Conducting a qualitative research on suicide in Ghana using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA): A reflection after a decade

Abstract

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) set of guidelines allow a researcher to gain access to the meaning of a phenomenon (e.g. suicide) through the individual person’s lived and personal experiences. In this paper I have discussed that the ethical challenges that confront researching suicide in Ghana the challenges of pursuing an idiographic rigor using the IPA may arise from the pervasive normative self-construal within Ghanaian communities. Though I admit the IPA has been useful in various studies within the African context, I have also interrogated such idiography within the normative social arrangement of such setting where sociocentric per spectives abound. This essay is a reflexivity on the IPA in a normative context after a decade, where suicidal behaviour is strongly proscribed and personhood is deeply shared. I have recommended that one way of addressing this challenge is to use a ‘funnel’ approach in interviewing from the general: the community, to the particular: the individual.