focus on African American males in the south, but I would like my scope to focus on mentoring relationships between black men; both structured and unstructured.

Prince George’s County (PG county) is a county in the state of Maryland, it borders the eastern portion of Washington D.C. and is the wealthiest African-American majority conty in the United States. The conceptual framework for the study was based on Nel Noddings’ Theory of Care. The research questions that guided the study included; how do mentor students view their role in the Freshman Mentor Program and to what extent do the mentors’ views of their role change as they participate in the

Power point slide Qualitative research is a difficult term to define…. Nevertheless, it is important to be familiar with some definitions in the field. The definition provided by Creswell 2009 is enlightening because it incorporates ……….. most important part of definition for me were reports detailed views of informants and natural setting.

‘Employing a qualitative methodology, underpinned by a constructivist world view, has provided the means to generate rich, deep and contextualised understandings of the research issue, and an appreciation of the socially constructed and experienced realities of the participants.’ (Highfield 2012)

Phenomenological interview limitations may appear due to the researcher’s lack of experience in conducting interviews (Downey, 2015); which may interfere with the researcher’s focus and intentionality (Ashworth, 2017). Limitations may occur with the relationship between the researcher and the interviewee, including power struggles which might affect trust and honest participant reflections (Boucher, 2017). Further, time limitations could impede upon a participants deliberation process during the interview process (Downey, 2015). If a researcher is to understand the essence of a phenomenon; a suspension of judgment is required during participant interviews (Ashworth, 2017). Additionally, the researcher will need to be extremely attentive to experience the study through the participants’ eyes (Kelley, 2016). Individuals may choose not to answer every question, which is acceptable; yet, missing data can also become a limitation to the study. However, if enough participants do not answer the same question, the question might need to be reframed or removed; additionally, secondary data, such as technical reports, white papers or additional publications might be necessary to validate the research question (Johnston, 2014).

As well as reveal how the effective mentoring experiences can be utilized to create tailored mentoring program for specialized populations. The researcher expected the results of the data collection and analysis to add to the existing body of literature from an African American woman’s perspective on the impact of mentoring in higher education. More significantly, the study revealed the mentees career development needs, expectations, and the impact their mentor’s influence had on their careers. These components are vital to understanding and providing suggestions for future African American women seeking leadership

As a program coordinator for Colonial Mentors, I demonstrated my ability to effectively plan, develop, and implement organizational structure to a program. Colonial Mentor is a mentoring program designed to aspire college students to succeed in their academic careers. With my role, I was responsible for the organizational direction of the program and communicating the progress to the program director, my supervisor. I began the planning process with researching and gathering the materials needed to compose an effective mentoring program. I developed the program curriculum, policies, code of conduct, procedures for recruitment, training, and matching of mentors and mentees. Once the innovations were approved by the program director, I introduced

In this qualitative phenomenological research, the researcher went to the building that the participants’ schools were located for participants’ convenience. The researcher followed a protocol of first conducting individual interviews with each of the ten participants. A semi-structured, conversational style of individual interviewing was adopted in order to explore the respondents’ stories which made interviewing multiple subjects more methodical (See Appendix A for Interview Protocol). According to Meehan, 20014),

Thus, the grounded theory study conducted semi-structured interviews. These interviews included broad questions, and questions generated by theoretical sensitivity, which is commonly related to grounded theory studies. In the case study, the data collection was performed through semi-structured interviews as well. The data collection in the phenomenological study was framed in Heidegger phenomenology because it allowed the researcher to have more interaction and involvement with the participants of this study. The discussion of the data collection for the authoethnography is clearly different from the aforementioned approaches. In this case, the author presented a narrative of a series of discussions and self-reflective points that the author maintained with his own family about end-of-life making-decisions and their relationship with ethics of

Phenomenology is a guided analysis and transformed personal experience into disciplinary understanding. This style of research (lived experience) also delivers a clear identified method for these men such as, using semi-structured and open-ended questions addressing the lived experience. This research helped these men to clarify, predict possible outcomes, recognize the phenomena of the understanding of

Qualitative research is concerned with meanings of experiences and interactions. Qualitative research is very common in the social sciences, although it is often used in market research as well (Alasuutari, 2010; Nieswiadomy, 2011). There has been quite a rise in qualitative research in the last 30 years. It first started to emerge in journals in the 1960’s, and an increase in the number of qualitative research can be seen in research journals in the 1980’s (Alasuutari, 2010). Instead of looking at the statistical numbers within research, the researcher in interested in getting within the research, and understanding the phenomenon (Leedy, 2011; LoBionod-Wood & Haber, 2013).

This essay will start by defining mentoring, and giving a brief understanding of mentoring. This essay will then go on to identify and evaluate a number of key factors that may influence the effectiveness of a mentoring relationship. This essay will focus on the example of mentoring within schools and a learning mentor to be more specific.

When utilizing a qualitative approach, the task becomes one of determining the qualitative method to be used. Additionally, Stake (2010) used purpose, research design, and methodical data techniques as a way of classifying types of qualitative research. Similarly, Cresswell & Cresswell (2007) spoke of five practices of qualitative research. These five practices consist of biography, phenomenological study, grounded theory study, ethnography, and case study. This researcher chose a phenomenological study for this research project.

A Phenomenological paradigm is a method of inquiry, associated with the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It attempts to capture the subjective experiences and interpretations as perceived by the participants or group of people in an unbiased manner. How they view and understand the world from their perspectives would be the focal point of the phenomenologists. Thus, the main goal of phenomenology is to understand the ‘life-world’ as viewed and experienced by the participants and requires the researchers to free themselves from any preconceptions and interferences. This method allows the researchers to understand the informants’ subjective world in their own terms and make them visible and true to the informants’