My Love Affair with Grounded Theory: Making the Passion Work in the “Real” World

ABSTRACT

Grounded theory offers the interpretive researcher a cornucopia of possibilities. Thanks to its theory-generating ethos, grounded theory is open and flexible and applicable to a variety of research settings. Furthermore, it can be used as a method, a framework, an analytical tool, and a paradigm. For the purposes of inductive research, grounded theory is very alluring and many qualitative scholars fall for its theory-building promise. Few, however, embrace the paradigm for all that it has to offer, despite claiming to being grounded in their approach to generating theory. Here I share my own passion for grounded theory: from the epistemological journey that led me to the paradigm, to pragmatically applying the method to my own research. Grounded theory is best equipped for furthering our understanding of complex social phenomena, providing us with the tools to generate rich, innovative data-driven theory, making our adoption of the method a truly lovely affair.

Notes

¹ As Gioia et al. (2012) bluntly put it, qualitative researchers continue to face scientific skepticism in the field, with heart-wrenching feedback such as “Great story! Good writing! Incisive thinking! But how do we know you haven’t just made up an interesting interpretation” (p. 18).

² Classic GT, as presented in Discovery, “is not a qualitative research methodology but rather a general methodology for the development of theory using any and all types of data” (Walsh et al. 2015:585; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Gibson and Hartman (2014) argued that Discovery “would never be a set of clearly defined ‘procedures and definitions’ [but rather] part argument, part presentation of [Glaser and Strauss’s] approach rather than what they perceive as the outcome of the approach” (p. 28).

³ Highly interpretive and focused on linking constructs, constructivist GT takes on the added burden of describing “what is going on” in the field as well as exploring how individuals and groups construct their meanings and experiences of that world (Gibson and Hartman 2014).

⁴ With this in mind, “people, institutions and interactions are involved in producing the realities in which they live and these productive efforts are based on processes of meaning-making” (Flick 2007:12; see also Crotty 1998; Lincoln and Guba 2000).

⁵ For Charmaz (2006) there is no need for a “silent authorship replete with assumed neutrality, objectivist pretentions, and an absent author” (pp. 174–175).

⁶ Pratt (2009) suggested the use of power quotes to present the “most compelling” (p. 860) parts of the data, which effectively illustrate the main argument or theory, whereas proof quotes are used to “bolster points you have already made in the body of the paper” (p. 860).

⁷ Gioia et al. (2012) elaborated on this analogy further in that “if the data structure is the anatomy of the coming theory, then the grounded model is the physiology of that theory. The writing in the GT section articulates and weaves together the workings of this anatomy and physiology to produce a dynamic inductive model that describes or explains the processes and phenomena under investigation” (p. 24).

⁸ Saldaña (2009) suggested applying the “touch test” when writing memos from tangible codes: from a “real” or “touchable” code such as “mother,” we should find its abstract equivalent, that is, “motherhood,” which will then be used throughout the analysis stage of the research (p. 187).

⁹ Cited in Saldaña (2009), Dey explained the importance of charting out our data visually: “[W]hen we are dealing with complex voluminous data, diagrams can help us disentangle the threads of our analysis and present the results in a coherent and intelligible form … not just a way of decorating our conclusions, they also provide a way of reaching them” (p. 201).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria L. Rodner

Victoria L. Rodner is a lecturer in marketing at the University of Stirling (UK) and a visiting scholar at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil, where she carried out postdoctoral research on spiritual consumption and marketing strategies of churches. Her main areas of research include branding narratives, macromarketing, the visual arts market, emerging markets, religious consumption, institutional theory, and qualitative research methodologies with a special interest in grounded theory, constructivism and, most recently, subjective personal introspections. Her work appears in international journals including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, Arts and the Market, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, and Society.