You do not triangulate in a Phenom study. You will be focusing on the lived experiences of your participants. I did a narrative study and I ended up triangulating. I was working with the blind or visually impaired. I had to create my own instruments and conduct a field test. It was not a requirement. I had to be certain that my instruments were credible and valid.

I agree with Laverne A. Davis that triangulation is not likely to be appropriate with phenomenological research. In particular, any quantitative project is going to involve variables that you operationalize, which is not something that you do in phenomenology. Beyond that it is hard to so see what the point would be of generating quantitative data on such a small N.

Please refer to the following publication/author’s comments in response to “what is lived experience?”, particularly: “lived experience is the starting point and end point of phenomenological research…..” (van Manen, 1990, p. 36).

• van Manen, M. (1990) Researching Lived Experience: Human Science For An Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London: State University of New York Press.

actually i am conducting phenomenological study.total population is 38 in a setting. I am planning to do face to face in-depth interview and 2 sessions of fgd with the same population for the purpose of data triangulation and gaining different concept of same phenomena.Is it appropriate?

A lot depends on the purpose for your focus groups. In particular, if you are doing triangulation to increase the credibility of your study, then you could first derive one set of results from your interviews, and then ask the participants in the focus for guidance with regard to those results -- that would be a form of member checking.

But if you simply ask the same people the same questions, that is a very weak form of triangulation.

In my opinion, having more than one data source in a phenomenological study like the interview transcripts, field notes and reflective diary will help achieve data source triangulation.