Giorgi based his method on principles laid out by philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as what he had learned from his prior professional experience in psychophysics.
[7] Giorgi promotes phenomenology as a theoretical movement that avoids certain simplified tendencies sustained by many modern approaches to psychological research.
[8] According to the phenomenological psychological perspective embraced by Giorgi, researchers are encouraged to "bracket" their own assumptions pertaining to the phenomenon in question by refraining from positing a static sense of objective reality for oneself and the participants whose experiences are being studied.
[11] The Descriptive Phenomenological Method involves neither deduction nor induction in order to find meaning, but instead asks the researcher to intuit what is essential to the phenomenon being studied.
The phenomenological psychological attitude is to be assumed while analyzing the data in order to ensure that "the results reflect a careful description of precisely the features of the experienced phenomenon as they present themselves to the consciousness of the researcher" (Giorgi, 2009, pp. 130–131).
For Giorgi (2009), "essential psychological structure" refers to: "[A depiction] of the lived experience of a phenomenon, which may include aspects of the description of which the experiencer was unaware.
The final structure is meant to serve as an ideal representation of the phenomenon being studied, based upon actual instantiations of it within concrete lived experiences.