About the Authors

Daniel P. Ash is a British criminologist and senior lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire.  He specializes in the development and application of theory in policing, novel research methods, the use of data science techniques to understand and develop operational policing practice, and policing innovation (in its broadest sense). He was formerly a British police officer, serving for twenty years with Northamptonshire Police, working in a variety of multi-agency operational contexts. Email: dash@glos.ac.uk Tom Andrews, PhD, is a Lecturer Emeritus in Nursing at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Cork, Ireland. He was trained in Classic GT by Dr. Barney Glaser, who also took part in his Viva Voce.  Tom lectured in research methods on post-graduate courses as well as teaching critical care to undergraduate and post-graduate students.  He has extensive experience in supervising and examining PhD students using Classic GT as well as conducting classic grounded theory troubleshooting seminars based on the model developed by Dr. Glaser. Tom is a fellow of the GT Institute and has several peer reviewed publications in journals. He continues to be active in the methodology of Classic GT and is currently collaborating in organising an international conference in Grounded Theory.   Email: t.andrews@ucc.ie Barry Chametzky, Ph.D. American College of Education. Dr. Chametzky holds graduate degrees in Music (Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York), French (Middlebury College), and Foreign Language education (University of Pittsburgh).  Dr. Chametzky is an active researcher in the fields of andragogy, e-learning, anxiety and online foreign language acquisition, and classic grounded theory with numerous peer-reviewed publications and book chapters to his credit.  He is also one of the reviewers and the copyeditor for the Grounded Theory Review.  He facilitates online learning with master’s and doctoral students in the fields of educational technology and leadership, and serves as a dissertation chairperson to a number of candidates. Email: barry@bluevine.net Ólavur Christiansen, PhD, is candidate in economics (cand. polit.) from the University of Copenhagen in 1977, and candidate in sociology (cand. scient. soc.) from the University of Copenhagen in 1983.  He received his PhD from Aalborg University in 2007 (a study of “opportunizing” in business).  He has mainly had a career within the governmental sector, but also within the private sector (bank auditing, market analysis). From 2013 to January 2022, he was General Secretary of the Economic Council of the Government of Faroe Islands.  The latter job was a full-time job.  From January 2022, Ólavur has been Associate Professor Emeritus at the  University of Faroe Islands. Astrid Gynnild is a Professor PhD of Media Studies,  Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. She is Head of the Journalism Research Group, and works at the intersection of journalism innovation, new technologies, and creative processes. She was Editor of the Grounded Theory Review 2012-2018 and is now a reviewer of the journal. Astrid is a Fellow of the Grounded Theory Institute. Judith A. Holton is Associate Professor Emerita at Mount Allison University, Canada.  Judith completed her PhD in Management Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research interests include grounded theory research methodology, leadership and management of complex systems, and learning and innovation in knowledge work.  She is a Fellow of the Grounded Theory Institute, former Editor of The Grounded Theory Review, and was a frequent collaborator and co-author with Barney Glaser. Judith has published in several academic journals including Management Learning, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Organizational Change Management, and The Grounded Theory Review. She is co-author with Isabelle Walsh...

From the Editor’s Desk: The Value of Modifiability...

I have been thinking about the value of modifiability as a criterion of classic grounded theory rigor.  In June 2020, I wrote about the need for research, and especially grounded theory research focused on changing social processes. What I couldn’t foresee was that we were on the mere cusp of multi-year virulence and social upheaval.  I wrote, “These are troubling days of pandemic illness, cultural upheaval, racial animus, international disruption, and political turmoil. . . .  We are in uncharted territory.  In response, particularly to Covid-19, structural and psychological social processes are changing.  Education, family life, health care, work life, business, consumerism, sports, trade, entertainment, government institutions, and travel are all changing.  People are assuming new roles or are adjusting their roles to fit new life circumstances.  This is a time of great upheaval—a time particularly ripe for grounded theory research.”  As a call for action, I urged grounded theorists and PhD students to turn aside from tired and over-studied phenomena and consider this wide-open opportunity to advance important knowledge.  What I did not suspect at the time was that global society was at the mere beginning of a swirling maelstrom of change and that theories discovered in 2020 might need to be modified in order to be useful in the future. Modifiability, one of four criteria of rigor in classic grounded theory, suggests that theories are not precious or inviolate.  This criterion requires that theories be reshaped as new data emerges.  Glaser (1978) wrote that even though basic social processes remain in general, their variation and relevance is ever-changing in our world.  A grounded theory must be constantly ready for quick modification in order to help explain surprising variations. Glaser further proposed that through this approach, the tractability of a grounded theory over social life is maintained and the theory secures its continuing relevance.  Let me give an example.  Many issues of the Grounded Theory Review over the years include papers written by health care professionals, the majority of which focus on nurse and physician relationships, decision making, and direct patient care.  Today, some of these theories may be less relevant because the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the tenuous connection between health care ethics and practical reality.  The stark reality today is that hospital staff must balance the traditional duty to care for individual patients against the duty to protect themselves and their families from the dangers of Covid-19.  In addition, the harrowing choices forced upon health care professionals during this pandemic has created an ethical turning point whereas the duty of health care workers to focus on each patient has sometimes necessarily pivoted to a utilitarian view of maximizing the collective good (i.e., who has the greatest need for this last this bed, this last ventilator, this last infusion. . .).  New data from the changing healthcare workforce, when applied to extant theories, can modify them to improve their usefulness in today’s world.  In addition to discovering new grounded theories, the challenge today is for researchers and PhD students to examine extant grounded theories in the light of changing social and structural processes and modify the theories to fit the new data; work to explain, predict, and interpret what is happening; and maintain relevance when new core problems and processes continue to emerge. In this issue you will find Glaser’s The Practical Use of Awareness Theory that focuses on the importance of writing a grounded theory that can be applied in a useful manner. ...

