What is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)?
Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative research methodology for studying how people make sense of significant experiences in their life. You start with individual participants, build each person's account, then look across a small group for where accounts converge and where they differ.
Getting there takes close, iterative readings of your transcripts. You pay attention to the words people use, what they come back to, and what's hidden just below the surface. This article covers IPA, when to use it, and tips on how to do it. We'll also show how to organize your work with Delve qualitative software.
What is interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)?
Phenomenology is the study of how people directly experience their world. Most phenomenological methods look at what people have in common when they go through a specific event. IPA does something different. Each person's analysis is completed on its own terms before moving on to the next transcript. Themes form first at the individual level first, then you look for where responses converge and diverge.
[Related reading: Phenomenological Research Design]
Smith calls this the double hermeneutic where you’re making sense of a person who is already making sense of an event. Rather than trying to block that out, you use it and show your reasoning. You look for the words someone reaches for, the metaphors they use, what repeats, and what they avoid. The findings are deeply narrative. Themes are built from quotes and your interpretation layered tightly together.
IPA studies long-lasting experiences like a diagnosis, loss, or major transition. Say you drive the same route home every day. One day you watch a cyclist get struck by a car. Afterward you avoid that street. IPA wants to study the reaction: how you processed it, and how it changed your sense of the world.
The main challenge of IPA research
IPA deals with personal experiences where maintaining objectivity is genuinely difficult. You are trying to describe someone else's innermost experience while acknowledging that your own perspective shapes that reading. And because IPA is idiographic, you are accountable to each individual account, one at a time.
The main challenges include:
Building rapport takes time, especially when asking participants to open up about emotionally charged experiences.
You are describing someone's experience of an experience, often using abstract concepts like emotions and feelings to do it.
You need to acknowledge and account for your own feelings, opinions, and biases, which are likely present when dealing with sensitive issues.
The analysis process is an iterative process of reading and re-reading data. It takes time.
It can be difficult to find enough participants to meet the goals of your study.
Remember IPA doesn't ask you to remove yourself from the work. It asks that you practice bracketing and reflexivity to acknowledge where your assumptions may be overpowering the data itself. In Delve, you can attach memos directly to snippets and codes so your reasoning stays tied to the data that supports it.
When (and how) to use IPA analysis
IPA is often used in psychology, sociology, and healthcare. Any place where understanding someone's inner experience of an event matters as much as what objectively happened.
IPA researchers tend to examine:
Major life changes, such as becoming a parent or moving to a new country.
Health-related experiences, like receiving a medical diagnosis or living with a chronic illness.
Mental health experiences, such as living with depression or recovering from psychosis.
Professional experiences, such as being a therapist or frontline healthcare worker.
Questions of identity, such as what it means to be a caregiver, or to navigate homelessness.
Because IPA works participant by participant with a small sample size, your data collection method needs to generate rich, detailed accounts. The most common approaches are in-depth interviews, participant diaries, and focus groups. Participant observation and action research are also used in some contexts.
Whichever method you choose, give participants enough space to describe their experience in their own words. Try not to steer or lead them toward particular answers. Building rapport before and during data collection makes a real difference, particularly when you’re rehashing sensitive topics and life events.
The objective of IPA is to get as close as possible to the lived experience of participants in similar situations. From there, researchers try to describe these experiences in rich detail to identify common themes that link one individual's reaction to another.
An introductory guide to IPA research
IPA analysis works from the individual outward. You complete each participant's transcript in full before looking across others for patterns. That order is what keeps the themes grounded in specific accounts rather than abstracted across a group. Themes stay connected to specific people and their direct words.
There is no concrete process, but this guide follows Smith's outline. Notice the first half of the process repeats for each participant before any cross-transcript work begins. Repetition is all part of the work.
1. Interviewing and transcription
Most IPA studies use in-depth semi-structured interviews as their primary data. Open-ended questions give participants space to describe their experience in their own words. When those are finished, transcribe them in full. The specific language people use is what the analysis works with, so be as exact as you can with transcriptions.
2. Read and re-read one transcript at a time
Start with a single transcript. Read it through once without taking notes just to absorb it, then read again. This is where bracketing begins. Think about how your own reactions and assumptions arise so they don't quietly shape what you notice in the data. You don’t need to write anything down or memo yet, but you can jot things down if you want. If you use Delve, you can batch upload, read, and then code your transcripts in one place.
3. Write analytic notes
Before applying any codes, record your initial, exploratory observations directly on the transcript. These are informal, but you want to use detailed line by line style “coding” as you go. You might note:
The language a participant reaches for
An emotion that sits just below what they are saying
A contradiction in how they describe something
A moment that feels significant without yet being categorizable
You are not just recording what someone said but how they said it and what that might mean. In Delve, you can attach these insights as memos directly to snippets. To keep track of which snippets you have noted without categorizing them too early, add a simple placeholder code like "to sort" alongside the memo. You can come back to it later without forcing a premature interpretation.
You can also filter your data by transcript so you're only seeing one person's work at a time. You can remove the filters later when you're done with the idiographic work and start working across participants.
