Overview
Welcome to Master of Arts—Interdisciplinary Studies 640: Grounded Theory, Exploration, and Beyond. This course is designed to give you an introductory opportunity to produce your own original grounded-theory research. We hope that you will find that grounded theory research has the potential to be an exciting and creative endeavour.
What is grounded theory? Simply, it is a social scientific methodology that is designed to generate theory from the “ground”—or information and data—up. Therefore, it is a theory-building methodology, rather than a theory-testing one. As you will see, the methodology is unique within the practice of social research.
For years, grounded theory has been viewed with suspicion, with many wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, theory has to be grounded in data, doesn’t it? Otherwise, it is just speculative philosophy or fantasy. Because of these misgivings, the method of grounded theory has sometimes been seen as misguided quackery and therefore dismissed.
Despite such misconceptions, since its inception grounded theory has repeatedly proven its worth to many social researchers, researcher-practitioners, and those who have reviewed its results in an increasingly wide array of substantive areas. Further, grounded theory has more recently begun to spin off into exciting new hybrid forms, embracing researcher interests in participatory action research, feminism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and so on. Its potential is truly remarkable. Thus, the intention of this course is to provide you with a venue for wherever you, the budding grounded theorist, would like to take the methodology—as long as your research remains true to the basic tenets of grounded theory. So, carpe diem!
Ultimately, then, this will be a very practical course. Although you will need to become comfortable with the philosophical justifications for grounded theory and its basic characteristics, everything in this course culminates in your writing a piece of grounded theory in a substantive area of interest to you. At first glance, this might appear to be a daunting prospect—there is no formula for doing this sort of thing and so, ultimately, every grounded theory exploration is a unique learning and discovery experience. But if you are an explorer at heart, we hope you will relish that experience and, when the course is over and you have finished your project, that you will look back on it and say (rather like a kid getting off a rollercoaster for the first time), “Yes! That was great! I want to do it again!”