🤔 3. Grounded Theory Research

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 3: Grounded Theory for (All) Research, which should be completed between 2/8 - 2/14. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 2, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Learn about grounded theory
• Conduct 3 rounds of preliminary research
• Begin developing research questions for your project

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

What’s Grounded Theory and Why Should I Care?

Grounded theory the name for an approach to doing research and building theory “from the ground up” — meaning “from the data.” Grounded theory research begins with data in the form of secondary research (library research) or primary research (fieldwork). The grounded theory researcher takes an active, interpretive role in approaching their secondary research with few to no predetermined thoughts and no preexisting literature review. In our class, you’re this grounded theory researcher; your experience influences the research questions that are asked and the hypothesis you come up with.

You’ll be collecting data and conducting analysis by categorizing evidence and figuring out the relationships between these categories — “from the ground up,” starting this week in a casual, cursory fashion, with preliminary research meant to familiarize you with contemporary discourse around current problems, or tensions, of your field,

Looking Ahead!

Because your experience is a valuable part of grounded theory, reflecting on your process of doing and writing research is important! This is why, whenever you engage in team workshops, you’ll also write short “process reflections,” intended to help you become aware of your meta-cognitive (“thinking about thinking”) research processes and how they influence your approach to grounded theory and qualitative research.

Engaging in grounded theory doesn’t mean you’re developing a grand theory at the level of established philosophers. It’s about looking for patterns in the textual evidence that you collect — starting this week with the preliminary research you’ll be doing.

How Do I Prepare for Grounded Theory Research?

As you might be able to guess, grounded theory approaches require a lot of loosely guided searching, previewing, and skimming, where you revise your search strings in each new search based on more specific and effective keywords you uncovered in the previous search.

One way to begin doing this is to look up the professional associations in your career field and preview their websites to get a sense of important keywords to your discipline and current issues or problems in your discipline. For instance, someone writing about healthcare workers in the mental healthcare field might visit the American Psychological Association, where just clicking the “Topics” tab suggests that a top issue in the field right now is the dangers of generative AI on adolescents’ psychological development and health. Then, using Google Scholar, the writer would try entering combinations of those keywords along with search strings that guide you towards increasingly specific potential research questions.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Review the ENG 201: Strategic Searching section of the Pace LibGuide for guidance on: selecting keywords (a grounded theory approach means you should not yet have a research question); using Boolean operators (and, or, not), wildcards, and limiters; and tips on organizing your search results, including a downloadable search chart (linked here for your added convenience)!

Forming Research Questions

You won’t be drafting your research questions until next week, but through the process of grounded theory research, you’ll naturally begin developing them this week. Your questions will arise out of what you learn from your preliminary research. They’ll evolve and change and become more specific the more you do preliminary research — and the more drafting you do throughout the semester.

Barroga & Matanguihan (2022) describe the development of research questions as:

“A process based on knowledge of current trends, cutting-edge studies, and technological advances in the research field. Excellent research questions are focused and require a comprehensive literature search and in-depth understanding of the problem being investigated. Initially, research questions may be written as descriptive questions which could be developed into inferential questions. These questions must be specific and concise to provide a clear foundation for developing hypotheses. Hypotheses are more formal predictions about the research outcomes.”

🛑 Stop: Watch!

Read this page and watch the embedded video “Picking Your Topic is Research!” produced by NC State University Libraries, which walks you through the process of choosing a topic using research, and using research to test the viability of your chosen topic.

Researchers tend to ask discipline-related kinds of questions, leading to a variety of scholarly inquiries within one research topic. Palmer (2020) offers the example of “renewable resources” and poses multiple discipline-specific questions:

• Business, Accounting, Economics: “Which renewable resources offer economically feasible solutions to energy issues?”
• History: “When did humans switch from the use of renewable resources to nonrenewable resources?”
• Environmental Studies: “How can algae be developed at a pace and in the quantities needed to be a viable main renewable resource?”
• Geography: “Which U.S. states are best suited to being key providers of renewable natural resources?”

Like many scholars, you’ll need to combine those kinds of questions with the particular asks of the Qualitative Research Project for ENG 201. This means you’ll need to do some reading and writing simultaneously.

You’ll learn more about developing research questions and hypotheses next week, when we talk about drafting discipline narratives, research questions, and problem statements!

Strategies for Active Reading and Annotation

You’ll engage with the below strategies more deeply when we get to the Literature Review, but they may come in handy as you embark on your preliminary research.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega blogs quite a bit about academic writing that work at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Among these strategies, he explains “How to Map Out Debates in the Scholarly Literature”. This is one way of positioning yourself and your inquiry in a body of existing literature. Of particular interest to our class is the “Empirical/Case Based Approach: Which case better illustrates a particular element.” For this research project, you’ll want to avoid approaching your project from a binary position (e.g., for/against).

Some of the steps Pacheco-Vega outlines for mapping debates that might be useful for your research process are as follows:

1. Identify the core element of discussion
2. Identify the type of debate you are finding in the literature: Are authors positioned along a continuum? Does the scholarly work you are finding support polarized positions (yes/no, pro/against)? Has the debate evolved over time? Is it theoretical, methodological?
3. Trace the different arguments and authors

He also recommends mapping specific citations. For this, you might want to glance at the Works Cited of articles that seem especially useful, and make note of those authors and titles for later previewing or skimming.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Pacheco-Vega describes the AIC technique in Finding the Most Relevant Information in a Paper When Reading: A Three-Step Method.

Conducting (Preliminary) Secondary Research

Tip!

