Situating Words: What Grounded Theory Brings to Dementia Research and Vice Versa

ABSTRACT

This article advocates a certain interpretation of grounded theory for the analysis of interviews with people diagnosed with dementia. Distinguishing itself from the methodological approaches that, closer to thematic analysis, consider the discourses of the participants as “pure symptoms” or “pure meanings,” this interpretation consists in interpreting the content of the interviews jointly with their enunciation situation and the social trajectories of the participants. It then allows for extending the space of interpreting possibilities, an endeavor especially crucial in research among discredited populations.

Acknowledgements

I thank Paméla Skaff, who was my research assistant during this research project; Rohan Todd for the proofreading of this paper; and Hans Bakker for his support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Note that the doctors’ point of view does not always rely on standardized diagnosis tools but also on “feelings,” which can be conceptualized as internalized clinical skills (Tessier 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ARIMA Partnership (SSHRC), 2015–2016.

Notes on contributors

Baptiste Brossard

Baptiste Brossard is a sociologist, currently a lecturer (U.S. equivalent: assistant professor) at the Australian National University. His areas of interest are mental health (self-injury, dementia, behavioral addictions), qualitative methodology, sociological theory, and utopias.