Grounded Theory (Research Methodology)

Abstract, Dedication, and Acknowledgments for the Hobbs (2011) dissertation published by SAS.

by Robert Dean Hobbs

The Hobbs (2011) doctoral study is published in the ProQuest Dissertations and These database, UMI No. 3484309

The purpose of the qualitative research was to assess models of education developed for the study to investigate how... more The purpose of the qualitative research was to assess models of education developed for the study to investigate how and when to incorporate second and third languages into the curriculum to improve language acquisition. Research indicates that L3 enhances and reinforces L2 and L1. The stratified systematic grounded theory study explored the perspectives of neurolinguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, and interdisciplinary education researchers to derive variables for constructing a new model of education. The outcome of the Internet survey revealed that 100% of the participants agreed that education must change and that teacher training must improve. Variables from the cross-disciplinary data contributed to the construction of an integrated model of multilingual education consisting of four primary models and other models to serve as tools for designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment as well as determining demographics and student meta-analysis of language abilities and storage in the brain. The first model emerged from the data to offer multilingual principles of education. The other primary models are macro, meso, and micro models. The macro model represents schools, instruction, assessment, and the curriculum cycle. The meso model depicts the developmental domains of the individual learner and includes a cyclical equation. The micro model delineates multilingual processing in the brain based on neurolinguistic research, variables from the current study, and Kees de Bot's bilingual adaptation of Levelt's language processing model. Recommendations include the incorporation of notional-functional pragmatic-aesthetic concepts as depicted in the models developed for the study and enhanced by input from published researchers with unique language and research repertoires who were located on four continents.

Reconstructed grounded theory: beyond comparison?

by Sally Bradley

Where in the world: a study of user preferences as to virtual environments for information access.

by Alan MacLennan

Product returns and customer value: a footware industry case

by Ivan Russo

Published in Modelling Value Selected Papers of the 1st International Conference on Value Chain Management 2012
editors
Herbert Jodlbauer, Jan Olhager and Richard J. Schonberger

Managing the flow of product returns is increasingly recognized as a strategically important activity that spans... more Managing the flow of product returns is increasingly recognized as a strategically important activity that spans different functions within and across firms, especially in terms of marketing and operations. We focus specifically on managing returns in the shoes industry. In order to explore the phenomenon of returns management, a qualitative research methodology was chosen to generate an in-depth analysis given the currently limited understanding of the present research topic. Our results suggest that returns management is recognized an increased role in inter-functional alignment and that this phenomenon is linked to different elements of the relationship value.

“We’re superhuman, we just can’t spell.” Using the affordances of an online social network to motivate learning through literacy in dyslexic sixth-form students.

by Owen Barden

Full EdD Thesis

This is a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a Sixth Form College in... more This is a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a Sixth Form College in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a Facebook group page about the students’ scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examines the educational affordances of a digitally-mediated social network. An innovative, flexible, experiential methodology combining action research and case study with an ethnographic approach was devised. This enabled the use of multiple mixed methods including participant-observation, interviews, video, dynamic screen capture and protocol analysis. This range of methods helped to capture much of the depth and complexity of the students’ online and offline interactions with each other and with Facebook as they contributed to the group and co-constructed their Facebook page. The philosophy and concepts of the New Literacy Studies and multimodality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, Kress 2010), and rigorous qualitative analytical procedures are used to construct a substantive grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) of the students’ engagement with the social network and hence its educational potential. The study assesses the students' motivation to learn through literacy, the role of identities, and considers the pedagogical principles their use of the network evokes. It concludes that Facebook offers an affinity space which engages the students in active, critical learning about and through literacy (Gee, 2004 & 2007). Little if any research has apparently been documented on the potential of digital media to engage and motivate dyslexic students, nor to integrate models of dyslexia, radical perspectives on literacy and social models of disability (Herrington & Hunter-Carsch, 2001). This study begins to address this oversight and imbalance.

