ndividual phenomenal description
The initial move was to faithfully unfold the experience to how it was presented. According to Wertz,1 the quest was to re-tell the story not only to prepare it for analysis, but also to be readable for an audience (This, however, was too long for being part of this paper.). Wertz1 states that the researcher “is not a mere spectator, but achieves a grasp of the meanings the subject has expressed precisely as intended by the subject.”1(p164) This requires that I familiarized myself by reading the interviews while openly attempting to put myself in Eve's “shoes of living through the experience from the inside.”1(p164)From the transcribed interview, I identified meaning units (in 1 or more sentences). By asking if the meaning unit was revelatory, only units that constituted the situation were kept.1 These were regrouped according to their meaning and ordered chronologically to present the event as it had happened.1 I chose to do it chronologically because it is a common way of reaching an understanding of a story. The goal was a well-organized description in the first person.1 One challenge was the stories' length; another was that the stories were told within the story. At the same time, I was afraid of ending up with a reduction that did not do Eve's story justice; when judging, which of the statements were revelatory of “being the mother of an adolescent suffering from a spinal cord injury,” I had to reflect on an emerging distinction. Some of the statements revealed Eve's personality more than her role as a mother. The conclusion was that motherhood could not be separated from personality. This phase took time, and that allowed the data to speak for itself, and prevented me from making conclusions to soon. The “individual phenomenal description” is data near so the informant would find that it characterized her story of “being the mother of an adolescent suffering from a spinal cord injury.” Furthermore, it provided the basis for the further analyses.