Methods Matter Podcast – Grounded Theory

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Hello, and welcome to the Methods Matter podcast from Dementia Researcher and the National Center for Research Methods. In this series, we’ll be looking at five different research methods with a method expert and a dementia researcher that has experience of putting the method into practice. And today we’re keeping both feet on the floor, keeping it real and exploring grounded theory. I’m Donncha Mullen. I’m a clinical research fellow at University of Edinburgh, and I’m delighted to be your host in the hot seat asking the questions with my notepad ready. Helping me today in expert corner, we have resident guru, Dr. Kahryn Hughes and in research ranch, we have teaching fellow and PhD candidate Nisha Dhanda from Aston University. Hello, and thanks for joining us.

Nisha Dhanda:

Hi.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Hello. Hi.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

For those who don’t know, Kahryn is an associative professor at University of Leeds, director of the Timescapes archive, editor in chief of the BSA sociological research online and senior fellow of the National Center for Research Methods. She also has an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of qualitative research methods. Did I miss anything, Kahryn?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

No, you didn’t. And that was very flattering. Thank you, Donncha.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. Nisha has a background in clinical audiology, and it is that work that led her to a PhD and an interest in the way people communicate and how this is affected by unmanaged hearing loss and associated comorbidities like cognitive impairment and dementia. Nisha, I see on your bio form that you were a Shotokan karate national champion. I wonder do you use that for street fighting? And if you do, is it true that before a fight, you have to warn someone that your hands are deadly weapons?

Nisha Dhanda:

I wish. No, it’s all about defense not attack. So yeah, you’re very safe with me.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

I was asked to do this one in person and I was too afraid, so I had to stick Zoom for that reason. I actually know a karate joke and I am a recent dad, so I think it falls into the dad category joke. Are you ready for the bad joke?

Nisha Dhanda:

Please, go ahead.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Why did the cupboard learn karate?

Nisha Dhanda:

Hmm, I don’t know that one.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

For shelf defense. Okay. You’re very kind to laugh. Okay. That’s enough bad jokes for now. Let’s get on with the show. Okay. So, what do I know? We begin each podcast with me giving a summary of what I understand of the methods we’re discussing, which of course today is grounded theory.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

