Thursday, 30 April 2015

The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research,
Barney G Glaser and Anselm L Strauss, Aldine, 1967, page 29

In the foundational defining work for 'Grounded Theory', so called because the developed theory is explicitly grounded in the data, Glaser and Strauss explain why 'discovery' is so important:

Whether or not there is a previous speculative theory, discovery gives us a theory that "fits or works" in a substantive of formal area (though further testing, clarification or reformulation is still necessary), since the theory has been derived from dat, not deduced from logical assumptions.

It is real; it is tangible; and - most importantly, it works because it comes from the data set.