Introduction

This chapter explores my experience of researching lived experience during a global pandemic. I used hermeneutic phenomenology with a careful approach to methods and ethics. The chapter discusses my lived experience of research, the difficulties I faced in the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these were resolved through methodological and ethical reflexivity.

Hermeneutic phenomenology research is the study of lived experiences – a study of humanness within humanistic parameters (van Manen, 1990). Humans, due to their dynamic nature, experience time and space differently. Birth, life, and death are common to all humans; however, time and space define their lived experiences subjectively with vividness. The study of human experiences within contextual phenomena, defined by time and space including body and mind, is called ‘human science research’.

My interest in human experience motivates me as a human science researcher. I am exploring research ethics from the perspective of how social scientists experience being ethical, as researchers. In the first week of December 2019, I planned to commence my research. Coincidentally, COVID-19 started to hamper daily life of people in China (Wang et al, 2020) and soon after the global pandemic emerged. The ensuing lockdowns rendered me unable to continue the proposed research as planned using face-to-face interviews and field notes. So, I started to explore alternatives.

In this chapter, I reflect on my own experiences as a hermeneutic phenomenological inquirer during a period of global crisis. Broadly, it is framed in two sections: the first discusses researching the lived experiences of others, and the second considers the consequences of my positionality when interpreting texts.

Researching lived experience

I always wonder, how can I investigate the experience of others as I live it? How can I transcribe all lived experiences and interactions in a textual form? But, to hermeneutic phenomenologists, lived experience consists of four dimensions: time, space, body, and mind. Researching lived experience means asking how social/human science researchers make meaning of their contextual existence (Frechette et al, 2020). For me, it was an opportunity to understand the knowledge-constituted world of my participants, who are researchers embedded within their own research. Assessing my participants’ lived experience was a way of understanding their world. It was also an approach to learning from their experiences.