So, when I think of grounded theory, I think of Sherlock Holmes and how he would go from specific observed information to making conclusions about events that he didn’t observe happen. So, I guess he reasoned from specific things to more general things, but I wasn’t sure if I could base my entire learning about grounded theory just on that, so I had a quick look on a very good resource called Wikipedia. It tells me that grounded theory is a systematic methodology that has been largely applied to qualitative research methods conducted by social scientists. Okay, that’s easy to follow. Let’s move on it. It then states the methodology involves the construction of hypotheses and theories through the collection and analysis of data. Okay. That sounds pretty much like every methodology, maybe the key is in the next part. Grounded theory involves the application of inductive reasoning. Kahryn, put me out of my misery and give me a proper introduction that I can understand.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Well, first of all, Donncha, I went and had a look at Wikipedia too. I do think that you have to be a bit of an expert in grounded theory to understand the Wikipedia entry, so that’s the first thing. And we need to pedal back a little bit, but before we take a run at grounded theory, because when we’re talking about grounded theory, we’re taking parts in debates about the relationship between research and theory. So that was actually, that provoked Barney Glaser and Anslem Strauss to do the work that they did. I’m going to come onto that in a minute.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, there are three sorts of approaches here. The first is where theory comes first and is then tested through data generation and analysis. The second, and this is where grounded theory falls in, this area is where research comes first and then theory is developed on the basis of data generation and through analysis. And that’s that inductive reasoning. That’s that, so if this is the case, then this might be the case, let’s test that. Let’s build explanation through our data. And the third is where theory data generation and data analysis happens simultaneously in a sort of dialogic or reciprocal process. And it’s worth having a look at Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson’s book Making Sense of Qualitative Data because they elaborate on those three positions.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, in 1967 Glaser and Straus published the Discovery of Grounded Theories: Strategies for Qualitative Research. And in the book, they set out a case for systematically obtaining and analyzing qualitative data in order to discover theory. So, the hint is in the title if you like. And they’re really interesting because they’re coming from two quite different positions. So, on the one hand, they’re addressing this tradition in social sciences, that’s been called symbolic interactionism. And that is looking at how humans through our interactions, symbolically construct our social world. That we make meaning in our everyday lives with each other. We’re always engaged in this process of sense making. So, if we’re symbolically constructing the social world, the implication there is that the social world doesn’t just exist to be studied. You can’t stand outside of it and simply observe, you have to engage with how and why people are making the meanings that they’re doing. But on the other hand, they’re really trying to push back on this idea that it’s all subjective. That we can only ever know our own values, that we can’t build beyond those analytically.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, their intention was to conduct systematic research and they set out a whole set of guidelines around that, around coding data systematically and engaging in what they describe as the constant comparative method, whereas it implies, it’s the constant comparison of all different dimensions of the case under observation. And they make this case as all the vagaries and differences need to be interrogated and accounted for so that you are building from a very sort of substantial empirically focused set of ideas and theories to a formal theory. That’s part of this thing. Grounded theory means it is grounded in the empirical, but it builds out in ways that allow those theories, even though they’re focused on local events, can be generalizable to broader situations. And finally, the other thing is about grounded theory is that they focus on incidents rather than when people talk about lived experience, which is what you might think is implied in symbolic interactionism. Actually, that interaction say is a set of incidents. And that’s where their sort of focus is aimed at.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much for that awesome introduction. And you mentioned the year 1967 there, one of the questions I had for me, I had this idea that grounded theory was quite a new method. Would you say that in comparison to other qualitative methods, that it is a fairly new method?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

No. I think that it builds out quite a long tradition, and if we’re going to get really theoretical, it builds out of Kant actually, Emmanuel Kant. It’s taken up in the work of Husserl and his phenomenology where it’s trying to get to this idea, Husserl talks about bracketing off. So, looking at distinctive situations in which what we’re able to observe. How meaning is formed, through which processes and in which ways. And so, in a sense, although it’s sounds hugely objective, by rendering it as a form of phenomenon, so phenomenology, that we’re able to interrogate in particular ways and build up systematic explanations. So, it’s got this very, very long tradition. In the introduction of their book, they talk about is that… Nisha, you can help me out here… is that Strauss comes from Columbia and Glaser comes from Chicago school, or is it the other way round? I can’t remember. One of them-

Nisha Dhanda:

