I’ve been having a wonderful time having conversations with writers about their writing and the uses and effects of the ‘Happily Ever After’ convention.  However, in some cases, it has been difficult to persuade people to speak to me via voice with Skype, or explain why a text chat or an email exchange won’t work.

When most people think of research, they think of labs and testing or going to the library and culling information from books. More recently, people have grown to understand questionnaire based research because of its use in the field of marketing.  There are broadly speaking two types of research: quantitative (which ask questions of how much, how many, frequency, etc. and results in numerical answers) and qualitative (which asks questions of how, why and what is it like?).

Quantitative research would lead me to, perhaps, ask ‘How many of my readers are erotic romance writers?’ or ‘what percentage of my readers prefer a happily ever after ending?’ and what I’d get would give me a count. But it wouldn’t tell me what was so important to those readers about having a story end happily. It would not give me any insight into how the given of an HEA might affect a writer’s approach to constructing a novel. These are the sorts of answers one can only get through conducting qualitative research.

Qualitative research is often called ‘interpretive research’ and because it doesn’t render indisputable numerical data, it is often disrespected. There are many types of qualitative research – many different approaches to getting data, but the one I have chosen to use to conduct my research is called hermeneutic phenomenology. Here’s a link to a very brief explanation of it, but it still assumes you know a lot about philosophy).

Phenomenology is an attempt to understand the ‘truth’ of things through the investigation of human experience. Husserl, who is considered the father of this type of investigative inquiry, felt that attempting to address all questions as if they could be quantified in a Cartesian way was not useful when it came to perceptions of reality arising in the human mind. We didn’t just think things in our brain, or feel them in our body, but very often our experience of reality was a combination of both. This is a very poor summary of Husserl, but hopefully it will pique your interest and make reading the above link an little more compelling.

It was the philosopher Martin Heidegger who took Husserl’s ideas and ran with them. They parted ways, philosophically, in that Husserl was interested in describing and understanding, where Heidegger felt that description wasn’t enough. It was important to glean meaning. We live through things, we identify them and understand them, but they also come to have meaning for us. Heidegger believed that “meaning is found as we are constructed by the world while at the same time we are constructing this world from our own background and experiences.”[1. Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Phenomenology: A Comparison of Historical and Methodological Considerations, S. Laverty, http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/2_3final/html/laverty.html ]

Hermeneutic phenomenology was really firmed up as a way of exploring the world by Hans-Georg Gadamer. I’m going to be a bit quick and brutal in my explanation of how be did this. Basically, Gadamer felt that language was the best way by which we could explore our understanding and meaning making in the world.  And he felt that conversation had a very special place in the way people formed their understanding.

“Understanding is always more than merely re-creating someone else’s meaning. Questioning opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the subject…To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”[2. Truth and Method, H.G. Gadamer, http://books.google.com.vn/books?id=ScG5YqYcsEcC&lpg=PA390&ots=QxZhrO6FAK&dq=%22Language%20is%20the%20universal%20medium%20in%20which%20understanding%20occurs%22&pg=PA390#v=onepage&q&f=false ]

If you didn’t read that last quotation of Gadamer’s carefully, please do it again. Because this is the essence of why I felt that hermeneutic phenomenology was the best way to investigate this question of what the ‘happily ever after’ convention REALLY is – how it’s affecting the way a writer decides to write and how it’s affecting the way a reader reads. It was an especially important choice for me, because I have come to this investigation with certain prejudices about HEA. I needed to find a methodology and a method that was most likely to allow me to really share someone else’s experience. To put aside sophistry and disputation, and just accept and take on board the experiences of readers and writers for whom a ‘happily ever after’ ending held importance and significance and emotional wealth.

Conversation is different from us throwing our opinions at each other. In written text, it’s easy for us to ‘state our position’. But conversation allows for us to share a space where commonalities of understanding and meaning can be found. When I embarked on writing this post, I looked up the OED definition of conversation and it was truly enlightening. There are a number of definitions, but they are all MORE than simple the act of two people talking AT each other:

conversation, n.

Pronunciation:  /kɒnvəˈseɪʃən/

Forms:  In ME–15 -acion, -acioun, etc., (ME -varsasyon).

Etymology:  Middle English, < Old French conversation , -acion (12th cent. in Littré), < Latin conversātiōn-em frequent abode, intercourse, n. of action < conversārī to converse v.