Download Constructing Grounded Theory A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis for free in PDF

Contents of Constructing Grounded Theory PDF

• An Invitation to Grounded Theory
• Gathering Rich Data
• Coding in Grounded Theory Practice
• Memo-writing
• Theoretical Sampling, Saturation, and Sorting
• Reconstructing Theory in Grounded Theory Studies
• Writing the Draft
• Reecting on the Research Process

Preface to Constructing Grounded Theory eBook

This book takes you through a journey of constructing grounded theory by traversing basic grounded theory steps.

The book will provide a path, expand your vistas, quicken your pace, and point out obstacles and opportunities along the way.

We can share the journey but the adventure is yours. I will clarify grounded theory strategies and oer guidelines, examples, and suggestions throughout.

Although some authors provide methodological maps to follow, I raise questions and outline strategies to indicate possible routes to take.

At each phase of the research journey, your readings of your work guide your next moves. 

This combination of involvement and interpretation leads you to the next step.

The end-point of your journey emerges from where you start, where you go, and with whom you interact, what you see and hear, and how you learn and think. In short, the nished work is a construction-yours.

Writing about methods can take unpredictable turns. In a recent issue of Symbolic Interaction,

Howard Becker (2003) recounts why the master ethnographer Erving Goman avoided writing about his methods.

Becker tells us that Goman believed any methodological advice would go awry and researchers would blame him for the resulting mess.

Oering methodological advice invites misunderstanding-and constructive critiques. Unlike Goman, however, I welcome entering the methodological fray and invite you to join me in it.

Possibilities for methodological misunderstandings may abound but also openings for methodological clarications and advances may occur.

Bringing any method beyond a recipe into public purview inevitably invites interpretation and reconstruction-and misunderstandings.

Readers and researchers' perspectives, purposes, and practices inuence how they will make sense of a method. In the past, researchers have often misunderstood grounded theory methods.

Published qualitative researchers add to the confusion when they cite grounded theory as their methodological approach but their work bears little resemblance to it.

Numerous researchers have invoked grounded theory as a methodological rationale to justify conducting qualitative research rather than adopting its guidelines to inform their studies.

This book represents my interpretation of grounded theory and contains methodological guidelines, advice, and perspectives.

The method has evolved or changed, depending on your perspective, since its originators, Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L.

Strauss, set forth their classic statement of grounded theory in 1967. Each has shifted his position on certain points and added others.

My version of grounded theory returns to the classic statements of the past century and reexamines them through a methodological lens of the present century.

Researchers can use grounded theory methods with either quantitative or qualitative data; however, they have adopted them almost exclusively in qualitative research, which I address here.

Throughout the book, I refer to the materials we work with as 'data' rather than as materials or accounts because qualitative research has a place in scientic inquiry in its own right.

In writing this book I aim to full the following objectives:

1) to oer a set of guidelines for constructing grounded theory research informed by methodological developments over the past four decades;

2) to correct some common misunderstandings about grounded theory;

3) to point out dierent versions of the method and shifts in position within these versions; 

4) to provide sucient explanation of the guidelines that any budding scholar can follow who has a basic knowledge of research methods; and 

5) to inspire beginning and seasoned researchers to embark on a grounded theory project. As consistent with the classic grounded theory statements of Glaser and Strauss, I emphasize the analytic aspects of inquiry while recognizing the importance of having a solid foundation in data. 

For the most part, I have used published data and excerpts so that you can seek the original sources, should you wish to see how excerpted data t in their respective narratives. 

I hope that you nd my construction of grounded theory methods helpful for your construction of new grounded theories. 

These methods provide a valuable set of tools for developing an analytic handle on your work, and taken to their logical extension, a theory of it. 

Researchers who move their studies into theory construction may nd Chapters 5 and 6 to be of particular interest. 

I realize, however, that sometimes our research objectives and audiences do not always include explicit theory construction, But providing a useful analytic framework makes a signicant contribution. 

Grounded theory methods foster creating an analytic edge to your work. Evidence abounds that these methods can inform compelling description and telling tales. 

Whether you pursue ethnographic stories, biographical narratives, or qualitative analyses of interviews, grounded theory methods can help you make your work more insightful and incisive. 

A long evolution precedes my traversing the grounds of this book. My ideas arose from two separate sources: an early immersion in epistemological developments in the 1960s and an innovative doctoral program that ignited my imagination. As for many graduate students of the day, Thomas Kulm's T7ze Structure of Scientic RevolutioTJS has had a lasting eect on me, but so did the theoretical physicists who challenged conventional notions of scientic objectivity, reasoning, and truth. As a member of the rst cohort of doctoral students in sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, I had the privilege of learning grounded theory from Barney Glaser in multiple graduate seminars. Each student had a class session when all members analyzed his or her material in a freewheeling discussion.

The seminars sparkled with excitement and enthusiasm. Barney's brilliance shone as he led us away from describing our material and into conceptualizing it in analytic frameworks. 

I am grateful for having had the opportunity to study with him. Anselm Strauss, my dissertation chair, kept tabs on my work from the day of our rst meeting until his death in 1996. 

He and Barney shared a commitment to raising new generations of scholars to become productive grounded theorists. 

When I gave Anselm a piece of writing-often just a fragment-in the morning, he would call me by evening to talk about it. 

Although Anselm would disagree with several points in this book, I hope that much of it might have caught his interest and have elicited the familiar chuckle that so many generations of students cherished.