I think you’ve got it the right way round. You’ve got it right.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Have I got it right way round? So, one comes from a very positivist tradition. One comes from a very interpretivist tradition if we’re using easy sorts of terms to make sense of where they’re coming from. And I think what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to move qualitative research beyond this idea that it’s Casey fireside chats, and that’s all that qualitative data can be treated as. It’s just these very locally situated, descriptive forms of engagement with only local application. And so, it’s reflective of that time, but it has this tremendously long antecedence in philosophical tradition actually as well. So, I think why it might feel new is that it’s been taken up repeatedly in different traditions. So critical realism, constructivism, various other traditions, where it’s been reframed or reorientated. So as any methodology, it has its own history, and that history is never ending. It’s always changing.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. Thank you for putting me straight there. It sounds like a wonderful approach. I love the kind of empirical basis of it. What are the particular situations or areas that you find lend itself to this methodology?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Well, and I’m going to move a little bit away from grounded theory in this sense. I’m going to talk about, and I can’t ever pronounce this and all my students throughout the decades know that I can’t do this, it’s interpretive phenomenological analysis, an IPA. Okay. That’s where we’re going to go with that one. So that’s often been used in health sciences research, and it’s where what we are trying to do is to find out what’s going on in situations where we have no knowledge. So grounded theory approaches, or those approaches, which seek to work from the particular to the general, without relying on previous theory in that area is it’s a really sort of suitable set of questions and approaches for those research settings, where things are quite new and they might be new save through diagnoses, through new social situations. So, it is quite an investigative approach.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. Who was it, was it Donald Rumsfeld who talked about known unknowns and unknown unknowns? Something confusing like that. It sounds like it’ll be good for the unknown unknowns.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yes. So that comes out of the Johari window as well in psychology.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Things that we can know about ourselves, other knows about us and so and so forth, but there’s always something that other people might not know that we might not know that that’s an area of investigation, the unknown unknowns.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. Now this might be a hard question to answer, but is this a hard method to use?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. I think. Well, I think it is and it isn’t. I think, so the basic questions that you ask in grounded theory, like what’s going on and why, I think that’s at the heart of all social and human centered research. Well, any research. What the hell is going on? So, there’s some lovely questions in grounded theory that I think really distill the essence of the most general sort of research endeavor. But I think to conduct grounded theory and make a claim that it’s grounded theory, to move from substantialist or local set of theories and findings to generating a formal theory, that entire process is hugely time consuming. It’s very exhaustive. And I think it’s enormously challenging because I think you need to, if you like, stick with the program and that’s very, very demanding.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. So, words like exhaustive, challenging, demanding. Nisha, I think that brings us nicely onto your experience of using it. I know you’re coming to the end of your PhD, so you might want to give away all the details, save some nice surprises for the thesis committee. But can you tell me about your research? What have you discovered?

Nisha Dhanda:

Of course, yes. So, what I’m really interested in is the mechanisms behind hearing loss and dementia in older adults. And what we know is that social isolation and social withdrawal has some part to play in that association. But I’m interested in how and why it’s maintained in residential care settings. So, I conducted my sort of grounded theory research in two residential care homes and used ethnography and interviews of residents themselves, of relatives and of care staff to really try to understand what the mechanisms were in the communication style within these residential care homes. Is it really down to having a hearing loss and impaired communication through your dementia severity that means that you are isolated, and you withdraw? Or is it because there are people who are unwilling to have social connectedness and social interactions with you, and actually that’s what reinforces your withdrawal and your isolation?

Nisha Dhanda:

And it was fascinating actually trying to form a theory from the research and trying to go in very open-minded, without preempting what it is that I think is contributing to these mechanisms. And what I found was actually that the amount of hearing loss that you have has very little to do with how isolated you feel, and sticking hearing aids on everybody is not the solution in residential care homes, because actually the environment itself needs to be adapted and adjusted for the residents rather than the residents having to stick devices on themselves to adjust.

Nisha Dhanda:

What I also found was that people in a sort of moderate or severe stage of dementia, who may be disordered language and impaired communication, in the right setting, they are still able to have a very thorough and meaningful conversation and connection with somebody, but all it takes is a bit of time and space to get there and for somebody to be able to read between the lines of what they’re saying and follow their track. And actually, because of the way that a residential care home generally is set up, there isn’t the time or space to do that. And then it isn’t the fault of the staff, because they are part of a wider political system that doesn’t allow them to do that. But what it shows is actually there are some really cheap and quick solutions that I won’t go to into too much here, but there are some cheap and quick solutions that we can implement into residential care homes to improve communication for older adults.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

I’m really keen to know what they are. So, we can have a minute on it. What would your top couple of solutions be?

Nisha Dhanda:

Yeah. Couple of solutions, I mean, so adjusting the communal spaces. So, if we think that actually residential care residents, they spend maybe up to 10 hours of their day in the communal areas of the home. If we can adjust the way that the furniture is placed, if we can avoid having a TV, radio and an Alexa on at the same time, if we can have maybe softer furnishings, if we can try to adjust where the natural light is coming from, people may be more ready to adapt, more ready to communicate with one another.

