13 - Questions and answers

Summary

Over the years, students in our research seminars have repeatedly asked some of the same questions when puzzled, confused, not yet grasping, or psychologically thrown by certain features or procedures in learning the grounded theory style of analysis. Most questions arise because a student's stage of development does not yet allow him or her to answer those questions: For instance, “How do I know when I have a category?” and later, “a core category?” Other questions arise because students are plagued by lingering doubts about the validity or efficacy of grounded theory (and qualitative analysis generally), having been schooled or partly sold on quantitative methods. Hence, questions are raised about sampling, reliability, and so on. Associated questions pertain to how to convince others who are committed to quantitative methods about the validity or reliability of the qualitative methodology that the students are learning. Other questions stem from puzzlement about some procedures, like converting questions of psychological motivation into sociological questions and analysis. And understandably, there are still other sets of queries about how to write up the results of analysis for publication or speech making.

That certainly does not exhaust the list of sources for questions, but it does help to explain why the bulk of queries are raised - often more than once by the same student, who either remains unconvinced or cannot yet grasp the answer given to the gnawing question. Most questions have already been addressed in this book, but since readers will probably raise some of the same questions, it should be useful to them also to have at least brief additional answers given to the most-frequently raised ones.