Consumer Roles in Brand Culture and Value Co-Creation in Virtual Communities

by Jason C. Healy

Co-authored with McDonagh, P., Journal of Business Research, forthcoming, in-press.

    Using a Netnographic Grounded Theory approach to an online fan forum, a Virtual Community (VC), this... more     Using a Netnographic Grounded Theory approach to an online fan forum, a Virtual Community (VC), this article considers brand culture and value co-creation. The research site is a VC containing football fans who are viewed as stakeholders of the organisation Liverpool Football Club. Following a service-dominant logic (SDL) and consumer culture theory (CCT) approaches, analysis is conducted on fan consumer behaviour leading to the submission of a Typology of Seven Consumer Community Cultural Co-creative Roles. The authors reflect on existing theoretical consumer responses to market offerings of exit, voice, loyalty, and twist, found in extant literature; adopting these as four co-creative roles. This study contributes three new consumer co-creative roles of entry, re-entry, and non-entry. Managerial implications of the typology are discussed.

Straussian Grounded-theory Method: An Illustration

by Mai Thai

Thai, Mai Thi Thanh, Chong, Li Choy and Agrawal, Narendra M., Straussian Grounded-Theory Method: An Illustration (2012). The Qualitative Report. (forthcoming) Vol 17 (5)

This paper demonstrates the applicationis an appreciation of Straussian Grounded Theory Grounded Theory method in... more This paper demonstrates the applicationis an appreciation of Straussian Grounded Theory Grounded Theory method in conducting research in complex settings where parameters are poorly defined. It provides a detailed illustration on how this method can be used to build an internationalization theory. To be specific, this paper exposes readers to the behind-the-scene work to develop a theory on the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises based in transition economies. It describes each step from sampling to coding and then to theory formation, explaining the rationale each step of the way. The readers can therefore see how a theory took shape and develop from raw data to refined theoretical propositions/hypotheses.

Philosophical Pitfalls: The Methods Debate in American Political Science

by Nivien Saleh

Published in: Journal of Integrated Social Sciences, 1(1), 141-176. 2009.

Positivism dominates research in U.S. political science. I will show that even though critical realism is virtually... more Positivism dominates research in U.S. political science. I will show that even though critical realism is virtually unknown in the discipline, realist concepts have found their way into debates among qualitative methodologists. The analysis begins with a juxtaposition of positivist and realist foundations. Next, I will trace the methodology debate that has unfolded in the U.S., examining in what ways it reflects these foundational assumptions. Over the last number of years, I demonstrate, qualitative methodologists have engaged in philosophical hybridity, because they have drawn on realist concepts while continuing to adhere to an empiricist ontology. This kind of cherrypicking is a perilous strategy, and I suggest that methodologists examine their ontological assumptions, especially their views on causation. To do so, they need to engage critical realism. This exercise would benefit political science, because it would provide scholars with exciting new research possibilities. Moreover, critical realism is well-suited to support the discipline’s central quest: gaining insight into the world by using few examined cases to draw inferences to larger sets of unexamined cases.

A Generative Analysis of Selected Socio-Scientific Theories in Urban Evangelization Among American Protestants [from 1800-2000]

