Invitation to Grounded Theory, chapter 4: Interviewing in Grounded Theory Studies

Text Exploration

In this chapter, the author describes how intensive interviewing fits with a grounded theory viewpoint or perspective, and makes some distinctions in types of grounded theory development.

Constructivist grounded theorists are focused on learning the participant’s words and exploring the researcher’s areas of theoretical interests. Language is fundamental to framing questions and understanding responses.

Intensive interviewing permits more control to the interviewer than other qualitative methods, and this allows researchers to control the pace and quality of emerging theories.

Grounded theorists aim to understand what is happening, and the method requires returning to the field throughout the research process to answer questions that emerge during interpretation. But by focusing on what is happening, a researcher may avoid focusing on the specifics in a participant’s stories. Interview data is used to construct conceptual categories, inductively, and so theory can take precedence over the collection of rich narratives.

There are four main “theoretical concerns” that impact what a grounded theorist looks for: theoretical plausibility, direction, centrality, and adequacy. The author diagrams a flow, moving from a continual process of interviewing, coding, and memoing, to an identification of recurring statements, towards tentative categories, towards an initial theory, refined through interviews with theoretical sampling, towards theoretical centrality. This is then assessed for theoretical adequacy. Theoretical plausibility can be applied or considered in a fragment of data, if it “provides a way of understanding many more situations you have encountered.”

The author makes some delineations between objectivist grounded theory and constructivist grounded theory. One difference is in documentation—if an interviewer should record and transcribe interviews, or simply take notes. Another is in focus areas: trying to elicit definition of terms and events (constructivist) or chronology, events, and problems (objectivist).

Grounded theory prescribes against starting with categories and forcing data into them; to encourage this, researchers study how language is used to enact meaning.