In this chapter, the authors discuss the challenges of using phenomenology as a research design, where the researcher is also a participant or has similar characteristics as the subjects of the research. This calls for the researcher to become a researcher-participant, which comes with its own challenges, including maintaining unbiased interconnection between the authors as researchers and as the object of research (researcher-participants), and still being able to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States. Research data is great, but stories from and by engaged respondents living the phenomena being investigated are more inspiring and actionable. Involved knowing and lived experiences, combined with rigorous research methodology, is in itself a researcher's challenge.

The authors were in every step of the research cognizant of the fact that personal knowing rather than objective, methodological knowledge was crucial to the authenticity of the results because of being directly and personally involved in what we know by lived experiences about the phenomenon. This personal dimension of knowing through experience is an advantage in that it opens up and expands the phenomena that is being studied and also in the course of interpreting it.

We chose to use qualitative inquiry as our guiding methodological approach because it involves “the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials […] that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in people's lives” (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 2) as well as “the nature and meaning of things, a phenomenon's essence and essentials that determine what it is” (Saldana 2011, 7). Qualitative inquiry allowed us to examine the meaning-making process and the resulting meaning made by sub-Saharan African immigrants about their lived experiences as they made decisions to emigrate. Further, it allowed us to explore their experiences as they navigated their new environment in the places they choose to settle once in the United States and the impact it had on their lives (Van Manen 1990; Moustakas 1994; Hein and Austin 2001; Giorgio 2009). The phenomenon that our research explores is the stories of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States.