Thinking about Grounded Theory
I began this course with very little knowledge of grounded theory, although I had heard in the past that it wasn’t objective, rigorous or systematic enough to result in valid conclusions. However, Charmaz (2014) quickly convinced me of its value as a systematic, flexible, inductive and comparative method that encouraged exploration and resulted in theory formation. By exploring the development of the grounded theory method, Charmaz demonstrated how these methods arose to address some problems with the usual methods of research used in the social sciences that focused on verification rather than theory formation. Grounded theory methods address problems such as the fact that many theories are too abstract, speculative or unapplicable, and other situations where the data that was generated was descriptive with no analysis to tie it together. In contrast, grounded theory arises from robust data in real-world situations, and guides the development of new theories. After these readings I ...