The
descriptive phenomenological method in psychology was developed by the American psychologist
Amedeo Giorgi in the early 1970s. Giorgi based his method on principals 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. Giorgi was an early pioneer of the
humanistic psychology movement, the use of
phenomenology in psychology, and qualitative research in psychology, and to this day continues to advocate for the importance of a
human science approach to psychological subject matter. Giorgi has directed over 100 dissertations that have used the Descriptive Phenomenological Method on a wide variety of psychological problems, and he has published over 100 articles on the phenomenological approach to psychology.