Grounded Theory in Applied Linguistics Research

A practical guide

Gregory Hadley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317636878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume demystifies the procedures and practical uses of Grounded Theory, a well-established research methodology used around the world today by social scientists, teachers, and qualitative researchers. Intended for graduate students, supervisors, and researchers, it provides readers with the tools for understanding, justifying, and disseminating new theoretical insights for the Applied Linguistics community and beyond.

Part I

Understanding grounded theory

Introduction

The emergence of grounded theory

In the world of the social sciences, there was once a time when ‘research’ was seen primarily in terms of following methodological practices heavily associated with the ‘harder’ sciences. Researchers devised studies that could be confirmed either by statistical analysis or by quasi-experimental designs (Grotjahn 1987) and often sought to validate the ‘grand theories’ of revered intellectuals in their discipline or academic community (Mills 1959/2000, pp. 48–49, Turner 1988, p. 111). With the exception of the nonconformist ‘Chicago School’ of ethnography (Charmaz 2006, pp. 4–5), where researchers constructed their contributions from field observations, interviews, and other ‘soft’ linguistic data, most at this time sought to investigate the human condition through quantitative forms of research (Wartofsky 1968, p. 390, Hunt 1991, p. 41, White 2005, pp. 56–57). The prevailing attitude towards qualitative, theory-generating research was that it was unscientific, subjective, and biased (Denzin and Lincoln 1998b, p. 7). Such views were still dominant during the early 1960s, when applied linguistics (AL) entered the world as a fledgling discipline.

However, by the late 1960s, academic voices of dissent began to swell against the established orthodoxy. Eschewing simple number-crunching, scholars from various fields began devising more flexible ways of studying what was happening with people in social groups (Mills 1959/2000, Kuhn 1962/1996, Kelly 1963). Among these, sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss wrote their landmark book, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Glaser and Strauss 1967/1999). In it, they urged researchers to break their overdependence on the ‘great man’ theories of sociologists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and to create fresh theories and new perspectives generated bottom up from empirical field data (Glaser and Strauss 1967/1999, pp. 1, 2 & 7).

At the time of its publication, Glaser and Strauss’s polemic was revolutionary. Discovery had an immediate appeal among a generation of young researchers who, as Eisner (2001, p. 137) explains, became ‘attracted to the idea of getting close to practice, [and] to getting a first-hand sense of what actually goes on in classrooms, schools, hospitals and communities’. For Glaser and Strauss, ‘grounded’ meant that findings were rooted in first-hand evidence – the problems, actions, symbols, and aspirations of the people being studied, and ‘theory’ referred to an explanatory model that ‘fits empirical situations … [one that] should be understandable to sociologists and laymen alike. Most important it works – provides us with relevant predictions, explanations, interpretations and applications’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967/1999, p. 1).

Glaser and Strauss provided a set of recursive practices that could be adopted by large numbers of researchers, and which could be externally evaluated by the academy for its potential value (Denzin and Lincoln 2000, p. 14). As a method of inquiry, the goal of grounded theory (GT) was to

encourage researchers to use their intellectual imagination and creativity to develop theories relating to their areas of inquiry; to suggest methods for doing so; to offer criteria to evaluate the worth of discovered theory; and to propose an alternative rhetoric, that of generation, to balance out the rhetoric of justification featured in journal articles and monographs.

(Locke 2005, p. 33)

Even by the turn of the century, Denzin and Lincoln (1998a, p. xviii) observed that, since its inception, GT had become ‘the most widely employed interpretive strategy in the social sciences today’. That growth has continued unabated, with the methodology seeing extensive use in fields such as psychology, education, and other ‘helping professions’ (e.g. Conrad 1978, Conrad 1982, Pajak and Blaise 1984). In the field of nursing alone, over 4,000 articles have been published under the GT title (Mills et al. 2006, p. 2). One exhaustive bibliometric survey found that, at the time of its publication, nearly two-thirds of the qualitative research projects in the social sciences had employed either full or partial forms of the grounded theory methodology (Titscher et al. 2000, pp. 74, 218–220).

Unlocking the potential of grounded theory in applied linguistics

In contrast to the spread of grounded theory in other fields of the applied social sciences, within applied linguistics, it has experienced marginalization and mistrust.

In terms of marginalization, while a few papers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) claiming to use a grounded theory methodology (GTM) are scattered throughout the literature (Watt et al. 1996, Orland-Barak 2001, Gan et al. 2004, Kung 2004, Mynard and Almarzouqi 2006), these have typically drawn upon only isolated aspects of the methodology. GTM is underrepresented in the methodological textbooks for graduate students in applied linguistics, where it typically receives only cursory mention (Holliday 2002, Richards 2003, Dornyei 2007). There are books that have utilized grounded theory within the context of applied linguistics, such as Senior (2006), who presents an insightful grounded theory on the behavior and symbolic actions of TESOL teachers in communicative classrooms, and my recent work (Hadley 2015) which highlights social processes taking place within English for Academic Purpose (EAP) units at neoliberal universities. In general, however, the focus of the applied linguistics community has centered on issues such as curriculum design, second language acquisition theories, corpus development, and materials design, but has unwittingly overlooked one of the most widely used research methodologies in today’s world.

The mistrust of some in applied linguistics about the potential of grounded theory stems from two undercurrents, one that is situated within the dominant academic conventions of applied linguistics and the other that comes from new challenges from the recent cohorts of graduate students around the world. Within the upper echelons of the applied linguistics academic community, the tendency is to privilege the philosophical worldviews and methodological practices dominant during the early 1960s. Therefore, to use gendered metaphors, while qualitative data of the type often used in grounded theory is undeniably ‘sexy’ (Miles and Huberman 1994, p. 1), what we find in many prestigious publications, university departments, and funding organizations for applied linguistics is a testosterone-fueled world (Gherardi and Turner 2002) that views ‘hard’ data from controlled quantitative studies as ‘the pinnacle of scientific perfection’ (Walsh-Bowers 2002, p. 166). In such environments, the sex appeal of qualitative research data analysis ends up being treated more as an ‘attractive nuisance’ (Miles 1979) and in extreme cases as a conceptual femme fatale – a methodological siren whose songs of theoretical discovery lead seasoned researchers and graduate students alike to an untimely end on the jagged stones of scholarly rejection.

Evidence for this can be found in the low acceptance rates of qualitative research in high-impact journals. Lazaraton’s (2000) analysis of the top-four journals in applied linguistics found that, in the ten years of journal articles surveyed, only 10 per cent featured some form of qualitative or mixed methods research. Richards’s (2009, pp. 151–152) analysis of 10 years of papers from 15 of the foremost international journals in applied linguistics found nearly identical results, and Hashemi’s (2012) more recent investigation came to similar conclusions. Statistical analysis and hypothesis testing with an empirical focus continue to be the ‘gold standard’ (Pierre and Roulston 2006, p. 674) in the field, and prestigious journals continue to support this focus, which then shapes the way that knowledge is produced. This has led Borg (2004, p. 6) to state,

It seems unhelpful that, within a professional teaching organization such as TESOL, the notion of research which is often asserted (e.g. hypothesis-testing, objective inquiry) is one which excludes the kinds of inquiries which are most relevant, feasible and accessible to a majority of members. An insistence on hypotheses and objectivity becomes even more problematic when the phenomena being researched – language teaching and learning – are dynamic, process-oriented, unpredictable and indelibly shaped by human interactions and values. In such contexts, broader views of what counts as research are required.

There is little question that quantitative research has great worth in areas such as language testing or in the validation of a preexisting theory. However, I would suggest that the neglect of qualitative research in favor of a constant focus on ‘how much’ and ‘how many’, something that is all too common in AL, risks channeling the creative energies of teacher-researchers into supporting ‘the myth that the assiduous application of rigorous method will yield sound fact – as if empirical methodology were some form of meat grinder from which truth could be turned out like so many sausages’ (Gergen 1985, p. 273). While it is certainly true that the semiotics of sausages, especially with relation to research and education, is evocative of social critiques stretching from the writings of Marx to the discourse of modern anti-globalization movements, as linguists and language teachers located in countries around the world, we who encounter humanity in all its diversity on a daily basis, grinding the lives of our students into preset, bite-sized data packages designed for easy consumption by an aging scholarly elite does not strike me as representing our best contribution, either to today’s world or for future practice. Qualitative research of the type that can be found in the methodology of grounded theory, while admittedly more difficult to carry out than the ‘fast-food’ approach taken by some, has the potential to balance the grinding measurements of ‘how many times’ or ‘how much’, with a greater appreciation of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ (Chism and Banta 2007) of human experience.

Attitudes are changing in some quarters with the opening of publishing venues such as the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education or Qualitative Inquiry, but these developments are not taking place quickly enough or in large enough quantities to accommodate the growing number of graduate students currently entering applied linguistics programs who, similar to graduate students in other fields of the social sciences, have shown a considerable amount of interest in qualitative research approaches (Belcher and Hirvela 2005, Tellez and Waxman 2006). And yet the pursuit of a qualitative approach on the graduate level often faces many challenges, and it can be likened to navigating a ship through perilous waters. The concern of some supervisors, many of whom have witnessed the failures of past students, is in seeing yet another student becoming lost on the ambiguous seas of subjectivity – wandering aimlessly towards places on the academic map marked ‘here be dragons’. Graduate students risk being stigmatized as conducting shallow research, and philosophically and/or politically motivated university Institutional Research Boards (IRBs) may exercise their authority either to reject or radically alter the course of their projects (Lincoln and Tierney 2004, Kiley and Mullins 2005, Lee 2008, Silverman 2013, p. 192). Even at the end of their long journey, there is always the probability of finding that they have weighed anchor in an unfriendly harbor, where there awaits a hostile oral defense committee that has very different philosophical views concerning the quality, nature, and potential contribution of research projects not derived from quantitative methods.

Within this situation, many misconceptions exist among students and supervisors about the practices of grounded theory. Some have heard that it does not require any reading of the scholarly literature and that the methodology entails the simple task of going out into the field in order to discover common themes happening among a particular group of people. Others with whom I have spoken at seminars equate any form of qualitative research as grounded theory. Misunderstandings such as these are embodied in the words of one graduate student who, when after learning of the degree to which his research proposal differed from grounded theory methodology, told me, ‘I guess it’s not the same. But, I’m calling it grounded theory’. What then happens later is that students begin collecting mountains of qualitative data only to find that, somehow, either theory creation eludes them, or they end up writing something that sounds suspiciously like what they believed before starting the project.

Naturally, PhD supervisors want their students to complete a solid thesis or dissertation and to move as smoothly as possible through a graduate program. A number that I have met during conferences and workshops have admitted to me that their difficult and disappointing experiences with graduate students claiming to have taken a grounded theory approach have led them to avoid taking on further students interested in grounded theory, or to strongly discourage its use. Their difficulties stemmed partly from not knowing how to advise students on how to carry out GTM, partly because they have never carried out a grounded theory study on their own, and partly because they are unfamiliar with the philosophical assumptions, actual research practices, and practical outcomes of the methodology. With the growing number of graduate students entering universities today, supervisors are even more pressed for time, and it is easier to supervise a project using the tried-and-true quantitative method than to have to learn about a method that might be ‘high maintenance’. Since grounded theory research tends to be open-ended and focused more on exploration, discovery, and insight than on established practices aimed at theory verification, there is the additional worry that the university’s ethics committee may stifle the proposal. In addition, without understanding the procedures of grounded theory, some supervisors might view the manner in which a student has taken large amounts of qualitative data, metaphorically disappeared behind the veil, and with the tinkling of a bell emerge with a theory as a form of methodological transubstantiation. The underlying concern here is that others on the oral defense committee might think the same.

These notions, unfounded as they are, still have just enough truth in them to make them believable. If left unchecked, however, such characterizations will only serve to strengthen the bias already seen in applied linguistics, thus making our field an even more unwelcoming place for qualitative inquiry and theorization. The sad consequence would be the reification of even better forms of sausage making and an overemphasis of privileged forms of research inquiry that would result in the intellectual impoverishment of our discipline (Mende 2005).

None of what I have discussed so far has capped the groundswell of interest among graduate students in applied linguistics for grounded theory. While numbers are hard to come by, over the past few years in workshops and seminars that I have given at universities in Europe, the United States, and Japan, there are increasing numbers of students who are either deeply interested in the potential of grounded theory, or who are actively trying to use the methodology, often with limited supervisory support. Excellent methodological books exist, with new works as well as new editions of older contributions appearing almost every year (Clarke 2005, Goulding 2005, Locke 2005, Charmaz 2006, Bryant and Charmaz 2007b, Stern and Porr 2011, Birks and Mills 2012, Urquhart 2013, Gibson and Hartman 2014, Birks and Mills 2015, Corbin and Strauss 2015). However, these are spread over many domains. Depending on where one lives in the world, some of the earliest texts can be hard to track down. Even when located, purchasing a collection of books detailing how to do grounded theory can quickly become an expensive option for teachers and student researchers, especially if they are just starting out or simply interested in exploring the methodology before making a commitment. The current books on GTM, as generalist works, do not address the perspective of applied linguistics, and as with other research methodologies, the major works in grounded theory differ significantly with regard to the finer points of carrying out a study. Sifting through the debate and learning the nomenclature while also deciding on the best course of action from books written outside the concerns of applied linguistics have led some to conclude with Silva (2005, p. 4), that GT requires ‘a whole lot of effort for very little gain’.

The need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Understanding grounded theory
• Part II Doing grounded theory
• References
• Appendix: Grounded theory readiness assessment inventory
• Index