Nisha Dhanda:

If we have somebody like a hearing therapist come in once a week to the home, to spend some time with residents and allow staff to learn about the sort of mechanisms of effective communication, they may be able to implement these things in their daily conversations with residents and that could help them. Could we introduce a very small, quiet space within these communal areas that actually maybe one or two residents could go off and talk with one another? Because it’s not actually about the quantity of friends that you have in this place. It’s about the quality of social connections that you have with people. And that might only be one or two people, but it’s really important to foster those relationships.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Amazing. They all sound like cheap and very sensible and very effective methods and I hope people are listening. I hope people are listening to those. I know from clinical experience that sometimes we think someone who’s living with dementia is agitated or being aggressive, but actually it might be a communication breakdown. You mentioned earlier that it’s not all just about putting in hearing aids, but more these solutions that you’ve just mentioned. Do you think that hearing loss is a contribution to what’s perceived as agitation or aggression?

Nisha Dhanda:

Completely because I always used to say this to my patients, that actually you are not experiencing a hearing loss, you’re experiencing a communication loss, and it’s not just you, it’s actually everybody around you who you want to communicate with successfully. They are involved in this journey with you. So, when you are unable to express yourself as clearly as you want to, and when you have a feeling that you are not being received as well as you want to be, that can cause a huge amount of agitation. And I think that there’s such an overlap in symptoms between unmanaged hearing loss and perhaps the early and moderate stages of dementia, that the two get very confused very quickly.

Nisha Dhanda:

And adding to that, because of sort of recent research in the last 10 years about this possible causal effect of hearing loss leading to dementia, the natural, I suppose solution, that some commercial providers think is that if you stick a hearing aid on someone early enough, then you’re delaying the onset of dementia because now suddenly they’re able to communicate. But actually, what we know is that the processing involved in listening through a hearing aid can be very, very overwhelming for some people. Not for all. And it really is a, I hesitate to say solution, but it is a management option for some people, but for others, it isn’t. So, if we can actually provide communication strategies and find ways to adjust the environment, that’s much more effective.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. Brilliant. It sounds like this method has really worked for you and the findings you have. What spurred you on to use this method in the first place? What was your thought process around that?

Nisha Dhanda:

Yeah, it was great to be introduced to it really early on in my PhD, from my primary supervisor who had used this method in a similar setting. And when she asked me to go and read up about it and see how I felt about using it, it all just seemed to really fit into place because I didn’t know exactly what the answers were to this problem. I knew it was a huge problem, and I knew that from my clinical experience, but actually to really try to understand the lived experience, I felt that this method it sat very well here, and it was a way of using localized context potentially for wider good, if it was done properly. And that’s why I felt really comfortable learning more about it. And then trying to take the bold step to actually implement it.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay, brilliant. Well, good on you making that step. We now have a good description of what the method is and an example of how it has been used. Let’s get into the detail and provide some top tips for anyone who is new to using the method in this segment. I’m going to ask some quick straightforward questions to both guests on how to put the method into practice. Kahryn, the first questions are for you. When is it best to use this method?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, I’ve already said it’s really useful to use grounded theory and situations where nothing yet is known or that there’s only very tenuous knowledge in the area. But it might also be a really good method to use where previous theorizations have been hugely problematic. So maybe they’ve been like racist or sexist or ableist or whatever. I think there’s also politics of method. So, it may well be that there are certain fields, disciplinary fields, where people are more likely to be persuaded by grounded theory than by other qualitative approaches.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, it may well be that people will choose to use grounded theory as a sort of more of a political strategy because they can begin to talk about systematization, internal validity, generalizability. They can present codes. They can demonstrate the relationship between hypotheses and theories, in a sort of almost like to an extent in some form of maybe not a linear line, but certainly a sort of a zigzagging line towards a set of explanations. And it might be, for example, in health sciences research, that grounded theory uses a language that is persuasive to other people say, coming from a much more say a stem background.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