For tips on using Boolean operators (and, or, “”, intext, intitle, etc.), check Illinois University’s guide.

🛑 Stop: Watch!

Watch the below video, “Basics of Literature Review Searching (ENG 201),” produced by Pace Library, which contains tips on conducting effective database searches.

🛑 Stop: Free-Write!

To prepare for the Research Introduction, try conducting 3 rounds of preliminary research on your own right now by following the directions below.

First, make a list of keywords that apply to your discipline or career and that describe a problem or issue that you think is plaguing your field. Create a search string that’s as specific as possible: e.g., “bioinformatics” is a more meaningful search than “computer science”; “neonatal intensive care unit nurse” is stronger than “nursing”; “racial inequity in salary” is stronger than “salary difference.”

Using previewing strategies, go through ~50 results — article titles and abridged summaries provided by Google Scholar. Write down keywords, phrases, and conceptual vocabulary that feel useful.

Important!

Make sure to focus on the issue faced by members or employees in your discipline (not the clients or publics they serve!) in one part of your search string, and in the other part of the search string, focus on the specific major/career or even subfield.

Next, use the notes you just took to refine all of the terms in your search string. The goal is to get to a line of inquiry so specific, you won’t have to spend hundreds of pages exploring every corner of it once you start drafting.

Next, conduct a new Google Scholar search using your updated search string. Using previewing strategies, review ~25 results — article titles, abridged summaries — and this time, open the articles and skim the abstracts as well.

Practice: Carillo’s Practice Exercises

As you read the articles your preliminary research uncovers, practice each of the reading strategies Carillo described in the book chapter you read last week, especially previewing, skimming, reading and evaluating, and reading like a writer.

As before, but with more (and different!) information, write down phrases, words, and keywords that feel useful. Your expanded list might have made some of your previous keywords less useful or redundant; take a moment to cross those out. What themes are emerging for you now? What controversies, debates, and problems appear to plague members of your discipline (e.g. funding, staffing issues, overwork and burnout, lack of emotional support, low salaries, frequent demoralization, identity bias, inequality, etc.)?

Take a moment to jot your observations down.

Using your new keywords, refine all of the terms in your search string again, and repeat your search with the new, updated search string. Using previewing, skimming, and reading and evaluating strategies, review ~25 results — article titles, abridged summaries — and open the articles and skim the abstracts and first and last paragraphs as well. As before, but with more (and different!) information, write down phrases, words, and keywords that feel useful. If any items on your orevious list now feel redundant, take a moment to cross those out.

Important!

Don’t worry if your search string becomes so specific that the number of results shrinks from 100s to 10s. When you conduct research for the literature review, you’ll be looking for sources that don’t exactly match your research questions. It might seem counterintuitive to you, but the more specific your research hypothesis, the less you’ll end up having to write and rewrite later on.

Keep doing the above until you’re down to fewer than 1000 results.

Finally, make a list of 5-10 of the articles that feel closest to inspiring your research questions — and skim these articles in search of the authors’ research hypotheses. From everything you’ve just read, what seems like a problem or issue facing your field right now? What didn’t you see in your preliminary research that might serve as a gap, a place where you can contribute to the conversation?

Demo: Preliminary Research!

Here’s an example. Since I’m a disabled professor, I’ll model one way to narrow down my general interest in a project about being a disabled academic and professor. (Pay attention to how I experiment with my keywords!)

Let’s say I’ve been playing with the issue faced by employees in the field (disability/chronic illness, in this case), but let’s say I forgot to be specific about the field itself! So I’ll try again, with increased specificity.

In the linked example, I might come away with the following, using Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, Brown & Leigh’s articles, and a couple more to explain some background and form a set of research questions:

Disabled writing instructors, especially those with invisible disabilities, are under-represented in academia due to the risks of disclosure (the possibility of being fired or discriminated against) and a lack of architectural accessibility. Fibromyalgic writing instructors suffer from incurable chronic pain that isn’t always visible, and writing itself is a painful activity even with ergonomic setups. My research questions right now are: How do fibromyalgic instructors negotiate access in the writing classroom through disclosure and accessible pedagogy? How do they use accessible pedagogies to accommodate themselves and their students? What do their strategies tell us about ableism in academia, especially writing studies?

Eventually, I’ll offer a potential answer to those questions, once I’ve really read the research, and that answer will be my research hypothesis.

I really want to ask why academia is ableist, and why disabled instructors can’t be treated better, but these aren’t research questions that I can reasonably, thoroughly address in even 20 pages.

It’s important to use preliminary research on Google Scholar to make it sound like you are coming up with your research questions from existing scholarship, and not out of thin air, just personal experience, or a random Google search.

Use this week’s readings and videos to help you further understand how to come to research questions through grounded theory!

Exit Writing

Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your Tue question and Fri answer posts as well as any other assigned writing. Continue with your preliminary research to prepare for developing your research questions. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when other low- and high-stakes writing assignments for Unit 1 is due.

Remember that by the first draft, you’ll need to have the following info, if it helps you plan your approach now:

• Identifies and describes the discipline you’re studying (1 sentence)
• Identifies and describes some of the problems at large in your discipline (2 sentences)
• Based on your preliminary research, what have scholars writing about the discipline already said about these issues? (2 sentences)
• What tentative research questions, based on this preliminary research, do you have at present? Phrase your RQs like this: “How does [the problem] affect workers in your discipline? Why does it appear and affect them like that? According to the literature, how do workers seem to cope with it?”

By the end of next week, you should end up with 2-5 research questions by the end of our two-week preliminary research process.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources