Review Article

Michael Crotty's Phenomenology and Nursing Research

Catherine Garrett
School of Applied Social and Human Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta Campus, NSW

Abstract

Michael Crotty, first a moral theologian, then an educator in developing countries and finally a teacher in the graduate program in health studies at Flinders University, died this year, leaving a substantial body of work on the phenomenology he knew and loved so well. His first book on the subject, Phenomenology and Nursing Research (1996) deserves far more attention than it has received. It is a gift to nursing research and, less directly, to all who work in what has become known as the health social sciences. Gifts, however, can be challenging and the challenge has not always been well received. For example, the nurse theorist Patricia Benner, in Nursing Inquiry, reads Crotty's book as 'uncritical and unobjective', accusing him of taking an entirely negative view of nursing research and failing to recognise its achievements (Benner 1996). Debates about research methods and the theories that inform them are crucial in health research, so it is worth clarifying some of the issues at stake in this one. I come to it as a sociologist who has taught in a faculty of nursing and health for over ten years during which, like Crotty, I have developed admiration for the work of nurses and friendship with nursing colleagues, while often experiencing despair at the paranoia and hermetic thinking of nursing culture. One of the myths of this culture is that 'non-nurses', and sometimes even nurses who have chosen to complete degrees in disciplines other than nursing, cannot know what it means to nurse. One of its rituals has been the exclusion of such people from any discussion of nursing philosophy. But culture is never uniform and Michael Crotty's ideas have been welcomed and already made a strong impact in some sectors of academic nursing. His guest workshops have provoked discussion about the differences between European and North American phenomenology and sent lecturers and students back to Husserl and Heidegger to test his conclusions for themselves.

This article is a homage to his achievement, an introduction to his ideas for those who have not met them and an attempt to resolve one of the problems he identifies in nursing theory and research; the apparent unsuitability of phenomenology as a method for considering the ethical relations which are at the heart of nursing - the issue of 'care' which nursing claims as its 'philosophy', but which, as Crotty suggests, constantly needs to be re-visioned, re-apprehended and re-stated.

In the first part of the article, I outline Crotty's arguments about phenomenology and the 'new' version he believes has jettisoned phenomenology's original aims. I address the questions: What is phenomenology? In what way has the 'new' phenomenology departed from the original phenomenological project? Why does it matter?

Is phenomenology a theory or a method? and if it is a method, as Crotty's book says it is, how is the method to be applied and who is best suited to use it? In the last part of the article, I introduce the ideas of Levinas, whose phenomenological approach to ethics may offer a resolution to the problem Crotty has identified in nursing research; an apparent conflict between the lack of ethical concerns in European phenomenology and the commitment of nursing to pastoral and humanist interests.

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