Constructing Grounded Theory

Kathy Charmaz was Professor Emerita of Sociology and the former director of the Faculty Writing Program at Sonoma State University. She joined the first cohort of doctoral students at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied with Anselm Strauss. She wrote in the areas of social psychology, medical sociology, qualitative methods, and grounded theory, and over her career wrote, coauthored, or coedited 14 books, including two award-winning works: Good Days, Bad Days; The Self in Illness and Time, and Constructing Grounded Theory. She received the George Herbert Mead award for lifetime achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Leo G. Reeder award for distinguished contributions from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Professor Charmaz also gave workshops on qualitative methods, grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, and scholarly writing around the globe.

Praise for the second edition:Kathy Charmaz’s new edition of her classic text on developing grounded theory is an invaluable resource for qualitative and mixed methods scholars. Her formulation of grounded theory analysis is remarkable for its eclectic synthesis of what have been contentious approaches and for its clear connections to the variety of qualitative data analysis methods. I have used Dr. Charmaz’s work to teach both general induction and specifically grounded theory methods. The emphasis on research thinking and decision making, the explicit discussion of theories we start with and theories we build, and the extensive variety of examples in the second edition enrich our understanding of what we are doing when we do research. The book is an indispensable part of a qualitative research library.

• Chapter 1: An Invitation to Grounded TheoryChapter 2: Gathering Rich DataChapter 3: Crafting and Conducting Intensive InterviewsChapter 4: Interviewing in Grounded Theory StudiesChapter 5: The Logic of Grounded Theory Coding Practices and Initial CodingChapter 6: Focused Coding and BeyondChapter 7: Memo-writingChapter 8: Theoretical Sampling, Saturation, and SortingChapter 9: Reconstructing Theorizing in Grounded Theory StudiesChapter 10: Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded TheoryChapter 11: Writing the DraftChapter 12: Reflecting on the Research Process