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ECRM:
The European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management
Studies
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Volume 2 Issue 1 July 2003
A
Critique of using Grounded Theory as a Research Method
George Allan, Department of Information
Systems and Computer Applications, Portsmouth University, UK,
George.Allan@port.ac.uk |
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Grounded Theory is a powerful
research method for collecting and analysing research data. It was
‘discovered’ by Glaser & Strauss (1967) in the 1960s but is still not
widely used or understood by researchers in some industries or PhD
students in some science disciplines. This paper demonstrates the steps in
the method and describes the difficulties encountered in applying Grounded
Theory (GT). A fundamental part of the analysis method in GT is the
derivation of codes, concepts and categories. Codes and coding are
explained and illustrated in Section 3. Merging the codes to discover
emerging concepts is a central part of the GT method and is shown in
Section 4. Glaser and Strauss’s constant comparison step is applied and
illustrated so that the emerging categories can be seen coming from the
concepts and leading to the emergent theory grounded in the data in
Section 5.
However, the initial applications of the GT method did have difficulties.
Problems encountered when using the method are described to inform the
reader of the realities of the approach. The data used in the illustrative
analysis comes from recent IS/IT Case Study research into configuration
management (CM) and the use of commercially available computer products
(COTS). Why and how the GT approach was appropriate is explained in
Section 6. However, the focus is on reporting GT as a research method
rather than the results of the Case Study.
Keywords: Grounded Theory; codes; concepts; emerging categories;
emergent theory.
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