It is Phenomenological, attempting to understand how participants make sense of their experience.
(It does not assume that participants' accounts refer to some verifiable reality) but it recognizes that this involves a process of interpretation by the researcher. It is an approach popular in psychology and in some areas of nursing. It looks at subjective states so takes an insider perspective. It is interpretative. It recognizes negotiation between researcher and researched to produce the account of the insider’s perspective, so both researcher and researched are present. The data are accounts, which researchers then code for emergent themes, look for connections, and construct higher order themes e.g. depersonalization arises as a consequence of illness. IPA is often combined with the constant comparison method and elements of content analysis.