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Grounded Theory Building

Grounded theory building (GTB) is a process of qualitative analysis that generates (builds) concepts and their relationships to explain and interpret patterns of social action (a theory) from rich data about a substantive domain of social action (the empirical ground). Grounded theory building is a style of doing qualitative analysis rather than a specific method, and quantitative data can also be used provided all data are used to discern core qualities of the social action under study. The three terms of GTB convey guidelines for the kinds of research topics and data to be gathered, the goal or expected outcomes, and the process of analysis.

Conceptual Overview

Grounded

GTB is “grounded” in the complexities of social life and in how people collectively think about, behave in, and make sense of their social situations. Social life is assumed to be inherently complex because people not only actively shape the world they live in, but also skillfully assess social situations, draw cues from them for proper behavior, retrieve details from experience, and create new knowledge with others, all in a situated manner. People routinely enact complex social activities (e.g., parenting, teaching, driving) without being told specifically how, as they go about everyday life. Thus, any observed instance of a construct is a contingent actualization of it, and the goal of GTB is to account for these contingent actualizations.

Research questions for GTB therefore concern social processes, social contexts, and situated interactions. Rather than study constructs that are abstracted from the complexities of social life, GTB explores their interactions with those complexities: what people actually do and think about the constructs, how and why they create and enact them in a certain way, why specific directions of change emerge, what shapes or enhances people's social skills, and why and how certain social understandings dominate. For organization studies, one might explore why and how hierarchy, work boundaries, or leadership styles affect how a particular kind of work gets done.

The data for GTB are rich in the sense that they must reflect these social complexities. Most GTB studies use textlike data such as observations, ethnographies, interviews, archives, photographs, and other symbolic artifacts, but can easily incorporate a variety of data sources and types, provided reasonable connections between them and the complexities of social action can be articulated. The categories that are discovered and honed by the study must, however, be in the data. A study that imposes constructs on the data is not GTB.

Theory

The purpose of GTB is to build theory, not to describe, illustrate, pilot test, or provide intuition. GTB seeks to achieve a better comprehension of a social phenomenon by generating concepts and their relations that explain, account for, and interpret the variation in the social action under study. A grounded theory gives a sense of understanding and control, and an access for action, just like any theory. The research may not create new ideas, but it should create new connections among ideas that shed new light on the social action being studied.

Developing a good theory requires theoretical sampling and theoretical saturation. Theoretical sampling refers to sampling on the basis of emerging concepts or categories. One captures the variation in the phenomenon by studying a diversity of settings for it and instances of it, but chooses those settings and instances to explore various properties of a category as these emerge in the analysis. Theoretical saturation means that no new information emerges about the category from additional data. When the researcher learns nothing new from additional data, he or she has enough data.

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