Extending Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA): Bringing culture into lived experience research

Rooted in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and hermeneutics, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) emphasizes how individuals make sense of critical events in their lives. However, much of the scholarship applying IPA has been conducted in Western contexts, where the focus often rests on an egocentric view of lived reality. While its idiographic focus allows for an immersive, in-depth understanding of each participant’s experience, as researchers from the Global South, we felt that it often underemphasizes the wider social habitus that human subjects are embedded in.

Our work as qualitative researchers and instructors in India has prompted us to ask: how might IPA, as formulated by Smith, Flowers and Laerkin (2009), be adapted to elucidate and interpret lived experience as deeply entwined with cultural scripts, social norms, and moral discourses? Through our study on women cosmetic surgery users in urban India, in the article, we will highlight how tenets and steps of IPA can be expanded to incorporate a cultural lens to understand their lived and affective experience of body alteration in the quest for beauty. This article is a summary of a working manuscript that details the discursive lens to the different stages of IPA research.

The study context

Cosmetic surgery is often framed as a matter of personal empowerment and autonomy, constructed as a neoliberal project of bodily self-care (Leve et al., 2012). For many women in India, beauty is not only an aesthetic pursuit but also tied to family honor, marriage prospects, and class mobility (Patil et al., 2011). What was once a medical intervention for injury and repair now functions as a cultural tool for reshaping identity, desirability, and social belonging.

Fieldwork was conducted at a cosmetic surgery clinic in South Delhi, India. Over six months, we observed the clinic environment and carried out three rounds of semi-structured interviews with ten women undergoing procedures such as skin lightening, Botox, liposuction, and rhinoplasty. Aligning with the spirit of double hermeneutics, beauty as a personal construct for each participant was explored. Questions like “What does fairness mean to you?” “When you say you feel confident now, what does that feel like in your body?” was explored. Unsurprisingly, these words were used in varied and context-specific ways, shaped by participants’ age, life stage, relationships, aspirations, and socio-economic realities.

Extending IPA through culture

Drawing from our field notes, transcripts, and reflexive journals, we traced how participants invoked cultural scripts of family roles, marital norms, desire, beauty, etc. when speaking about their bodies and cosmetic choices. For example, participants frequently used terms like “saawli si ladki” (dusky girl), “bold woman”, “graceful ageing” and “being presentable”, expressions laden with cultural codes around desirability, deviance, and virtue. The cultural aspect was most evident at the linguistic level: idioms like saawli (dusky complexion), metaphors of “flawlessness,” or even the use of abusive words to express frustration revealed how cultural scripts shaped the emotional and moral stakes of beauty.

For example, one participant described being rejected in marriage proposals because of her skin tone, despite her education and career success. Her words linked complexion not only to attractiveness but also to perceptions of sexual morality (“bold”). Here, IPA’s layered commentary—descriptive, linguistic, conceptual—allowed us to show how personal distress was intertwined with India’s long-standing cultural preference for fairness, a discourse reinforced by media, kinship systems and global beauty economies.

Table 1

Descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual comments 

IPA allowed us to explore how women navigated the felt dimensions of beauty, its pleasures, and pressures, while simultaneously appropriating, resisting, or complying with dominant ideals. This approach aligns with hermeneutic phenomenology as well as discursive traditions that foreground the role of language and culture in shaping subjectivity (Motta & Larkin, 2023).

Methodological tensions in IPA

Conducting IPA in this context also meant grappling with several methodological dilemmas:

• Reflexivity vs. bracketing – As women researchers, our own practices of beauty colored how we related to participants. Rather than attempting to bracket these away entirely, we treated them as “reflexive echoes” that shaped interpretation (Goldspink & Engward, 2018). It helped us expand and critically examine our shared language of beauty and individual improvisations of the same.
• Idiography vs. commonality – The idiographic focus of IPA sometimes clashed with participants’ shared cultural experiences. By intentionally foregrounding culture at every step of the research, the study’s focus facilitated analysis of macro ideals and practices of beauty and desire for women, along with individual embodied experience.
• Description vs. interpretation – IPA is often criticized for straying too far from participants’ words. Our strategy was to anchor each interpretive claim in textual detail while situating them in cultural frameworks (Tuffour, 2017), thereby keeping them closer to the spoken realities of the individual. 

Over time, we came to see these tensions not as obstacles but as part of the labor of doing IPA. For us, IPA as a research process is less about resolving contradictions and more about dwelling in them.

Key takeaways for researchers

From this study, the following lessons emerged for using IPA, especially in non-Western or cross-cultural contexts:

1. Culture is not background – Lived experience is always culturally embedded and to overlook this is to miss how meaning is socially produced.
2. Language is a cultural resource – Paying attention to idioms, metaphors and symbols provides deep insight into participants’ lifeworlds.
3. Reflexivity is ongoing – Researchers’ own embodied positions inevitably shape analysis. Acknowledging and expanding researchers’ reflexive insights can enrich rather than dilute interpretation.
4. IPA is adaptable – While rooted in psychology, IPA can engage with sociological and cultural frames, making it a versatile method for global qualitative research.

Conclusion

By extending IPA to incorporate cultural analysis, our study demonstrates how qualitative methods can illuminate the entanglement of self, society, and embodiment. In adapting IPA to non-Western settings, we not only expand its methodological toolkit but also open new ways of understanding how people live, narrate, and transform their lives.

Contact

Annie Baxi, PhD
Faculty, Ashoka University, India

Ishita Bharadwaj, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Delhi

Related Resources

Leve, M., Rubin, L., & Pusic, A. (2012). Cosmetic surgery and neoliberalisms: Managing risk and responsibility. Feminism & Psychology, 22(1), 122–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353511424361opens in new window

Motta, V., & Larkin, M. (2023). Absence of other and disruption of self: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the meaning of loneliness in the context of life in a religious community. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 22(1), 55–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09832-8opens in new window

Patil, S. B., Kale, S. M., Khare, N., Jaiswal, S., & Ingole, S. (2011). Aesthetic surgery: Expanding horizons: Concepts, desires, and fears of rural women in Central India. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 35(5), 717–723. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00266-011-9675-2opens in new window

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretive phenomenological analysis: Theory, method, and research. London: Sage.