Posted by
jillian on Jun 25, 2010 in
Issue 2 , June 2010,
Volume 09 |
Comments Off on Is That a Real Theory or Did You Just Make It Up? Teaching Classic Grounded Theory
Odis E. Simmons, Ph.D. Abstract The title of this paper was derived from an incident I observed some years ago while accompanying a highly talented musician-songwriter friend to a performance. During a break, an audience member approached him to compliment the last song he had performed. He had written both the music and the lyrics to the song, one of many he had written. The audience member queried, “Is that a real song, or did you just make it up?” A touch amused, and not knowing whether he should be flattered or insulted, he politely replied, “It is a real song and I made it up.” This episode puts in mind a similar attitude in the social sciences that Glaser and Strauss (1967) noted, in which a small number of ’theoretical capitalists’ originate what are considered to be “real” theories and others are relegated to the role of “proletariat” testers. The means by which these theorists derived their theories remained largely mysterious. Unleashing proletariat testers was one of the chief rationales behind Glaser and Strauss’ development of grounded theory. It brought a democratic option into the social sciences that enabled anyone who learned the methodology to generate theory. The democratic ethos of the methodology may also have inadvertently unleashed an abundance of aspiring remodelers of the methodology, who unfortunately have eroded its primary purpose—to generate theories that are fully grounded in data rather than speculation or ideology. Introduction Since Glaser and Strauss published The Discovery of Grounded Theory in 1967, the methodology they originally conceived (1) has been subjected to numerous forms of methodological torturing. It has been misrepresented, misconstrued, distorted, and “remodeled” (Glaser, 2003) into varieties of “constructivist grounded theory” (Charmaz, 2000, 2006) and/or standard qualitative data analysis (Glaser, 2002, 2003, 2004) which has been “jargonized” (Glaser, 2009) with grounded theory terminology. Grounded theory, or at least what many secondary authors attempt to pass as grounded theory, has been “slurred” (Baker, Wuest, & Stern, 1992; Raffanti , 2006), “eroded” (Stern, 1994; Greckhamer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2005), “reconstructed” (Haig, 1995), “broadened” (Kools, McCarthy, Durham, & Robrecht, 1996), “diffused, diluted or distilled” (May, 1996), and “evolved” (Mills, Bonner, & Francis, 2006) to the point that much of what is called grounded theory has become a bit alien to classic grounded theorists who still honor its primary purpose, intent, and origins. Through all of these methodological machinations its original purpose has seemingly been forgotten. Before his passing, even Strauss (1987) and his co-author Corbin (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 1998; Corbin 1998) diverged from the original articulation of the methodology that he and Glaser laid out in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967). (2) Although Glaser has continued to write books about grounded theory as he and Strauss originally conceived it (3) (Glaser, 1978, 1992, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005a, 2006, 2008, 2009) the runaway perverting of the methodology continues largely unabated.(4 ) In my view, the primary reason for this is that the bulk of those who consider themselves to be grounded theorists gained their understanding of grounded theory through what Stern (1994) termed “minus mentoring” and I termed “bootstrapping” (Simmons, 1995). Although the number of researchers doing what has come to be called grounded theory has increased exponentially since 1995, the situation regarding systematic training in grounded theory has changed little. However, for the last decade or so Glaser has been teaching the nuances of grounded theory in periodic two day ’troubleshooting’ seminars in multiple locations within the U.S. and internationally....