Struggling with IPA in your PhD? A practical guide to analysing and writing up Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
You chose Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis because it felt rich. Thoughtful. Human.
Now you have transcripts. Pages of them.
And instead of feeling excited, you might feel something closer to quiet panic.
What do I actually do with all this?
How do I interpret someone’s lived experience without overstepping?
How do I know if I am “doing IPA properly”?
If those questions are circling, you are at the point where IPA becomes real.
The post-data wobble
There is often a moment of relief when data collection ends. Interviews are complete. Files are saved.
Then the analysis stage begins, and everything feels heavier.
IPA is not mechanical coding. It asks you to think carefully about meaning. It asks you to sit with ambiguity. It asks you to engage interpretively.
That can feel exposing.
The key thing to remember is this: IPA is iterative. You are not expected to produce themes in one dramatic burst of insight. You move back and forth between reading, noting, interpreting and refining.
The slowness is not a flaw in the method. It is the method.
Start with depth, not speed
When you begin analysing, resist the urge to jump immediately to cross-case themes.
Stay with one participant first.
Read their transcript closely. Make notes in three layers:
Descriptive observations about what is happening.
Linguistic observations about how they are expressing it.
Conceptual reflections about possible underlying meaning.
This layered noting process helps you avoid superficial coding. You are not simply tagging content. You are engaging with how experience is being constructed.
IPA rewards dwelling.
Qualitative PhD students often feel anxious here because there is no visible “progress.” But immersion is analytic progress.
Case first, patterns later
One of the biggest misunderstandings about IPA is the fear that developing themes across participants will erase individual voices.
It will not, if you follow the idiographic logic properly.
Complete your analysis for one case. Develop emergent themes. Write a brief case summary that captures how this participant makes sense of their experience.
Then move to the next case.
Only after analysing each case individually do you begin looking across cases.
When you do this, you are not searching for uniformity. You are asking: where are there shared patterns of meaning, and where are there important divergences?
Variation is not noise. It is insight.
The double hermeneutic anxiety
Many qualitative researchers experience a particular IPA worry.
My participants are already interpreting their own experience. What gives me the right to interpret their interpretation?
This is the double hermeneutic at work. You are making sense of them making sense of their world.
Your role is not to correct or override their account. It is to explore it thoughtfully. To situate it within context. To consider how identity, culture and circumstance shape what is being said.
And crucially, to reflect on how your own theoretical stance shapes what you notice.
Reflexivity here is not decorative. It is methodological integrity.
The “am I doing it wrong?” phase
Almost every IPA PhD student reaches a point where they think they are misapplying the method.
They worry that they have not followed every step perfectly. That their themes are too broad. Too narrow. Too interpretive. Not interpretive enough.
What examiners look for is not procedural perfection. They look for coherence.
Have you demonstrated an understanding of IPA’s phenomenological and hermeneutic foundations?
Have you centred lived experience?
Have you shown how you moved from transcript to theme?
Have you been transparent about your analytic decisions?
If the answer is yes, you are engaging in credible IPA.
It is also entirely acceptable to state that your study was informed by IPA if you have adapted the approach. What matters is clarity about what you did and why.
Reading strategically
If you are deepening your IPA understanding, there are two types of reading that help most.
First, return to the core text by Smith, Flowers and Larkin. Not to memorise it, but to ground yourself in its logic.
Second, read published IPA studies in your discipline. Notice how authors describe their analytic process. Pay attention to how themes are introduced and supported with extracts. Observe how interpretation is woven through the writing.
This makes the eventual writing up far less intimidating.
IPA is about meaning, not perfection
If you are feeling stuck, return to the fundamentals.
IPA is about exploring how people make sense of significant experiences in their lives.
It is not about ticking procedural boxes. It is about engaging thoughtfully, reflexively and rigorously with lived meaning.
If you slow down, stay close to each case, and make your interpretive decisions visible, you are doing the work IPA asks of you.
If you want ongoing qualitative research clarity
If you’re working with IPA and realising that qualitative research is as much about thinking as it is about method, you’ll probably benefit from being part of the conversations I share each week.
Inside my emails, I unpack things like:
how to strengthen your methodology chapter without waffle
how to interpret data without overclaiming
how to sound confident rather than apologetic in your writing
what examiners are actually looking for in qualitative theses
It’s not generic productivity advice. It’s grounded, thoughtful support for people doing serious doctoral work.
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