Kathy Charmaz

Premises, Principles, and Practices in Qualitative Research: Revisiting the Foundations:

In this keynote address, the author focuses on what we bring to qualitative inquiry and how we conduct our research. What we do, why we do it, and how we do it remain contested issues. She proposes that we look at our methodological premises anew, revisit our principles, and revise our practices. Throughout this address, she draws on Goffman’s methodological insights to provide a foundation for reassessing qualitative inquiry. She argues that researchers can build on Goffman’s ideas to strengthen their methodological practices and research products. Last, she counters current institutional scrutiny of qualitative inquiry and suggests unacknowledged benefits of this work.

Stories of Suffering: Subjective Tales and Research Narratives

The following analysis addresses relationships between suffering and the self. It emphasizes subjects’ stories of experiencing chronic illness and their relationship to the construction of self. A symbolic interactionist perspective informs the analysis. Topics include forms of suffering, the moral hierarchy of suffering, relationships between gender and moral status in suffering, and meanings of subjects’ stories. The major argument is that suffering is a profoundly moral status. Placement in the moral hierarchy of suffering affects whether and how an ill person’s stories will be heard.

Stories and Silences: Disclosures and Self in Chronic Illness

The renewed attention to research participants’ stories and researchers’ ways of telling them has advanced our thinking about narratives but neglected the significance of silences. This article addresses the stories and silences of chronically ill people in relation to their self-disclosures. Studying their stories and silences (a) corrects an overreliance on participants’ stories, (b) notes disparities between lived experience and accounts of it, (c) brings the body into analytic purview, and (d) addresses the researcher’s stance and actions. Four often liminal concerns underlie these research participants’ stories and silences: the place of suffering, the potential of dislocation and isolation, the possibility of losing moral status, and potential loss of self and a way of life. These concerns contribute to participants’ rhetoric of self and are implicit in social scientific treatment of illness stories. The article ends by arguing that ethical dilemmas in interacting with participants and rendering their stories may take a different form than currently supposed.

The Self as Habit: The Reconstruction of Self in Chronic Illness:

The self-concept is predicated on taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that become defining characteristics of an individual and distinguish him or her from other people. Chronic illness disrupts these taken-for-granted notions about self, as well as daily habits that support this self. Yet not all people define the disruption that they experience as serious illness with lasting consequences. Their habitual ways of defining self do not permit them to accept altered images of self—even those given in experience. Thus they avoid viewing themselves as chronically ill and resist reconstructing an altered self around illness until they exhaust other plausible explanations and learn over and over in their daily lives that they have changed. The implications for occupational therapists are that patients may either view treatment as irrelevant for their future selves or see the self-images reflected in treatment activities as at odds with their habitualized self-concepts. The article draws on narratives from a qualitative interview study of 140 people with serious chronic illnesses.

Grounded Theory: Methodology and Theory Construction

Grounded theory is introduced as an inductive, comparative methodology that provides systematic guidelines for gathering, synthesizing, analyzing, and conceptualizing qualitative data for the purpose of theory construction. The founders of grounded theory, Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, offered the first explicit, codified statement of how to analyze qualitative data. The intellectual traditions of each of its founders are discussed. Strauss brought Chicago School pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, and field research to grounded theory and Glasers training in survey research gave the method its systematic approach, positivist proclivities, and procedural language. Debates between Glaser and Strauss and Corbin are noted and the distinction between objectivist and constructivist grounded theory is introduced. Objectivist grounded theory assumes the reality of an external world, takes for granted a neutral observer, views categories as derived from data, and sees representation of data and subjects as non-problematic. Constructivist grounded theory places priority on the studied phenomenon over the methods of studying it, uses grounded theory strategies as tools, not as prescriptions, and acknowledges the researchers role in interpreting data and creating categories. Techniques involved in three major grounded theory strategies are described: coding, memomaking, and theoretical sampling. Last, a statement of current emphases and future directions is provided.

Grounded Theory in Global Perspective Reviews by International Researchers

This article locates grounded theory in its national, historical, and disciplinary origins and explores how and to what extent these origins affect research practice across the globe. The article begins a conversation with international researchers who review using grounded theory in their countries and cultures. Their reviews reveal the significance of (a) shared meanings, (b) contradictions between data collection techniques and cultural practices, (c) tensions between coding in English and native languages, (d) points of cultural convergence and grounded theory strategies, and (e) local constraints. In conclusion, the article calls for attending to how the national and cultural underpinnings of methodological approaches affect inquiry.

The Power of Constructivist Grounded Theory for Critical Inquiry

The pragmatist roots of constructivist grounded theory make it a useful method for pursuing critical qualitative inquiry. Pragmatism offers ways to think about critical qualitative inquiry; constructivist grounded theory offers strategies for doing it. Constructivist grounded theory fosters asking emergent critical questions throughout inquiry. This method also encourages (a) interrogating the taken-for-granted methodological individualism pervading much of qualitative research and (b) taking a deeply reflexive stance called methodological self-consciousness, which leads researchers to scrutinize their data, actions, and nascent analyses. The article outlines how to put constructivist grounded theory into practice and ends with where this practice could take us.

Teaching Theory Construction With Initial Grounded Theory Tools A Reflection on Lessons and Learning

This article addresses criticisms of qualitative research for spawning studies that lack analytic development and theoretical import. It focuses on teaching initial grounded theory tools while interviewing, coding, and writing memos for the purpose of scaling up the analytic level of students’ research and advancing theory construction. Adopting these tools can improve teaching qualitative methods at all levels although doctoral education is emphasized here. What teachers cover in qualitative methods courses matters. The pedagogy presented here requires a supportive environment and relies on demonstration, collective participation, measured tasks, progressive analytic complexity, and accountability. Lessons learned from using initial grounded theory tools are exemplified in a doctoral student’s coding and memo-writing excerpts that demonstrate progressive analytic development. The conclusion calls for increasing the number and depth of qualitative methods courses and for creating a cadre of expert qualitative methodologists.

Modern Symbolic Interaction Theory and Health

As sociologists we know that people are connected both to and through society. Individuals share much in the way of values and understandings of the world and their actions generally appear to be coordinated—yet human actors are more than well-socialized cogs in a machine. The symbolic interactionist perspective helps us understand relationships between the individual and the larger society as dynamic. This theoretical perspective views concepts of self, social situations, and society as accomplished through people’s actions and interactions. Through its concepts and guiding assumptions, symbolic interactionism fosters theoretically-driven research with implications for medical sociology, which we address here.

Studying the Experience of Chronic Illness through Grounded Theory

To address how, when, and to what extent experiencing chronic illness assaults people’s lifeworlds, social scientists need to consider class and context as well as the relative intrusiveness of illness and effects on identity. Certainly the notion of assaults on the lifeworld suggests loss, suffering and a diminished quality of life. Assaults on the lifeworld through experiencing chronic illness in Western middle- and upper-class cultures mean loss of one’s taken-for-granted world (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Schutz, 1970). The known world has become deeply problematic and unpredictable. In this case, assaults on the lifeworld become assaults on self and identity (Ciambrone, 2007). Assaults on the lifeworld among impoverished people can mean a relentless barrage of calamity and misfortune that chronic illness exacerbates (see, for example, Abraham, 1993; Pierret, 2007; Scheper-Hughes, 1992). A stable taken-for-granted world was never theirs to enjoy. Assaults on the lifeworld have permeated their existence. Thus, the vicissitudes of chronic illness may be blurred by overwhelming hardships of everyday life.