# Transcript

DARREN:

First and foremost I think phenomenological social psychology is about lived experience. Experience as people live it in their day to day lives.

DR LINDA FINLAY:

It’s about focusing in on what it, what it means to be human and, and that, that I just find very exciting.

LINDA (continued):

Very often in psychology people focus in on smaller aspects of people’s behaviour, whether it’s in their brain or whatever, and you lose the sense of what it means to be human.

DARREN:

Immediately I encountered the phenomenological approach and the philosophy of the kind of phenomenological philosophers, did I merely kind of think: hello, this is, this is something that resonates with me and my understanding of the world, and what I’d learnt and studied so far.

DR LINDA FINLAY:

My path into this really came from practising as a mental health therapist, because there I used all sorts of theoretical perspectives in my work, but the one I favoured was the humanistic approach, where you’re trying to look at, kind of taking a holistic view of the person, the individual, trying to understand their, their feelings, their needs, their potential. Trying to empower. And these are the kinds of messages that also phenomenologists pick up on. And so it was a very short jump for me really as, as a therapist to then move into phenomenology .

DARREN:

What I discovered with phenomenology was an alternative psychoanalysis that had that vast scope, that actually sought to kind of deal with human existence kind of as we live it, in its entirety.

DR LINDA FINLAY:

It asks: well what is that experience like for you? So for example, if you were a depressed person and you had a whole room of psychologists here, every single psychologist would probably look at you differently and understand you differently. And you’d have some psychologists perhaps would be very focused on why is it that you’ve become depressed. Whereas the phenomenologist simply says well, I want to know what is it like for you to be depressed? What is your world? You know, who are you and how are you handling it? What’s your pain? What’s … what are your needs, what are your feelings? What is it that gives you meaning in your life? And for me those are the important questions. And of course there a link there then into how one would then help you with your depression.

NARRATOR:

Phenomenological research sets out to describe the particularity of people’s experiences.

DARREN:

My own research has been mostly concerned with understanding the lived experience of sexual identities. A particularly interesting study that I conducted was concerned with understanding the expectations of young gay men for parenthood. As a gay man coming out some years ago, I recall automatically assuming that I’d not be able to have children of my own or give my parents grandchildren. I was interested in exploring whether there was a new story about parenthood and the possibility of this for young gay men. This led me to conduct a study designed to investigate the hopes and fears of young gay men about becoming parents themselves.

DARREN:

We set out basically to conduct kind of fairly in depth interviews with sort of 20 young gay men, who didn’t have children but had something to say about the topic.

DARREN:

Hi, James. I’m Darren.

DARREN:

We recruited from a number of different sources with flyers that we put around various venues, directly approached youth groups in the area, university groups and other people that we knew. We basically were trying to find kind of as many young gay men as we could who were willing to volunteer that didn’t already have children through whatever means, and that had some wish to take part and talk about the topic. Men that sometimes we were interviewing them in my office, at the university, or we’d go to their homes, whatever was most appropriate for them, and they felt most comfortable with.

DARREN:

Through here?

JAMES:

Yep. Would you like a drink or anything?

DARREN:

Yeah, a cup of tea would be great, thanks.

JAMES:

No problem.

DARREN:

I wonder if we could begin by just talking a little bit about your expectations for parenthood. And in particular I’m interested in whether you’ve ever imagined becoming a parent at some point in the future?

JAMES:

I have certainly. Five years ago, before I came out as a gay man, I was in a relationship with a woman and I got her pregnant. I realised I think at that point that I wasn’t in the relationship I wanted to be in to actually bring the child up. It was a mutual decision, but we decided to get rid of the baby in the end and … it was the right decision, I don’t think we could have supported it as I would have wanted to and I think she had the same opinion as me really. I would like children in the future but obviously now, being a gay man, it would be with a different partner, and it would definitely be I think in a relationship that I would want to have that child.

DARREN:

What we heard from these people were a variety of themes around the way in which having a child was a way of connecting them in with their own families, their own biological families in particular; a way of continuing the generation, the family name through providing parents with grandchildren, linking themselves into the family structure in a way that often heterosexual siblings did.

DARREN:

And have you thought about the implications of your decision for the child themselves?

JAMES:

My generation’s a lot more accepting of gay marriage, gay people having babies. And I would hope that in the future, perhaps ten years down the … ten years down the line, sorry, that it’s developed even more, so that it’s become less of an issue.

DARREN:

And I wonder if you thought about how your friends or family might respond to you in this decision?

JAMES:

I think my friends would be very accepting. My parents would like grandchildren, definitely, and wanting children myself, I think, I think it would be, it would be a good thing for them and it would be a good thing for me.

DARREN:

There was often an emphasis on quite traditional notions of families, of needing to be in a couple before having children was actually quite a common theme, and wanting to be a kind of fairly traditional family, where the child had lots of love and affection and support. And these things were kind of clearly identified as common themes for the men involved.

DR LINDA FINLAY:

I set out to study the lived experience in multiple sclerosis and in my research I actually interviewed several people with multiple sclerosis. Now what was so striking was that they all had completely different stories, and I soon realised that actually it was not possible to do a study on this is what the experience of multiple sclerosis is like. It was clear to me that I needed to focus in on the individuals and kind of honour their story. And Ann was one of the individuals, and I thought she had a really important story to tell. In Ann’s interview she talked about having a numbness in her hands that had spread, spread up her arm, and then it subsided, leaving her with a little bit of numbness in her fingertips. And that’s pretty much all she had wrong in a way. And, and that was what I was thinking: well, it’s not that bad in, in the grand scheme of things. But of course I wasn’t setting aside my understandings of the medical condition not being so bad. Whereas really I needed to tune in to what Ann was feeling about this and what it meant to her. And she did something in the interview which just yanked me back to her life world and really showed, showed me, from her perspective, what it was about. LINDA (continued): She, she described the sense of not being able to feel her babies skin properly, so that she could love them. And she did this gesture, this kind of embodied gesture, which just whoa, and I … and I suddenly got it. I suddenly realised what … whatever the medical status of her hand, that was really irrelevant. For her, having a little bit of numbness in her hand, meant that she couldn’t touch her babies. In medical terms her symptoms were relatively minor, but her entire world was derailed. One of the valuable things that has come out in my research with Ann is, is actually working with health professionals. They do exactly what I did, which is kind of thinking: oh well, she’s just got a little numbness in her fingers, no big deal. And then they switch off. And I say wait a minute, you’ve got a person there with a whole life, look at how her, her whole world has been disrupted. I think phenomenological research in general reminds the professionals to listen and hear what it is like for the individual.