The Practical Use of Awareness Theory

Barney Glaser, PhD Editor’s note: Through examples found in their seminal theory, Awareness of Dying, Glaser and Strauss (1965) demonstrated how to develop and write a classic grounded theory in a way that is applicable to practice. Awareness of Dying was one of four monographs that culminated from a six-year funded research program titled Hospital Personnel, Nursing Care and Dying Patients (Glaser & Strauss, 1968). In Awareness of Dying, Glaser and Strauss identified different levels of awareness of impending death and the effects these have on patients, families, nurses, and physicians.  They discovered four distinctly different awareness contexts: closed awareness, suspected awareness, mutual pretense awareness, and open awareness.  In other words, to what degree does the patient know that he or she is dying and how do others participate in that knowledge.  Glaser and Strauss found that awareness contexts affected many elements of medical and nursing care and relationships among staff, patients, and families. In discussing their theory, Glaser and Strauss emphasized the importance of usefulness, clarity, and parsimony in the development of grounded theories.  Indeed, through a review of the literature, Andrews and Nathaniel in 2009 confirmed that the theory continues to be useful in practice. Glaser and Strauss’s chapter has been edited and reprinted several times. In various forms, this paper was published as a chapter in in Awareness of Dying (1965) and subsequently in The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (1967).  As reprinted here, the chapter has been gently edited for clarity and context from the version found in Applying Grounded Theory: A Neglected Option (Glaser, 2014) and includes Glaser and Strauss’s original footnotes. It is included in this issue of Grounded Theory Review as an example of the practical usefulness of a substantive grounded theory. In this chapter we shall discuss how our substantive sociological theory has been developed in order to facilitate applying it in daily situations of terminal care by sociologists, by doctors and nurses, and by family members and dying patients.  The application of substantive sociological theory to practice requires developing a theory with (at least) four highly interrelated properties. The first requisite property is that the theory must closely fit the substantive area in which it will be used.  Second, it must be readily understandable by lay persons concerned with this area.  Third, it must be sufficiently general to be applicable to a multitude of diverse, daily situations within the substantive area, not just to a specific type of situation.  Fourth, it must allow the user partial control over the structure and process of the substantive area as it changes through time.  We shall discuss each of these closely related properties and briefly illustrate them . . . to show how our theory incorporates them, and therefore why and how our theory can be applied in terminal care situations.[1] Fitness That the theory must fit the substantive area to which it will be applied is the underlying basis of the theory’s four requisite properties.  It may seem obvious to require that substantive theory must correspond closely to the data, but actually in the current ways of developing sociological theory, there are many pitfalls that may preclude good fitness.[2]  Sociologists often develop a substantive theory—theory for substantive areas such as patient care delinquency, graduate education—that embodies without his realization, the sociologist’s ideas, the values of his occupation and social class, as well as popular views and myths, along with his deliberate efforts at making logical deductions from some formal...

Personalizing Wellness: A Grounded Theory Study...

