Expanding Microphenomenology: The Researcher-as-Obstacle Approach to Continuous Phenomena

Investigating phenomena that practitioners experience as continuous, without clear beginning or end, poses a challenge for standard micro-phenomenology, which reconstructs short, bounded episodes retrospectively. This article introduces the Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) framework and protocol as a structural adaptation for such cases. RAO organizes a pretext experience that genuinely mobilizes the continuous process of interest, and the researcher introduces precisely timed interruptions eliciting immediate micro-phenomenological evocations. Each interruption is retrospective with respect to the micro-event yet functions as real-time sampling within the unfolding pretext experience.A case study with a professional artist who completed both a standard retrospective interview and an RAO session illustrates the contrast. Standard micro-phenomenology reveals fine-grained experiential content but struggles to temporally anchor the regulative dynamic of the “creative engine.” RAO, by contrast, sacrifices exhaustive diachrony to obtain multiple anchored samples of recurrent patterns, such as the search for a “feeling of life.”RAO thereby extends micro-phenomenology to practitioner-defined continuous phenomena while preserving evocation, pre-reflective access, and experiential validity.