by Curt Watke

Ph.D. dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX

Urban evangelization among American Protestants and the social sciences developed concurrently during the nineteenth... more Urban evangelization among American Protestants and the social sciences developed concurrently during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historical developments led American Protestants to embrace several ideas regarding the nature of the city that developed within urban evangelization and were codified in the Chicago school of sociology. These conceptions taken together are the ecological paradigm that undergirds the urban evangelization of today. This paradigm envisions the urban social structure in ecological terms; uses attributive, quantitative, and thus, demographic study as its research method; and employs the linear communication model.
The purpose of this study is to examine the development of the socio-scientific foundation of urban evangelization; to critique the appropriateness of this foundation; and to propose an alternative socio-scientific paradigm for doing contemporary urban evangelization based upon integrating social network analysis, ethnography, dimensions of cross-cultural communication, and the convergence model of communication with contemporary models of urban evangelization. In turn, this new paradigm is integrated within existing disciplinary matrices of urban evangelization. The new paradigm arises from a theoretical conception that pursues urban evangelization along social networks aided by ethnographic tools and clarified by various network representations of social interaction.
Types of generative analysis (as opposed to verificative analysis) provide the basic mode of analysis for this study. Generative analysis uses various sources of evidence in an attempt to discover theory arising from systematically collected data. Hence, this study generates theory derived from systematically collected research data rather than tests or verifies a predetermined thesis or hypothesis. The study applied two theoretical frameworks that employed the generative perspective. These two frameworks include social constructionism and grounded theory.
A systematic investigation of the intertwined historical developments of urban evangelization and early American sociology traced the definitional process of urban evangelization from British moral philosophy and Thomas Chalmers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was determined that both urban evangelization among American Protestants and early American sociology had common roots in common sense realism and Baconian inductive empiricism.

Demuth, C.; Keller, H.; Gudi, H. & Otto, H. (Juni, 2009). Entwicklung von Autonomie und Relationalität über die Lebensspanne – eine Rekonstruktion aus autobiografischen Erzählungen.

by Carolin Demuth, Dr. phil.

Posterpräsentation auf dem 5. Berliner Methodentreffen Qualitative Forschung (BMT), Berlin, 26.-27. Juni, 2009

Inside the Black Box: Revealing the Process in Applying a Grounded Theory Analysis

by Peter Rich

This is the early version of a paper that is now in press with The Qualitative Report. The citation will be:

Rich, P. J. (2012) Inside the black box: Revealing the process in applying a grounded theory analysis, 17(4). The Qualitative Report.

Qualitative research methods have long set an example of rich description, in which data and researchers’ hermeneutics... more Qualitative research methods have long set an example of rich description, in which data and researchers’ hermeneutics work together to inform readers of findings in specific contexts. Among published works, insight into the analytical process is most often represented in the form of methodological propositions or research results. This paper presents a third type of qualitative report, one in which the researcher’s process of coding, finding themes, and arriving at findings is the focus. Grounded theory analysis methods were applied to the interpretation of a single interview. The resulting document provides a narrative of the process one researcher followed when attempting to apply recommended methodological procedures to a single interview, providing a peek inside the black box of analysis often left unopened in final reports.

"Hartmann, Schutz and the Hermeneutics of Action"

by Robert Jordan

published in  in 'Axiomathes,' 12 (2001) 327-338

Hartmann's way of conceiving what he terms "the actual ought-to-be (aktuales Seinsollen]" offers a fruitful... more Hartmann's way of conceiving what he terms "the actual ought-to-be (aktuales Seinsollen]" offers a fruitful approach to crucial issues in the phenomenology of action. The central issue to be dealt with concerns the description of the "constitution" of anticipated possibilities as projects for action. Such these are termed "problematic possibilities" and are contrasted with "open possibilities" in most of the works published by Husserl as well as those published by Alfred Schutz. The description given by Alfred Schutz emphasized that the projecting of possibilities is thoroughly conditioned by the agent's habitual beliefs and interests. Schutz, however left open the possibility that other factors might affect the projecting of courses of action and the choosing of one in preference to others. In particular, he left open the possibility that the agent come to take an interest in possibilities in which she had no prior interest. More recent interpretations of his position on this issue have left this possibility undiscussed or else excluded it altogether. The result has been that a sort of value nihilism (subjectivism, sociologism, lingualism, anthropologism, historicism, psychologism, etc.) came to prevail in the phenomenological description of actions.