Kari Allen-Hammer, Saybrook University Abstract The impetus for exploring how people created wellness using classic grounded theory rose from an interest in understanding behavior that shaped a health-conscious lifestyle. The grand tour question was, “what does wellness look like to you; how do you see yourself cultivating that in your life?” Thirty-three data samples were collected from interviews, a diary, and field observations. The substantive theory of personalizing wellness outlined three stages in forming a health-conscious lifestyle. Stage 1, Awakening a Vision of Wellness, begins the change process through experiencing disruption and personal discovery. Stage 2, Integrating Strategies, involves assuming responsibility by prioritizing wellness and handling complexity associated with one’s inner and social life. Stage 3, Living Wellness, represents mastery levels of personal responsibility maintained through lifelong learning, sustaining energy resources, radiating vibrancy, and sharing wisdom. Coach-practitioners may utilize this theory for determining stage-appropriate interventions that support health-conscious behaviors. Keywords: autonomy, coaching, health-conscious, self-determination, flow Introduction Personal responsibility in health has gained traction during the last three decades as individuals take ownership of their wellbeing by increasing health-conscious behaviors (Kraft & Goddell, 1993; Wiese et al., 2010). Health-conscious refers to “individuals who lead a ‘wellness-oriented’ lifestyle [and who] are concerned with nutrition, fitness, stress, and their environment. They accept responsibility for their health” (Kraft & Goddell, 1993, p. 18). A consumer-driven market for health-promoting goods and services prompted the healthcare industry, albeit hesitantly (Fulder; 1993), to take notice of shifting trends from disease management (Fulder, 1993; Kraft & Goddell, 1993; Wiese et al., 2010) to “using medical knowledge to prevent disease by altering lifestyle behaviors such as eating, sleeping, exercising, and smoking” (Kraft & Goddell, 1993, p. 19). Some researchers have highlighted the concern that research focusing continually on disease rather than on the experience of health or wellness will only continue to spotlight the disease process and experience and hinder understanding of the process and experience of health and wellness (Antonovsky, 1987; Fulder, 1993). Antonovsky (1987) addressed the fundamental differences between studies that focus on the science of disease versus the science of health, mainly concluding that whatever the study focuses on will determine the questions, hypotheses, methods, and conclusions that guide the study. The motivation behind this study was initially to understand the health behaviors of people who, hypothetically, contributed to and helped sustain the “historic change in public choice” (Fulder, 1993; p. 108) in their quest for wellness. It became evident from the data that the main concern for participants in the study was relieving suffering by personalizing their approach to creating wellness to meet individual needs, preferences, interests, and wellness values, forming a dynamic relationship-to-self. Relationship-to-self refers to recognizing and responding to meeting needs, preferences, interests, and wellness values. Personalizing wellness introduces a three-stage process of developing a personal approach to living a wellness lifestyle. Theory Development This classic grounded theory study was conducted by a doctoral student at Saybrook University (Author, 2018). Wellness lifestyles were the topic area of research. Preconception was limited by not conducting a preliminary literature review and journaling to set aside personal biases and preconceptions, as Glaser (1998) recommended. Also, under the mentorship of the dissertation committee chair, when preconceptions appeared in the doctoral students’ work, the mentor addressed the issue, and the student corrected course. In this manner, preconceptions and personal biases were acknowledged and let go to reduce and eliminate interference in the study. Criteria for selecting adult participants were based on observing the participant exhibiting behaviors that...

Collaborative Grounded Theory

Kara L. Vander Linden, Ed.D. Institute for Research and Theory Methodologies, USA Catherine J. Tompkins, Ph.D., MSW, George Mason University, USA Abstract This article describes how two researchers’ professional relationship began as a mentor/mentee relationship and transformed into co-researchers using grounded theory. We explain how we navigated each stage of the process of conducting a GT study using a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach. The article also presents some key takeaways for researchers to consider when working collaboratively. Keywords: collaborative, co-researchers, interdisciplinary, grounded theory Introduction This article presents how two researchers’ professional relationship evolved from a mentor/mentee relationship into co-researchers using grounded theory (GT). While the topics of collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams have been extensively researched and written about for many years (Abramo et al., 2009; Oliver et al., 2018; Tkachenko & Ardichvili, 2020), little is written on collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams using GT. Authors have cited many reasons for the increased use of collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams. Some reasons include the increased pressure to publish within academia, the need to address increasingly complex problems, and access to resources to name a few (Abramo et al., 2009; Oliver et al., 2018; Tkachenko & Ardichvili, 2020). There are also numerous articles that focus on the advantages and drawbacks of the use of collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams (Oliver et al., 2018; Tkachenko & Ardichvili, 2020). The experiences of the authors of this article align with the previous findings but this article focuses on the unique aspects of collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams using GT. In this article, the authors described how our relationship began as a mentor/mentee relationship and transformed into co-researchers. We present how we navigated the various stages of the process of conducting a GT study using a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach. The article ends with some key takeaways for researchers to consider when working collaboratively. How Our Relationship Began From 2007 to 2009, Dr. Cathy Thompkins[1] was a John A. Hartford Foundation Geriatric Fellow who provided resources for faculty development. With these resources, she decided to become skilled in a different research method, grounded theory, for a study she was preparing on grandparent-headed households. As a gerontologist, she was interested in the relationships between grandparents and grandchildren when a grandparent was the primary care provider. Through the fellowship, she had funds to hire a mentor to teach her GT. She first contacted Dr. Simmons who referred her to Dr. Kara Vander Linden, who at the time was a recent graduate and mentee of Dr. Simmons. While Kara had been mentoring doctoral students using GT for 2 years, she had never mentored an experienced researcher. With Cathy’s understanding of this, Kara mentored Cathy using the same approach she used with her students. Cathy in turn taught what she was learning to her research assistant. Later Cathy served on GT dissertations committees with Kara. Now, 14 years later, Kara and Cathy are still collaborating. The Mentor/Mentee Relationship As Kara does with all her mentees, she recommended that Cathy read the seminal books, specifically the Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (1967), Theoretical Sensitivity (1978), and Doing Grounded Theory: Issues and Discussions (1998). Kara and Cathy met regularly to discuss Cathy’s questions about the books. Kara said, “My goal was and still is to be an experienced role model, who provides encouragement, advice, coaching and moral support to learners who want to learn, and more importantly, DO grounded theory” (Vander Linden & Tompkins, 2021). The real way...