The Discovery Power of Staying Open

Judith A. Holton, Mount Allison University, Canada Glaser (1978) emphasized three foundational pillars of GT that must be respected: emergence, constant comparison, and theoretical sampling.  While many qualitative researchers who claim to employ GT will assert their use of constant comparison and theoretical sampling, there is much less clarity around claims to respecting GT’s emergent nature.  Emergence necessitates that the researcher remains open to what is discovered empirically in the data “without first having them filtered through and squared with pre-existing...

Growing Grounded Theory: Doing my Bit

Helen Scott, PhD, United Kingdom In Glaser’s recent book, The Grounded Theory Perspective: Its Origin and Growth (2016), Glaser writes of how he recorded and explicated the grounded theory perspective and disseminated the perspective as the grounded theory general method of research, over a period of 50 years. During this period he has monitored its use, embracing procedural developments (e.g. Nilsson, 2011; Scott, 2011), whilst vigorously defending and differentiating the grounded theory perspective from adaptions (e.g. Glaser, 1992, 2002). A scholastic endeavour of...

Remodelling the Life Course: Making the Most of Life with Multiple Scl...

Milka Satinovic, Western Norway University, Norway Abstract The aim of the study was to develop a substantive grounded theory on how to live a life as good as possible with multiple sclerosis (MS). The question of how to improve the quality of life is of key importance when speaking of a chronic illness like MS. We still have little knowledge of this important question from the patients’ perspective. Classic grounded theory was used to explore patients’ experiences of living with MS. The aim was to identify their main concern and how they process this concern at different...

Intacting Integrity in Coping with Health Issues

Lene Bastrup Jørgensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark, Stine Leegaard Jepsen, University of Aarhus, Denmark, Bengt Fridlund, Jönköping University, Sweden, Judith A. Holton, Mount Allison University, Canada Abstract The aim of this study was to discover and elaborate a general substantive theory (GST) on the multidimensional behavioral process of coping with health issues.  Intacting integrity while coping with health issues emerged as the core category of this GST.  People facing health issues strive to safeguard and keep intact their integrity not only on an individual...

Final Thoughts on Exampling

Barney G. Glaser, PhD, Hon PhD, USA The humble purpose of this book is to help novice researchers doing dissertation research to do good GT by emphasizing the learning of GT by example. There is much to learn as GT methods become developed in the literature every year. This book has focused so far on exampling GT from its inception in 1965 to the reader Methods of GT in 1994. In this chapter I will discuss exampling GT to 2007 when I put out a reader with Judith Holton of very well formulated GT papers. It was called the GT Seminar Reader. Since this reader was published...

Celebrating 50 Years of Grounded Theory: Onward and Forward Editorial

Astrid Gynnild, University of Bergen Welcome to this very special issue of the Grounded Theory Review.  In this issue we celebrate 50 amazing years of grounded theory during which it has become one of the fastest growing methods in the global research world. Five decades after The Discovery of Grounded Theory was first published, the seminal work of founders Barney G. Glaser and Anselm Strauss is cited more than 94,000 times on Google Scholar alone. We celebrate that after 50 years of researching, teaching, defending, explicating and clarifying grounded theory as a...