A quite parallel development occurred in interpretations of Heidegger's account of actions (of "explication [Auslegung]" in the vocabulary of Being and Time). Heidegger expressly and emphatically rejected most ways of conceiving values in discussing the forms of action (circumspection and assertion in the vocabulary of Sein und Zeit). it came quite generally to be assumed that he subscribed to some variation of nihilism regarding values despite his insistence in the "Letter on Humanism" that he meant no such thing. The literature' on this subject has concentrated on Scheler's work to the complete exclusion of Hartmann's axiology — as happened in Parvis Ermad's Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Values, His Critique of Intentionality, foreword by Walter Biernel (Glen Ellyn, Illinois: Torey Press, 1981). Scheler's view entails the radical separation of ontic traits from axiotic traits, of what-is from what-ought-to-be. However, for Hartmann, the set of ontic traits that becomes actual when laws about what-ought-to-be are satisfied is identical with the set of traits that ought-to-be,

Hartmann's way of conceiving the ought-to-be, the actual ought-to-be, and the three-fold structure of the finalistic nexus seems entirely compatible with Heidegger's way of thinking about actions. They are also an enlightening supplement to Schutz's description of "Choosing Among Projects of Action" (in Collected Papers 1, 67-96). That description requires that choice and action be thoroughly conditioned by psychological, social, and historical facts about the agent. However, nothing of this vital determination of actions is sacrificed when these concepts that are so central to Hartmann's "absolutism" with respect to values are introduced into the description.

Their introduction provides an elaboration that Schutz himself neglected, perhaps due to pragmatic deference to biases which were prevalent then in the intellectual climate of philosophy and sociology in the U.S. Still, the transformation they bring is a significant improvement. It shows decisively that being conditioned linguistically, psychologically, socially, and historically does not enclose the choice among projects within a "Hermeneutical Circle" such as would exclude the possibility that agents be open to previously unfamiliar values. Hartmann's conception of the plurality as well as the absoluteness (or "objectivity") of primary goods allows: put in Kantian terms, that an agent may, however rarely, take an interest in possibilities such as she may never before have been interested in at all; or, put in Heideggerian terms, that she may come to care about possibilities such as have never concerned her before.

El ejercicio profesional en el abordaje de la violencia de género en el ámbito jurídico-penal: un análisis psicosocial

by Doctorado en Psicologia Social

Cubells, Jenny, Calsamiglia, Andrea y Albertín, Pilar .(2010)

Cubells, J., Calsamiglia, A. y Albertín, P. (2010): El ejercicio profesional en el abordaje de la violencia de género... more Cubells, J., Calsamiglia, A. y Albertín, P. (2010): El ejercicio profesional en el abordaje de la violencia de género en el ámbito jurídico-penal: un análisis psicosocial, 26(2): 369-37).

Resumen:
El objetivo del presente estudio se centrará en valorar psicosocialmente las características del trato que reciben las mujeres en el marco
de las instituciones del ámbito jurídico-penal, explorando especialmente la
existencia o ausencia de perspectiva de género en las interacciones. Se trata de un estudio cualitativo, usando como técnicas la entrevista en profundidad, la observación participante y el grupo de discusión. El análisis se ha llevado a cabo mediante la Teoría fundamentada, con el apoyo del programa de análisis cualitativo Atlas.ti. Los resultados apuntan a la ausencia de perspectiva de género en el ejercicio profesional de los agentes jurídico-penales que tratan la violencia de género y las principales consecuencias que se derivan de ello, como los efectos a nivel de victimización secundaria y sobre las propias emociones de los profesionales.

Palabras clave: Violencia de género; LO 1/2004; ejercicio profesional;
perspectiva de género; ámbito jurídico-penal; metodología cualitativa. 

Title: Professional practice in gender violence approach in the criminal
legal field: a psicosocial analysis.
Abstract: The main goal in this study is to assess, from a psicosocial point
of view, how women are treated in legal institutions, exploring the gender
perspective on interactions. It is a qualitative research that uses in-depth
interviews, participant observation and discussion groups. The analysis has
been made with Grounded Theory, with the support of the program
Atlas.ti. The results show an absence of gender perspetive in the legal
agents’ practice that treat violence towards women, and its consequences,
such as secondary victimization or the professionals’ emotions.

Key words: Gender violence; LO 1/2004; practice; gender perspective;
legal context; qualitative research.