Why include phenomenological analysis in a Research Methods course?

BACKGROUND Guidelines for Spanish university curricula include the descriptor Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, but the latter are still poorly represented. METHOD To inform the argument for phenomenological methods, the last 20-year interval of ISI databases has been content-analyzed with the following codes: discourse analysis, grounded theory, narrative analysis, phenomenological analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, that is, four qualitative methods and a prototypical quantitative one. RESULTS In absolute terms, the most frequent qualitative method is grounded theory, followed by discourse analysis, phenomenological analysis and narrative analysis. However, taking into account content categories, only phenomenological analysis shows a clear psychological profile, similar to confirmatory factor analysis. CONCLUSIONS We recommend starting qualitative training with a method that does not require either big groups, or big funding, and that has a procedural core that is simple, relatively well-delimited and "secularizable," a variety of thematic analysis. Historical reasons and the clear psychological profile evidenced by our results enhance our argument to foster the inclusion of phenomenological analysis in research method courses in psychology.