It’s working on me. How does someone prepare to use grounded theory? And could I use quantitative data in it?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things about grounded theory is that, I mean, for me, I think that this sort of thing around as if there’s an antipathy between qualitative and quantitative data is problematic. It’s around how we treat different data as particular forms of evidence in order to build particular sorts of explanations. And we have to be very clear about how some data support certain explanations and how other data support different explanations. And that’s the fundamental challenge for researcher.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, in terms of building, particularly in terms of the incidence’s aspect, in a lot of big data driven social sciences research that’s what’s being identified through big data analytics are unexpected incidences, coalescing sorts of phenomena in data that need then explanation. So absolutely, quant data can be used. Really quickly, so how do people prepare to use it? They have to decide which approach to grounded theory they’re going to take and why. And they also need to understand the extent and scope of grounded theory that is possible because as I said, it’s really exhaustive. It’s challenging, there’s this procedure, it’s very time consuming,

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Keeping what you’ve said about grounded theory in mind, things like it’s difficult, it’s not easy, it’s time consuming, would you recommend that this is more used by experienced researchers, or do you think anyone could use this research method?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think anyone can use it. And again, it’s coming back to this, I always use this language for courses. It’s like, what is it that you’re trying to achieve in your research? So, what’s your question and how are you proposing to answer it? And your question absolutely defines and determines what it is that you need to do in order to answer it. And a lot of PhD is a form of pursuit, a search for the question as well, so it’s a recursive process, quite challenging.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

But grounded theory, as I said, it’s at the core of it really has a set of questions, which is what on earth is going on? How do I make sense of this? How do I build a persuasive argument? So, I think the challenges of grounded theory apply more generally, but again, it’s like, who is this for and what sort of evidence based am I trying to build? And that also determines the sort of extent to which, or the extent of the research study that you’re going to use grounded theory in. And to be honest, I should imagine that Nisha is much better placed to answer that question than I am.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

And I think she is. I’d like to have her input on the next question as well, but I would like to know from your experience, Kahryn, and seeing PhD students using it, one thing I really like to say there a PhD is often a search for the question. So, given that, and given that it’s quite time consuming, if you think the question that somebody wants to ask in their PhD would be suited to grounded theory, would you ever recommend that they ask a different question so that they don’t have to approach grounded theory and the time-consuming nature of it?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

See, I would never dissuade people from using a methodology. I do think that methods aren’t tools. I think that’s the other thing. And I think that’s for me, one of the challenges of grounded theory that it seems to suggest particularly as Glaser and Strauss set it out is that it is. And I much prefer the work of Kathy Charmaz who uses constructivist grounded theory. She does some lovely stuff and shows it as it a much more adaptable sort of set of strategies rather than this very formalized set of procedures.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, for me, in order to understand which methodologies are suitable for a particular research question, that process of reflection is often seen in research to be solely methodological. However, and this is another challenge to grounded theory or a complication of it, is that through interrogating that very question, which method should I use, with these people in this situation, in this way, we are always drawing on additional forms of evidence. We are always building theory around that. And that process of questioning is an in and of itself, a process of empirical inquiry, which is inevitably theoretically driven.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, for me, there’s a second challenge of grounded theory, it’s not had I got enough time to use it, because it’s a set of strategies really, and should be adaptable to those circumstances. But for me, there’s this second challenge, which is it actually possible to be a theoretical? And given that as human beings, we are constantly theorizing about our lives, that our participants, when we are speaking to them are presenting to us sets of theories that draw on bigger theoretical traditions through our shared social history. That there is a challenge for granted theory in that to take account of how we are all always theoretically driven. So again, it’s like, what does my student want to do and what claims do they want to make about their research and what the challenges to that might be?

