The Relationship between an Emerging Gro...

Vivian B. Martin, Ph.D. The relationship between grounded theory researchers and the existing literature has become a red herring that even confuses some grounded theorists who have completed a study. Antoinette McCallin’s essay does a commendable job outlining the realities of the research terrain that make proceeding without some exposure to the literature unlikely and ill-advised in most situations. When embarking on my dissertation, I needed to know enough about the literature, both substantive and methodological, to argue for the use of classic grounded theory as...

Methodological Issues: Have we forgotten...

Antoinette M. McCallin, Ph.D., RN The article “grappling with the literature in a grounded theory study” (McCallin, 2003) has stimulated a lively discussion in the international grounded theory research community. In this paper, I reply generally to my colleagues’ responses and raise some further issues that I do not believe have been addressed to date. In particular, I question if current discussions about the place of literature review are incomplete if methodological matters are debated in isolation from issues of thinking. The purpose of this paper is to argue that...

Revisiting Caresharing in the Context of...

Eleanor Krassen Covan, Ph.D. Abstract In this paper I revisit the basic social process of caresharing whereby people engage in personal and communal strategies to maximize their pleasure and minimize their losses. I originally discovered caresharing in the context of Hollywood Falls, a Florida retirement community that provided no formal supportive services for its aging residents (Covan, 1998). There, hiding frailty was the most obvious caresharing strategy. In this community which has since become more diverse in terms of ethnicity and age, hiding frailty is no longer...

Caresharlng: Hiding frailty in a Florida...

[This paper was originally published in Health Care for Women International, 19:423439, 1998 and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis.] Eleanor Krassen Covan, PhD Abstract This paper presents research findings generated from a study of the structure of a caresharing system for the elderly who reside in a Florida retirement community during the last decade of the twentieth century. A caresharing system is a combination of strategies employed in order to maximize pleasure and minimize losses that might otherwise be associated...

Staying Open: The use of theoretical cod...

By Barney G. Glaser, PhD., Hon. PhD. with the assistance of Judith A. Holton Abstract Theoretical codes (TCs) are abstract models that emerge during the sorting and memoing stages of grounded theory (GT) analysis. They conceptualize the integration of substantive codes as hypotheses of a theory. In this article, I explore the importance of their emergence in the development of a grounded theory and I discuss the challenge of the researcher in staying open to their emergence and earned relevance rather than their preconceived forcing on the theory under development. I...