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1. INTRODUCTION = 19 veloping a higher sensitivity to others. Consequently, recovery is a journey that involves a process from social exclusion to social inclusion. It also involves a more collectivist outlook and a desire to see changes in mental health services and society in general. A more collaborative approach, more extensive choice of treatment, alternatives to the medical model and to apply a person, rather than a symptom-oriented approach is needed (Chadwick, 1997; Forchuk, Jewell, Tweedell, & Steinnagel, 2003; Pitt et al., 2007; Waite, Knight, & Lee, 2015). 1.2. INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a recently developed and rapidly growing qualitative research approach. It is originated from health psychology but increasingly used by those working in the human, social and health sciences (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009). It has become one of the best known qualitative methods in psychology ever since the first IPA study was published in 1996 (Smith, 1996) in the United Kingdom (Smith et al., 2009), the developers of the method are also scientists from the United Kingdom: Jonathan A. Smith, Paul Flowers, Michael Larkin and Mike Osborn. The number of qualitative psychological studies has been growing in the last years (Willig & Stainton Rogers, 2008) and IPA is one of the most often used qualitative methods (Smith, 2004, 2011). IPA examines how people make sense of their significant life experience in its own terms. An IPA research tries not to fix experience in predefined or abstract categories it instead follows the lead of the philosopher Edmund Husserl to go “back to things themselves”. IPA is committed to examine experience in its complexity and to uncover what happens when a lived experience takes on a particular significance for people (Smith et al., 2009). This chapter is offering a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of IPA, its place between other qualitative methods, research areas where IPA is often used and a concise description of the IPA research design. 1.2.1. Theoretical foundations The primary goal of IPA is to investigate how individuals make sense of their experiences. People are considered to be “self-interpreting beings” (Taylor, 1985) because they are engaged in interpreting people, objects and events of their life. In order to unfold these processes of interpretation, the approach of IPA is engaged in the fundamental principles of phenomenology, hermeneutics and idiography (Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014; Smith et al., 2009).
