Nursing Research and Practice their preceptorship experiences in both the third and fourth years of the program. It was our goal to recruit participants from both generations of preceptors; however none of the Baby Boomers responded to the invitation. It is important to acknowledge as well that at the time of data collection, the third year preceptorship course had been completed and the principal investigator was no longer working directly with any of the participants and was not responsible for the student evaluations. None of the preceptors who participated in this study had worked directly with any of the student participants. Both groups were informed at the outset that we would not be interviewing any participant that they had been paired with previously. To further maintain conﬁdentiality and to ensure anonymity, pseudonyms were assigned to each participant. 4.2. Data Collection. Data were collected during two unstructured interviews with each of the participants. The interviews served the dual purpose of collecting data to discover a rich, deep understanding of the preceptorship experience in the intergenerational context, as well as creat- ing a dialogue between the researcher and the participants about the meaning of their experience. Following the ﬁrst round of interviews, a number of preliminary themes became apparent and, during the second interviews, these themes were further explored in order to conﬁrm and extend the analysis. Participants were also guided to reﬂect upon the meaning of their experience. Ethical permission to conduct the study was granted by the university research ethics board. 4.3. Data Analysis. van Manen [19] describes his approach to human science research as being derived from both the German tradition of human science pedagogy (the Dilthey- Nohl School), which employed an interpretive methodology, as well as the Dutch movement of phenomenological pedagogy (the Utrecht School), which was noted to be more of a descriptive methodology. In order to distinguish his particular approach to human science research, van Manen identiﬁes an active and ongoing interplay of six distinct research activities: (1) turning to the nature of the phe- nomenon, (2) investigating the experience as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it, (3) reﬂecting on the essential themes which characterize the phenomenon, (4) describing the phenomenon through the art of writing and rewriting, (5) maintaining a strong and oriented relation to the phenomenon, and (6) balancing the research context by considering parts and whole. As researchers, we engaged in each of these six activities and moved back and forth between them as the project unfolded. Data collection and analysis occurred simulta- neously. We became immersed in the data by listening to tapes and reading/rereading the transcripts. Following the ﬁrst round of interviews the research team met to discuss the emerging themes and to ﬂesh out what gaps existed that might need to be explored during the second interviews. We prepared a summary of the emerging themes and included some direct quotations from participants that were found to be particularly revealing. This summary was sent to all 3 participants and we then requested a second interview to explore these further. Following the second interviews, we revised the thematic analysis and began to structure the phenomenological text. We drew from van Manen’s [19] suggestions when deciding how to structure our research text. He identiﬁes ﬁve possible approaches: (1) thematically, (2) analytically, (3) exempliﬁcatively, (4) exegetically, and (5) existentially. He adds that these are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive and that researchers may choose a combination of approaches or may invent an alternative organization. We chose to structure our phenomenological text using a combination of the thematic and analytical approaches as outlined by van Manen [19]. In the thematic approach, the emerging themes serve as generative guides for writing the research report and the totality of the research ﬁndings are explicated under each thematic heading with the recognition that there is inherent overlap among the themes. Complex phenomena are further explored using subsuming themes as was the case in our study. The analytical approach may take several forms; however for our purposes we considered etymological sources of the key words in each of the three main themes to further explicate the meaning of the theme. We acknowledge that juxtaposing human experience with categories or themes can be challenging in that one must be careful not to attempt to “ﬁt” all experiences into the identiﬁed categories. Throughout the study we were mindful of the need to keep a fresh perspective on the experiences of preceptors and students through a process of constantly revisiting the tenets of phenomenology within the context of the preceptorship experience that was occurring. It was important for us to acknowledge that choosing an epistemological lens by the way of themes or categories was merely a means to organize the text and we recognize that not all experiences would necessarily ﬁt neatly under each of the categories. The challenge for us was to treat each theme systematically while keeping in mind that one theme always has meaning dimensions in other themes. van Manen also cautions that deciding which themes are essential versus incidental is one of the greatest challenges in structuring the text. In so doing, we were ever mindful of the need to ensure that the main themes ﬁt with each person’s experience. 4.4. Rigor and Phenomenological Research. Methodological rigor is an ongoing issue in qualitative research and many authors suggest that it is inadequate to apply a quantitative concept of rigor to that of qualitative research [19, 23– 28]. van Manen [19] posits that the criteria for rigor and rationality in human science research cannot be the same as that of natural science research because a much broader view of rationality is essential. Subsequently, he proposes four evaluative criteria which seem most appropriate for judging the power and convincing validity of any phenomenological human science texts. He states, “Our texts need to be oriented, strong, rich, and deep” ([19, page 151]). In this study, we aimed for the strongest possible inter- pretation of the phenomenon through our awareness of the human lived experience and through the writing of a text deep in meaning. We believe that the data analysis