Kathy Charmaz

Sonoma State University | SSU · Sociology Department

This article introduces grounded theory and places this method in its historical context when 1960s quantitative researchers wielded harsh criticisms of qualitative research. The originators of grounded theory, sociologists Glaser and Strauss, sought to defend the quality of qualitative research and argued that grounded theory increased its quality...

This paper is about the development of constructivist grounded theory. It shows how the method has been advanced, has spread across disciplines and professions, and indicates its growing reception as a major qualitative method. I discuss its epistemological roots and compare them with earlier versions of grounded theory.

This article addresses how constructivist grounded theorists grapple with conducting their research and use the method for social justice research and critical inquiry in the public sphere. To explicate how using this method ensues, I sought reflections from four researchers explaining why they adopted the method and how they used it. I also review...

Neoliberal perspectives, policies, and practices increasingly affect chronically ill and disabled people's embodied experiences of stigma and exclusion. Neoliberalism emphasizes individual responsibility and self‐sufficiency, a limited social safety net, and narrow governmental accountability. Examining pivotal experiences of chronically ill people...

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Social+Self+and+Everyday+Life%3A+Understanding+the+World+Through+Symbolic+Interactionism-p-9781118645338

This article examines qualitative data in an era of neoliberalism and focuses on the place of data in grounded theory studies. Neoliberal values of individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, competition, efficiency, and profit have entered the conduct of research. Neoliberalism fosters (a) reifying quantitative logical-deductive research, (b) imp...

What continuities and contradictions can qualitative researchers discern among versions of the grounded theory method? How do contradictions within the method affect research practice? How do new versions of grounded theory advance research practice and critical inquiry? To answer these questions, this keynote address begins with a brief overview o...

A lengthy foreword discussing the context, content, and significance of Anselm Strauss's book, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity

The purpose of this constructivist grounded theory article is to identify, explore, and theorize the social and psychological processes used by people with Parkinson disease. Analytic procedures generated the five-stage theory of Preserving self of people with Parkinson disease: (a) making sense of symptoms, (b) defining turning points, (c) experie...

Grounded theory is a powerful qualitative method for social justice inquiry. Essentially, grounded theory is a flexible, systematic, comparative method of constructing theory from data that supports studying social and social psychological processes. In this chapter, we show how researchers can use grounded theory strategies in social justice inqui...

Constructivist grounded theory is useful for pursuing critical qualitative inquiry. This article introduces critical inquiry and shows its connections with pragmatism, the philosophical foundation of constructivist grounded theory. Pragmatism provides a theoretical frame for thinking about critical qualitative inquiry; constructivist grounded theor...

Kathy CHARMAZ is one of the most important thinkers in grounded theory methodology today. Her trailblazing work on constructivist grounded theory continues to inspire research across many disciplines and around the world. In this interview, she reflects on the aura surrounding qualitative inquiry that existed in California in the late 1960s to earl...

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 th...

Chronic illness lasts. A chronic illness has a lengthy duration, uncertain outcome, and unpredictable episodes, often with intrusive symptoms and intermittent or progressive disability. Having a chronic illness poses life problems such as following a medical regimen, managing ordinary responsibilities, and experiencing stigma and discrimination. A...

Grounded theory is a general methodology with systematic guidelines for gathering and analyzing data to generate middle‐range theory. The name “grounded theory” mirrors its fundamental premise that researchers can and should develop theory from rigorous analyses of empirical data. The analytic process consists of coding data; developing, checking,...

Prepublication Version of "Identity Dilemmas of Chronically Ill Men

George Herbert Mead is widely recognised as the father of symbolic interactionism, a theoretical perspective that gave new direction to research in diverse fields of study. His dynamic theory of action based on meaning, agency and process challenged conceptions of social structures as fixed and stable and has been fruitfully used to examine facets...

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 significan...

Grounded theory and theoretical coding Grounded theory (GT) is a research approach in which data collection and analysis take place simultaneously. Each part informs the other, in order to construct theories of the phenomenon under study. GT provides rigorous yet flexible guidelines that begin with openly exploring and analysing inductive data and...

This article locates the development of the grounded theory method in its national, historical, and disciplinary origins and explores how and to what extent these origins affect grounded theory practice across the globe. The purpose is to begin a conversation about the prospects and problems of using grounded theory for international scholars. To g...

The sociological study of death and dying and the grounded theory method made a simultaneous debut. Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss’s (1965) book, Awareness of Dying, brought death and dying into sociological purview, and put the experience of death and dying on the agenda of grounded theorists. Any review of death and dying through using gr...

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 be...

My story is one of becoming a sociologist by accident. Throughout this story, I emphasize the turning points I took and those thrust upon me during my sociological journey. The turning points in my path to becoming a sociologist began during my childhood, although I could not have foreseen them. Both of my parents had experienced downward social mo...

Chronic illness and disability present circumstances in which people become conscious of their body and refl ect upon them in ways that may or may not be on their own terms. Thus, as Kathy Charmaz and Dana Rosenfeld suggest, “Studying people's experiences with chronic illness and disability teaches us of the fragility of our body and its appearance...

