‘Yes it is phenomenological’: a reply to Max Van Manen’s critique of interpretative phenomenological analysis

In this paper I present a rebuttal of Max Van Manen’s (2017) critique of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Unfortunately Van Manen’s piece contains a series of misrepresentations of IPA and its history. Here I answer these misrepresentations and present IPA as subscribing, and contributing, to a broad and holistic phenomenology concerned with both pre-reflective and reflective domains of lived experience. I contend that IPA has much to offer to our understanding of the experience of health and illness where participants are spontaneously and actively engaged in making sense of the significant and unexpected things which happen to them