Conducting phenomenological research on self-help groups: How to understand an experience that you do not share?

Self-help groups tend to be composed of people who believe their experience can only be understood by those who share the same experience. How then is it possible for qualitative researchers to study their experience from a phenomenological perspective? In 2008 I was asked by a self-help group for Japanese family survivors of suicide (hereafter “survivors”) to conduct research on their organization because they believed that the great potential of self-help groups to help survivors was not being recognised by human service professionals and the government. They were hoping my endorsement of their activities would increase social recognition of their self-help groups. The survivors were very critical of professionals who claimed to understand what they were experiencing because the survivors believed their experience could only be understood by someone who shared the same experience. I describe how I approached researching the survivors’ experience, and relate three stories addressing a failure, a success, and a challenge respectively. Initially, I tried to understand survivors’ experience by remembering the suicide of a student I had known, but this proved ineffective. The success relates to a metonymic approach to grief adopted by the survivors, who used the expression “Grief is love” to focus their experience. The challenge relates to how long one should grieve. Although group leaders insisted their grief could never be resolved, in reality some survivors left the group after their grief had become bearable. Through the use of metaphors, I was able to approach and begin to understand survivors’ experience