History of Grounded TheoryIntroduction to the Method What Kinds of Research Questions is Grounded Theory Most Suited To?What Kinds of Questions is Grounded Theory Not Suited To?Collecting Data: What Constitutes Data and How Much Should I Collect?How Might Participants and Service Users be Involved in Grounded Theory Studies?How Does a Researcher Us...

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore what disclosing illness and disability in the workplace means to workers with chronic illness and disabilities. It aims to argue that beginning analysis from the meanings of these workers contributes to a nuanced understanding of their situations; gaining this view requires knowing how individuals define their...

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 th...

A Brief History of Chronic Illness ScholarshipThe Impact of Uncertain Chronic Disease on the SelfShame and StigmaChronic Illness in Sociostructural Context: Medicalized Environments, Medicalized Identities, and Chronic IllnessConclusion References

This study addresses how people with chronic illnesses (1) measure their pursuits as indicators of their health and (2) adopt such measures as markers of who they are and are becoming. Ultimately, such markers can become part of the person's self-concept. This article notes how work generates measures, but emphasizes those that people derive from t...

Anselm is perhaps best known for creating the grounded theory method with Barney G. Glaser. The Discovery of Grounded Theory was a cutting-edge book that fueled the qualitative revolution. I agree – strongly – with Norm Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994, p. ix) that a qualitative revolution has taken place in the United States. The Discovery book arr...

I will briefly suggest why Blumer's injunctions are crucial, and lay out several of their implications. To me, gaining intimate familiarity means gaining an in-depth knowledge of the research participants, their setting or settings, and their situations and actions. This notion of intimate familiarity has been espoused in Analyzing Social Settings...

This article sketches a personal story of life at a teaching institution when jobs in sociology were scarce. I examine the concept of elitism and situate it in conditions that shaped the discipline of sociology in the 1970s when a growing number of women entered the field. Throughout my story, I raise the following points: (1) Defining elitism requ...

This keynote address looks at marginalization in two realms: chronic illness and qualitative research. It conceptualizes marginalization through examining stories about experiencing chronic illness. Marginalization means boundaries or barriers, distance or separation, and division or difference. Marginalization assumes a core of enacted rules and m...

The term grounded theory refers to a set of methods for conducting the research process and the product of this process, the resulting theoretical analysis of an empirical problem. The name grounded theory mirrors its fundamental premise that researchers can and should develop theory from rigorous analyses of empirical data. As a specific methodolo...

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 meth...

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 over...

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 th...

Two research stories provide a means of looking backward at our discipline over the twentieth century and of thinking about moving forward in the twenty-first. These stories recount individuals' quest for control when their moral status is threatened. Both research stories and sociological stories render reality, subscribe to rulesfor such renderin...

This article provides a collection of students' anecdotes about what studying with Anselm Strauss meant for their lives and careers. Their stories are presented as direct statements rather than refracted through an analyst's lens. The remembrances these students offer represent the experiences of many more. Their statements emphasize how they learn...

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 gend...

Medical sociology ranges from studies of formal medical care to those of health, healing, and caring practices outside the health care system. This field has had a history of ethnographic and qualitative research since its beginnings. Because few studies in medical sociology derive from immersion in a setting, the authors examine those qualitative...

Voice, the animus of storytelling, the author's presence in written works, concerns both sides of the modernist fence. Authors are urged to restrain and regulate their voices in deference to disciplinary expectations. We advocate developing an audible writer's voice that reflects our empirical experiences. Voice ranges from the evocative to the ana...

Serious chronic illness undermines the unity between body and self and forces identity changes. To explicate how the body, identity, and self intersect in illness, one mode of living with impairment, adapting, is explicated in this article. Adapting means altering life and self to accommodate to bodily losses and limits and resolving the lost unity...

The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse, by Donileen R. Loseke.

Chronic illness frequently comes to men suddenly with immediate intensity, severity, and uncertainty. Because men contract more serious and life-threatening chronic illnesses than women, experiencing illness causes men different identity dilemmas. This paper explores men's identity dilemmas by studying how men experience chronic illnesses and by lo...

This paper focuses on using the grounded theory method to study social psychological themes which cut across diverse chronic illnesses. The grounded theory method is presented as a method having both phenomenological and positivistic roots, which leads to confusion and misinterpretations of the method. A social constructionist version and applicati...

Generally, reviews of new ethnographies or methods texts are solicited and compiled by the New Ethnographies editor. The preferred form, unless specified otherwise, is an 800-1000-word critical essay addressing theoretical, methodological, and/or substantive contributions of recently published materials relevant to ethnographic inquiry. Unsolicited...

Physical pain, psychological distress and the deleterious effects of medical procedures all cause the chronically ill to suffer as they experience their illnesses. However, a narrow medicalized view of suffering, solely defined as physical discomfort, ignores or minimizes the broader significance of the suffering experienced by debilitated chronica...