Longitudinal Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (LIPA): A review of studies and methodological considerations

This paper presents a review of studies that have employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) longitudinally to capture temporal aspects of phenomena by analysing data gathered over multiple time points. Sixty-six eligible articles from peer-reviewed journals were obtained by searching the Web of science, Medline and Psychinfo databases up to March 2018. A description of the corpus is provided, followed by an in-depth review of the methodological choices made by authors. The paper describes the range of approaches used to capture and convey experience over time, including data gathering decisions and types of thematic structure used to present findings. Finally, a selection of common features of good quality studies is illustrated using examples taken from articles in the corpus and their potential merits are highlighted.