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. And the final question for you, Kahryn, you mentioned there that grounded theory is a sort of set of strategies and how would you decide which of these strategies you want to use?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Again, it’s like, which is suitable. And I think Nisha, again is much better placed to discuss this in terms of her research, which ones she used and which ones she sort of edited out because they simply weren’t appropriate for this situation. I mean, the other thing is this is what I always find so problematic it’s as if somehow in human-centered research, we’re shipping in these strategies that exist outside of humans. And we use these strategies in the right way, we can somehow generate extra human knowledge. So, this sort of free-floating truth around an explanation around what it is that’s going on or what it is that we are doing. Whereas in actual fact, particularly in qualitative research, our methods reflect what it is to be human. So grounded theory in and of itself is a process of inquiry. It’s asking, what do you think, what’s happening, how did you make sense of this, what does this mean to you, over perhaps a period of time, through different situations with different people. And that is what we do always anyway in making sense of ourselves and making sense of the world around us.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. So, Nisha, I’m going to move over to questioning you. And I have a few extra bonus questions carried over because I think, yeah, we all agree that you’re well placed answer them. So, if it’s okay with you, I’ll start with those ones carried over. So, I guess the first one was around how long it takes to use this method, and would you recommend it for someone doing a PhD?

Nisha Dhanda:

Yes. I mean, I suppose I should state that I am doing a part-time PhD. So, I mean, I did have two kids in between, but I suppose I had the time to really think about in those first two years to think about how I was going to execute the method and building relationships with the care homes in which I conducted the research was a really big element actually, I think of making the research successful. Because residential care homes, they are a social construct within themselves and when you enter as a stranger, it can be very daunting. So, I did a lot of participant engagement work, patient and public involvement work very early on in my PhD, not only with those two care homes, but with two other care homes to really understand the culture of a care home.

Nisha Dhanda:

And I think that by doing so, and by making myself a familiar base within those settings, that really helped me to feel comfortable in doing the observations and doing the interviews. I think somebody doing a full time traditional three-to-four-year PhD, certainly could do this method and do it very well. But it’s just about being planned and from those first few months that you start your PhD, it’s about knowing straight away, okay, well, this is where I would like to conduct my research. So, let’s do all of the preparation to put that into place, because there’s no way that you can just turn up at especially a setting like a residential care home and say oh, is it okay if I spend time with you for a month, without doing any of that planning. Yeah.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. Wise words. And the other question was which strategies from the grounded theory sort of toolkit did you decide to use and how did you decide to use them?

Nisha Dhanda:

Yeah. So, I decided to steer away from the traditional grounded theory methods or strategies, because I had to be very open and conscious about the fact that my clinical background and my clinical career meant that actually I do have some preconceptions about this area of inquiry. I do have an understanding, not the understanding, but one point of view of what it is like to communicate for somebody with hearing loss and learning then about people living with dementia and what that experience is like has been fascinating to me. But what I try to move to much more of a practical grounded theory method, like the constructivist one that Kahryn mentioned, where actually I tried to use the context in which I was in to help really form the theory and apply it to that particular context.

Nisha Dhanda:

I also have done a lot of reading about realist research and sort of how the context and mechanisms of a particular phenomenon will affect the outcomes. And whilst I’m not claiming that I’ve done realist research at all, I think that really having a focus on my context and where the research was placed has helped me to form the grounded theory mechanisms. Because, like I said, I was conducting my research in two different care homes, and those two different care homes have come out with different findings because of the localized context.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. Okay. And this may be my newness to this area, but did your use of the constructivist approach, did that necessarily mean that your preconceived ideas and your experience and your clinical experience, which was all really valuable, did using that approach over others mean that kind of took care of that as an issue, it was no longer a big problem in the research?

