3: Method and Methodological Issues

The methodological issues of this qualitative research project, ontologically grounded in an interpretive approach, phenomenological in character, and executed through the oral history approach, as the research method, are explored in this chapter. The project itself was concerned with establishing, through semi-structured interviews, the motivations for the careers of intellectual disability nurses from England and the Republic of Ireland; to give meaning and context to their everyday practice, and communications, along with their lived experiences of long service in supporting people with intellectual disabilities. And whereas we did not explicitly adopt a phenomenological paradigm in framing the research method, the lived experiences of these participants were implicit in the semi-structured interview schedule and were uppermost in the minds of the interviewers when conducting the interviews. Therefore, it was important that the research method was congruent (Polit and Hungler, 1999) with, and able to accommodate the telling of stories of how social actors, in this case intellectual disability nurses, created and made sense of their long careers through the use of a method which is well established in phenomenological epistemology (Friedlander, 2000). For as Atkinson has said: