What is Grounded Theory?

Massimiliano Tarozzi

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350085251
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Research in Education

What is Grounded Theory? provides a compelling account of an approach that has come to be one of the most widely used qualitative research methods across a wide range of subject areas and in the disciplines of nursing, health sciences, computer science, marketing, social psychology and education, among others.
Drawing on two decades of research practice and teaching, Tarozzi explains what Grounded Theory (GT) is, exploring its historical context, the many and sometimes antithetical approaches that have emerged of it and the epistemological implications of its application to different disciplines. With chapter summaries, further reading lists and a wealth of practical examples, the author shows how to do GT, accompanying the reader through the various phases of the research project.
Using GT in research is an adventurous journey: one can only understand what GT is by doing it.

Part I

Understanding GT

1 What Is Grounded Theory?

1.1 Starting from the Definition of Grounded Theory

In 1967, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss published The Discovery of Grounded Theory presenting the first formulation of an innovative method for conducting qualitative research. The introduction to this text featured a concise definition of this approach. I do not particularly like definitions, however, it is convenient to begin with the following one by deconstructing it into some important keywords that shed light on the features and distinctive traits of this method.Grounded theory is a general method of comparative analysis (…) and a set of procedures able to generate [systematically] a theory grounded in the data. (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. viii, emphasis added)

1) A general method. According to its founders, Grounded Theory (GT) can be regarded as ‘a general method’ (elsewhere defined as ‘strategic method’, p. 21) for generating a theory and at the same time as ‘a set of procedures’. It is a methodology, namely an overall rational discourse or way of thinking about (or constructing) social reality, or to draw on Michael Crotty (2015), it is the strategy, the plan of action, the process underlying the choice and use of particular methods. At the same time, however, it is also a method, that is to say a procedure, a techne, a set of techniques or tools, used to gather, treat and analyse data (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2018). Reflecting on one’s methodological approach should account for the process of investigative work while the method is functional to the researcher’s productive work.

2) Set of procedures. Since that first definition, different views have been put forward over time as to how GT should be understood and positioned among methods or methodologies. For Glaser (1978) and others it is essentially a methodology; for Juliet Corbin (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and recently, Bryant (2017), it is a method; for Kathy Charmaz (2006, 2014) GT is a ‘constellation of methods’. For the purposes of this book it can be fundamentally understood as a methodology that contains various procedural guidelines, but with the caveat that these guidelines do vary greatly according to the school of thought and its associated authors. In fact, as the above-mentioned definition suggests, it can be considered in both ways: as a theoretical gaze on collection and analysis techniques (‘a general method’) and as some ‘sets of procedures’ and concrete tools for collecting and analysing data. I have used the plural here because, while as a method it does not make sense to speak of just one GT (there are varied instrumental approaches), there is only one methodology or methodological approach. The most important reminder for users of this approach is to always be well aware that these two levels coexist and be conscious of the level of abstraction in which they are positioning themselves.

3) Systematically. This attribute, added in brackets in the definition since it appears frequently in many other excerpts, emphasizes the functional aspects of the method. A peculiar trait of GT, that in the eyes of its proponents distinguished it from the very outset from the unsystematic impressionism of other qualitative approaches, was precisely the fact that its procedures are systematic in nature. In the 1960s, and even today, qualitative methods were considered to lack validity, and were even less reliable because they were highly conditioned by the impressionistic subjectivism of the researcher and by the lack of rigour characterizing their procedures. Qualitative research lacked the standardized procedures of quantitative research, and no alternatives were being proposed that allowed researchers to maintain certain essential features which, legitimately, the academic community expects from research findings: that the interpretations (or representations) coincide to a given degree to the reality under investigation, and that the findings are able to explain phenomena through systematically organized statements and even provide predictions about those phenomena. GT provides procedures which are systematic but flexible, a set of functional aspects that do not circumvent the requirement for rigour imposed by the academic community on empirical researchers.

4) Generating theory. The outcome of research conducted with GT is a theory – a rational, dense, articulated and systematic interpretation that is capable of accounting for the reality being examined. Alternatively and less ambitiously, it produces a conceptual framework (Charmaz, 2006). In general, broad, extensive social science theories are the outcome of theoretical or speculative activity. Conversely, social scientific empirical research rarely produces comprehensive theories; rather, it limits itself to testing hypotheses or providing descriptions. GT originally ambitiously sought to generate complex and articulated theories similar in nature to those produced by the theorists of many disciplines, including early nineteenth-century sociology with its grand theories. The ambitious originality of GT consists in the attempt to offer an interpretative theory of the phenomena being examined, namely, the kind of product we would normally expect to be generated by the speculative work of a given discipline’s theorists and not by the empirical work of field researchers. Obviously, if we were to further define the controversial concept of ‘social theory’, it would be necessary to distinguish it from the classical logic-formal definition of theory used in the social sciences, where theory is considered a set of organized statements and assertions, systematically connected to each other, which can be empirically tested when its statements are transformed into operationalized hypotheses. Kathy Charmaz has noted that different authors use diverse concepts of theory even within the grounded theorists’ community (2014, pp. 227–34): concepts such as empirical generalization, process explanation, a theoretical comprehension or even a relationship between variables.

A neat distinction between theory and empirical research developed over the course of the last century together with the positivist paradigm in the human and social sciences. The ambitious aim of constructing comprehensive theories disappeared from empirical studies, and the activity of theoretical production was, from some points of view, reduced to testing hypotheses obtained hypothetically or deductively from pre-existing theories. As a matter of fact, the creative work of theoretical formulation withered away in the very act of developing a hypothesis on the basis of a critical review of previous studies or the will to replicate preceding studies by modifying minor conditions. GT, instead, puts a great deal of stress on the close link between theoretical and empirical research and positions itself in the narrow space that welds or binds theory and empirical reality together.

5) Grounded in the data. However, the specific characteristic of the theory produced using this approach is that such theory has a clear empirical basis; that is to say, it is obtained beginning from the data. In some ways this might represent an oxymoron to some people, a contradiction in terms: a theory cannot be empirically grounded, and empirical exploration cannot lead to speculative theory. The founders make a clear distinction between armchair theory and the outcome of fieldwork. It is here that they introduce the concept, untranslatable in many other languages, of grounded. This term encompasses several meanings at the same time: rooted, based on, but also stranded (ships), grounded (aircrafts), laying the basis for, to instruct or educate in, to teach the basic rudiments of, to prepare a base drawing. There is thus something carnal or material in the grounding in the data of a GT; it is a vital foundation of the living experience of facts – strong, intense and sometimes even violent. At the same time, however, it is a precise, detailed rooting which, by virtue of that fact, can form the basis for subsequent constructions, a terrain on which to build complex formal theories. This type of theory is not only based on the facts or empirically obtained from the data but also something more: it conveys the meaning of an accurate, profound, vital rooting in lived experience. This trait imbues the GT approach and the type of theory it is able to produce with originality: a theory not dissimilar from that produced by theorists or philosophers but one constructed starting from an empirical investigation and, by its very nature, deeply anchored in the data. This grounded nature of the theory, its lived rooting in the womb of reality, is therefore the quality that then grants the produced theory a very marked practical-operational significance and the potential to be useful for practical users.

In this sense, ‘grounded theory’ should be understood as both the name of the methodological approach and its outcome, process and product; through GT, researchers are able to produce theory that is grounded.

1.2 Characteristics of the Method

Although a multitude of interpretations and a variety of methods and procedures have been developed and circulated over the last fifty years, we can nevertheless identify some relatively constant methodological traits that represent the fundamental characteristics according to which research studies can be defined as GT.

Indeed, as is often the case in qualitative research, the flexibility of methods and of tools – so important for effectively describing and interpreting complex phenomena that cannot be contained within the rigid boxes of other more standardized and strict methods – also gives rise to methodological confusion and inappropriate mixtures of structurally different methods. The tendency to engage in method slurring (Baker, West & Stern, 1992) undermines the specific traits of an approach, thus losing the researcher the chance to use it appropriately and coherently with the phenomenon being studied. Obviously, the very idea of science that underlies various qualitative approaches is not compatible with the pursuit of methodological ‘purity’, and it is likewise wholly legitimate to use, with caution and competence, mixed or multiple methods (Creswell & Clark, 2007; Morse & Niehaus, 2009). Nevertheless, in order to both ‘transgress’ the orthodoxy of a given method and use it in combination with others, it is important to thoroughly understand the specific nature of that method and be able to fully master its procedures.

Since misconception too often reigns supreme in concrete uses of GT, it can be said that when any of these characteristics, in whatever specific version, are missing, the researcher is not using GT. In fact, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of generally calling every generic inductive qualitative analysis GT (Hood, 2007). Unlike generic inductive models, GT provides a specific and systematic set of procedures. Moreover, there is a widespread tendency to use different GT approaches because researchers need to ground their qualitative analyses in a legitimating technical language. Barney Glaser complained that the great success of GT can be seen as due to the success of its recognized and authorized technical language – a ‘legitimizing jargon’ which, according to Glaser, may prevail over the substantial use of the method (Glaser, 2009).

It is for this reason that, even while maintaining the necessary flexibility and accepting a plural notion of GT encompassing a multiplicity of approaches and orientations, we must nevertheless recall the defining and distinctive traits of this approach that cannot be missing in any way, no matter what the user’s preferred orientation may be (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Charmaz, 2000, 2006, 2014). These traits are as follows:

a) To generate a theory or a conceptual framework. As discussed earlier, GT is a methodology that aims to inductively generate conceptual abstraction on the basis of empirical data. Applying analytical procedures associated with GT but not aimed at conceptual construction is absolutely legitimate; however, it cannot be called GT. In the next section (1.3), I will come back on the specific nature of the emerging theory in GT.

b) To explore a process. A process can be defined as the conceptual formulation of temporal sequences that connect individual events to each other by identifying the markers of their beginnings, ends and intermediate passages or stages (Charmaz, 2014, p. 344). It is certainly a key GT feature to explore a process and the key categories through which it organizes and to identify its stages and phases. Many qualitative m ethods, especially after the ‘interpretative turn’ in the social sciences, are analytically focused only or mainly on language or exclusively on meanings. The distinctiveness of GT is that, although it departs from language and meanings, it searches for regularities of conceptual type among the phenomena being analysed. In this sense, GT has the specific, unique trait of being particularly suited for the exploration not of static phenomena, but of the processes underlying those phenomena and their dynamics, understood in context.
In contrast to many other approaches, the research questions that GT is able to answer relate to processes and complex actions. GT aims at bringing out the processes – social, psychological, educational and so on – underlying the phenomena being investigated. I will return to this point in more detail and by providing practic...