4. Develop experiential statements
Go back through your analytic notes and begin turning them into experiential statements. These are short, interpretive claims about what the experience appears to mean for this participant. A good experiential statement holds two things at once: enough grounding to stay connected to what the participant actually said, and enough abstraction to say something meaningful about it.
The specific words someone reaches for are your starting point. "It just happened to me" and "I had no voice in any of it" both point toward something about agency. An experiential statement like Sense of agency removed by the medical system could follow from either. But the path there should come from reading that person's language, not from a category you already had in mind.
Two people can arrive at a similar experiential statement through completely different language, and those differences matter. You are not looking for patterns across participants yet. You are focused on what this one person's words reveal about how they experienced something.
In Delve, create a code for each experiential statement and apply it to the relevant snippets as you identify them, replacing your "to sort" placeholders as you go. The code page collects everything you have coded under a particular statement in one place, so you can read through the snippets and check whether they actually support the claim you have made.
5. Cluster into personal experiential themes (PETs)
Now you look across all experiential statements for this one participant. Some will cluster naturally around shared concerns or meanings. Those clusters become the participant's Personal Experiential Themes, or PETs. Smith describes the goal here as finding the best way to tell the clearest story about this individual's experience. A small set of PETs should capture the overall trajectory of it.
Each PET should trace back to specific experiential statements, and through those, back to the specific snippets that generated them. If a bunch of experiential statements cluster around feeling excluded from decisions, losing trust in the process, and having no say, a PET might be something like Agency surrendered to the medical process. That theme belongs to this person before anyone else factors in.
In Delve, you can nest your experiential statements under a top-level code for each PET. You get PET → Experiential Statement → Snippets with memos. Assigning a color to each PET code means the nested codes beneath it inherit that color by default. When you look at the transcript, the colored underlines show you which themes are forming and where the data is thin, without having to click into each code.
You can use the Code Page feature again here to pull all the snippets under a PET together and keep an eye on whether the theme is holding together as you add more data.
6. Repeat the cycle for each transcript
Complete steps 2 through 5 in full for each participant before moving on to the next. Each person gets their own analytic notes, experiential statements, and PETs before any comparison begins. By the end of this step you will have a complete individual analysis for every participant in your study.
After you get through each transcript, you can start connecting ideas between your participants.
7. Convergences, divergences form group experiential themes
Now look across your participants' PETs for where experiences connect and where they diverge. You want to balance commonality and individuality: showing what participants share without losing sight of what makes each person's account specific. A participant whose experience stands apart from the others isn't an outlier to manage. It adds depth to what the theme means.
As you build Group Experiential Themes, or GETs, pay attention to how different participants described similar things. If several developed PETs around agency and control, but one described it through bureaucratic frustration while another through physical helplessness, the GET might be Navigating powerlessness within the system. That GET holds both accounts without flattening either one.
In Delve, go to the Snippets page and look across all participants at once. Filtering by a PET code pulls together every snippet coded under that theme across participants, so you can see how different people talked about the same thing. You can also filter by two codes to find where themes might intersect.
8. Interpret and write up
IPA write-ups move between participant quotes and your interpretation of them. Quotes do not speak for themselves. Nizza, Farr and Smith describe close analytic reading of participants' words as what draws out the fuller meaning of the data and makes interpretive claims transparent to the reader.
When you quote someone, ask what their specific language is doing. What metaphors are they reaching for? What do they repeat? What sits just beneath the surface? The interpretation should come from that close reading, carried through from the analytic notes you wrote at the start.
Structure your findings around your GETs, with experiential statements and individual quotes woven underneath. Show how you moved from analytic notes to experiential statements to PETs to GETs. Note where accounts converged and where they diverged, and say what that divergence reveals. Describe and refer to your bracketing throughout the process.
Your memos, reflexive notes, and the chain from analytic notes to GETs keep your interpretive claims traceable. That traceability is what a reader needs to evaluate and trust your findings.
Delve is built for the IPA workflow
IPA asks you to work through a lot of moving parts in a deliberate order. Analytic notes lead to experiential statements, into PETs, and then GETs. Keeping each participant's analysis separate until the right moment is the whole point, and Delve is built around that kind of structured, iterative work.
With Delve’s web-based platform, all of your analysis can happen in one place. Your memos, codes, and snippets stay connected throughout the research process, and you can move between working on one participant and looking across all of them without losing the thread.
Delve is also one of the easiest qualitative coding tools to learn, which can save days or weeks of training. Start a free trial and see how the workflow fits your IPA research.
References
Nigbur, D., & Chatfield, S. L. (2025). Naming themes in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA): Recommendations and examples. Quality & Quantity. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-024-01992-y
Nizza, I. E., Farr, J., & Smith, J. A. (2021). Achieving excellence in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA): Four markers of high quality. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(3), 369-386. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1854404
Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
Answers to frequently asked questions about thematic analysis. University of Auckland, 2019. University of Auckland. https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/psych/about/our-research/documents/Answers to frequently asked questions about thematic analysis April 2019.pdf
Larkin, M., Watts, S., & Clifton, E. (2006). Giving voice and making sense in interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp062oa
Cite This Article
Delve, Ho, L., & Limpaecher, A. (2023c, June 08). What is Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)? https://delvetool.com/blog/interpretive-phenomenological-analysis