Nisha Dhanda:

I wouldn’t say it took care of it because I think that we still have to be very reflective as researchers of how actually those preconceptions can really bias our forming of theories. You know, the data is the data, but actually perhaps the way that I have viewed an observation or the way that I have coded certain interview transcripts may be biased because of my background. And my supervisor is and at the time was so wonderful in allowing me to debrief after an observation or debrief after a set of interviews so that I could almost vent all of these biases and then they were out there. And so actually, whilst they have been acknowledged within the analysis, hopefully I’ve also tried to take away some of the bias as well by acknowledging it.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay, brilliant. So, you mentioned two usual things like reflection and then debriefing or venting your biases, so be more aware of them. Okay.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, I think that’s really interesting what Nisha was saying. And Jennifer Mason uses the language of reflexive epistemology. So, it’s a process of working through what it is that we are thinking, how we are doing that when it’s not just a simple well, what my thinking, but actually it’s theory, building and theory testing simultaneously.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. Thanks for that, Kahryn. And then Nisha, a question I had was how did you stay on track? Or I guess, did you stay on track during this and if so, how did you manage to stay on track while using this method?

Nisha Dhanda:

In terms of, I suppose doing the method because of the setting in which I was in, within the residential care homes, I was very conscious of their time and me sort of imposing on their time and space. So, I think that knowledge really did keep me on track. I knew that I did not want to outstay my welcome. And so, I needed to try to conduct my research within a set amount of time. And I was very planned from the beginning and knew that I would be there for X number of hours over X number of days. And that really helped me to ensure that actually it was all done within that timeframe. And I should add that I completed my last set of observations and interviews two days before the first lockdown. So, thank goodness that I had booked that in. But yeah, it’s very easy to get off track if you don’t meticulously plan when you’re going to do these observations and interviews.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. So, you mentioned a few useful skills there, are there other skills that you think someone should work on developing if they wanted to use this research method?

Nisha Dhanda:

I think being really open-minded is important. And whilst it’s great to acknowledge any preconceptions or acknowledge any biases that you may have being very open-minded to what you are observing and hearing and then asking somebody to take a second and look at your analysis is very helpful to have a discussion about the way that they interpret things compared to the way that you do, and then being open-minded to those differences in interpretation.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Well, it’s been brilliant, and I get the impression this method is a little tricky to use if you want to stay true to the book. But get it right and the benefits are clear. So let me recap on what I’ve learned so far.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

So let me recap on what I’ve learned so far. Grounded theory has multiple traditions from theory to data analysis, but also the reverse of that. So, from researcher data to theory are a simultaneous reciprocal method. A second learning point for me is that grounded theory has a long tradition and builds on work from philosophers, such as Kant. A really interesting point for me was that IPA is not just an Indian pale ale, but it’s also an approach that is suitable to use where we have no knowledge on the subject. And a point that came out time and time again, is that grounded theory is a challenging, demanding, can be exhausting, a time consuming method, but that if you remain with an open mind and keep your preconceived ideas under check, stay focused and keep to a time plan, that you will get some excellent results by the end of it, as demonstrated by Nisha and her findings from her PhD.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

So, in this final part of the show, we’re going to discuss common pitfalls challenges and how to avoid them. Nisha, tell us what challenges you came across in delivering your research and what might you do differently? What have you learned along the way?

Nisha Dhanda:

Yeah, I suppose the biggest challenge initially was trying to form really meaningful relationships within these residential care homes. As I touched on earlier, they have their own sort of culture as soon as you enter the door and trying to be a part of that can be difficult. But I found by sort of trying to stay out of the way as much as I could and trying not to impose on the residents and care staff’s usual routines that really helped. And being really honest and transparent about why I was there, that I was not some official body observing what they do and how they work, but actually I was really interested in them as people. And I suppose another challenge was knowing really when to stop. Like I said, I did already have this set amount of time that I was going to be in the settings for, but I was nervous as to how much data I would get through and collect in that time and whether that was going to be enough and meaningful for me to form the theories and really understand the mechanisms.

