In this work, scattering of a collimated light source incident on a single/multiple scattering axisymmetric medium is studied and the extent to which analysis can be used to recover the effective radiative properties of the medium is determined. For this purpose, a He-Ne laser nephelometer is designed and the angular scattered intensity distributions measured in the single and multiple scattering regimes for mono- and polydispersed suspensions of particles. Analytical expressions are derived for the angular intensity distribution, accounting for up to two successive scatters. The experiments show very good agreement with the theoretical calculations. Also, an inverse analysis is presented to determine the phase function coefficients of particles in situ using the experimental results. The first two coefficients of the Legendre expansion of the phase function are recovered for both ymono- and polydispersions within 10% of the actual value for experiments conducted at low optical thicknesses (τ < 0.5).