A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of Humanitarian Service Providers in the Ukraine-Russia Crisis
Type:
Demo Session
Category:
Online
Place:
Online 3
Date and time:
10:30 to 12:00 on 02/12/2025
The ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine has become a serious humanitarian crisis. The call for help to meet the basic needs of people affected by the crisis has been disseminated worldwide. Aside from the relief agencies there are private individuals who have been involved in the ground of Ukraine in providing humanitarian services in the area of medical care, hunger relief, transportation, and home shelter. It is thus considered imperative to explore the firsthand experiences of Adventist humanitarian service providers who continue to help displaced Ukrainians.
This demonstration presentation is focused on how to conduct a hermeneutic phenomenological study, specifically on how to formulate research questions and the phenomenological interview guide, what data collection methods to use, and how to organize the themes according to the existential lifeworld elements such as materiality, temporality, relationality, spatiality, and corporeality. Further, we will demonstrate how we conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study on humanitarian service providers during the first few months of the Ukraine-Russia war.This hermeneutic phenomenological study is anchored on humanitarian ethics and care theory (Robinson, 2011; Toronto, 1993). It aimed to describe the lived experiences of humanitarian service providers who served during the Ukraine-Russia crisis and interpret the meanings that the participants ascribed to their experiences.
Seven humanitarian service providers in the media, medical, food, transportation, and home shelter services were chosen through purposive and snowball sampling. Data was collected virtually through the phenomenological interviews and aesthetic portrayal and analyzed using the data analysis framework of van Manen (1990, 2016). The themes were presented following the essential lifeworld elements (van Manen, 1990, 2016). Our team will also share lessons we gleaned through a series of debriefing which we did after each interview and after we analyzed our data.