Taking Part
Sometimes IPA studies involve a close examination of the experiences and meaning-making activities of only one participant. Sometimes they may draw on the accounts of a small number of people (not usually more than 15). In either case, participants are invited to take part precisely because they can offer the researcher some meaningful insight into the topic of the study; this is called purposive sampling . Usually, participants in an IPA study are expected to have certain experiences in common with one another: the small-scale nature of a basic IPA study shows how something is understood in a given context, and from a shared perspective, a method sometimes called homogeneous sampling. More advanced IPA study designs may draw together samples which offer multiple perspectives on a shared experience (husbands and wives, for example, or psychiatrists and patients); or they may collect accounts over a period of time, to develop a longitudinal analysis.
Read more about this topic: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
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