Nisha Dhanda:

So, I suppose what I’ve learned along the way is people connect with people. So, if you can be really honest and transparent and upfront about what it is that you want to achieve, then people are there to help you do so. And just don’t stop reading, even when you’re collecting data, just keep on reading to check that you are on the right track with the methodology that you’ve chosen. But then have the confidence to say, well, no, actually I feel like I have collected enough here.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Okay. That’s something I can share that thought around collecting, when have I collected enough data. Kahryn, what are the common pitfalls and how do you avoid them?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So, for me, I think there’s a really big challenge with grounded theory, this idea of being atheoretical, because I just don’t think that, as I said earlier, I don’t think that’s feasible because who we are, where we are, how we understand the world, from what sorts of perspective builds out very much long historical traditions. So for me, there’s a real concern with grounded theory, which is that it sort of is pushing towards what I would describe during, on the work of Norbert Elias as a retreat to the present, that it’s atemporal, that this idea of bracketing off of treating things, humans, situations and incidences as phenomena has the problem, even when like Nisha’s research is absolutely about what is this human, of the human experience. There could be a real push towards trying to exclude all of that. And so, I think that’s a real challenge and a contradiction in the sort of philosophical underpinnings of the methodological approach itself. So that’s one of the biggest pitfalls for me.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

There’s this other thing, which in grounded theory, which is this idea that builds out the constant comparative method and Nisha said, knowing when to stop. So in its original formulation, the grounded theory proposes that you keep on in order to build from a very local particular, substantialist theory to this big formal theory that you’ve got to keep on sort of testing and exploring and interrogating through different forms of comparison in order to understand all of the ins and outs, the vagaries and diversities of situations so that your explanation can account for those. And the language that they used was the language of saturation.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So one of the things that they said is that when you are researching in a situation, so we’re still focused on this substantial area, mental health, dementia and hearing loss or whatever, that when people stop saying something different, i.e. that you’ve reached the extent of diversity and vaguery and difference in that setting, that you’ve in effect reached saturation point. And at that point, so in a sense, that’s telling you that’s, when you stop with the data gathering. You can feel quite confident that you’ve captured all the diversity of that setting. But for me, obviously, I’m somebody who does a lot on methods of qualitative secondary analysis, looking at how data can be endlessly and creatively reused. That the same interview can inform in a billion different ways on the social world, depending on when it’s analyzed and for which reasons, and by whom and so forth.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So that very language of saturation, I think, can be quite problematic. Again, more broadly epistemologically. So, for me, I think that researchers claiming to use that language or wanting to use that language should really treat it with a little bit of caution. And as Nisha has done is that, well, what’s fit for purpose. What was it that I needed to know in order to be able to answer my questions and generate findings that are useful in this particular context and speaks to the needs, both of the participants and also of the service providers? So perhaps thinking a little bit more pragmatically in that way gets us away from a very problematic notion of saturation.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Brilliant. In this final segment, I’m going to give our expert Kahryn one minute to tell our listeners what they should go away and read to further their knowledge on this method.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Okay. Obviously, Glaser and Straus, they wrote a number of books together. But then also Corbin and Strauss, because there was a bit of a rift between the original pairing and it’s worth following that through if you want to see how grounded theory has developed. Kathy Charmaz has developed constructivist grounded theory and her website that she had, and there’s lots of other online resources. There are fantastic resources. And there’s an hour-long interview with her talking about constructivist grounded theory on YouTube that well worth going and having a look at. It was conducted as part of a conference at Huddersfield University.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

For methods and techniques of analysis. I actually think that it’s worth going, having a look at Virginia Braun and Victoria Clark’s website, which is called thematicanalysis.net. This website is absolutely rammed with resources on thematic analysis, and they critically engage with the language of grounded theory. So, for example, they’re very critical of the idea that meanings emerge from data, but actually they deal with the problematics by providing some really helpful guidance on how you might go about those sorts of analysis.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

Thank you so much. I’m afraid that’s all we have time for today. So let me say a huge thank you to our wonderful guests, the incredible Dr. Kahryn Hughes, and the brilliant Nisha Dhanda.

Nisha Dhanda:

Thank you.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Thank you.

Dr Donncha Mullin:

So much for listening. With the show notes you’ll find links to all the resources mentioned by our guest. So please join us next time on the Methods Matter podcast from Dementia Researcher and the National Institute for Research Methods.

END