Talk:Grounded theory

G. Thomas and D. James

I hate this paper. The seem to manage to spend 2000 words saying something that could be said in three sentences. --Writethenread (talk) 10:25, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Restructure

I keep on wanting to restructure this article. But I'm not qute sure how to do so. Restructuring well can rqeuire you to understand the soure material and the "entire editorial logic" behind the articles structure at the same time.

Random thoughts that come to mind at the moment:

• I don't like the use of bullets. But I don't know why. I think they make stuff difficult to read. I found some papers about how bullets remove the logical relation between sentences created by "but, however, and etc". I thin I might want to turn some of these into separate paragraphs
• I want to merge premise and philosophy into a single section - perhaps adding some subsections.
• I want to merge stages of analysis and nomeclenture, and turn nomenclenture into a discussion of methodology

Does anyone have opinions or suggestions. (Writethenread (talk) 10:47, 4 October 2020 (UTC))

User:Writethenread, The grounded theory entry is weak. I have tried to improve on the unclear writing. I recently hit a wall in the nomenclature section and temporarily gave up. Iss246 (talk) 20:27, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I'm interested in this topic, so might have a go myself, perhaps you could give me some feedback if I have a go. Any advice would be useful :) ? I'm mostly trying to avoid a "you changed everything and it's terrible" scenario if I do some heavy editing. --Writethenread (talk) 11:44, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Sure user:Writethenread, I would give you feedback. The Nomenclature section is a challenge. Sometimes when I encounter a weakly written, unclear batch of text on WP, I edit one sentence. Make the change. Enter the change. Then I proceed to the next sentence, sometimes right after I edited the previous sentence, sometimes a day later.

The Nomenclature section had me scratching my head. Look at the sentence that kicks off the Nomenclature section: "A concept is the overall element and includes the categories which are conceptual elements standing by themselves...." It kind of says, in effect, that a concept is a concept, or something like that. I'm not sure. Iss246 (talk) 18:15, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

User:Writethenread, a few moments ago, I tried to improve the lead. Perhaps my edits of the lead can help us improve the Nomenclature section. Iss246 (talk) 18:36, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Hey there. I'll have a look at what you did. I've been digging into the literature for the sentence. I got the original book by glaser and strauss, and it was equally cryptic. I've found this iier.org.au/iier16/moghaddam.html - which looks like it might be helpful (searching google scholar for "grounded theory propert") --Writethenread (talk) 19:39, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, so I think the idea is that category is like a "label" you attach to data, you then group these into categories (groups of labels) and associate properties with different concepts in a category (categorical data) or "dimensions" - things that can vary. --Writethenread (talk) 20:06, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

I read the book a few years ago. I don't believe that it is possible go into a set of qualitative data without any preconceptions or any ideas about the subject matter. I attended a seminar Strauss gave an NYU a few years ago and told him as much. Several graduate students at the meeting agreed with me. Others were noncommittal. I view qualitative research as one way to obtain ideas/hypotheses (although there are other ways) but I don't think it can be done in the Glaser-Strauss way. In the section on criticisms, that is made abundantly clear. Iss246 (talk) 23:24, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

I found a nice source for properties / categories - sage handbook of grounded theory p.196 looks like it might be a clearer discussion of the meaning of terms. I think I agree with you in practice but not in theory :), in theory you could go and build a minimal possible descriptive model of what is going on (along with a minimal model of human language interpreted by a machine) and be completely clear and specific about of priors - though the technology to do so does not yet exist. In practice you have to use your brain and it's learned way of categorising and interpreting things - which will always have some priors. I'd like to think there is some middle ground there so that you can be "more objective" (or perhaps not obviously wrong)... like the whole point studying anything is that some things might be more likely to be true that others, and grounded theory-esque studies on some controversial topics have been pretty compelling to me as "not obviously biased, perhaps I should update me views". --Writethenread (talk) 06:37, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Cool cool. I had a go at a little rewriting of the first paragraph (as well as merging together sections into methodology). See what you think. I'm a fan of the sage handbook - it's one of those "edited sets of papers" so it gives a range of viewpoints. --Writethenread (talk) 16:56, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Plagiarism

Ugh, the split in methodology section seems to have been lifted from https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sePEDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=%22Data+are+co-constructed+by+researcher+and+participants,+and+coloured+by+the+researcher%27s+perspectives,%22&source=bl&ots=JlPo2HYTKj&sig=ACfU3U1mTUGSJDtH0yAz-dDr6Oad5R1Lig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjnkJP2v6DsAhUEi1wKHWrwCM4Q6AEwA3oECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=%22Data%20are%20co-constructed%20by%20researcher%20and%20participants%2C%20and%20coloured%20by%20the%20researcher's%20perspectives%2C%22&f=false . I think it might have bee there for a while. Not sure what to do about that. I'll start off by rewriting the sectioni. --Writethenread (talk) 17:38, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Hmm... it's worse that that. I think the majority of the article is lifted from this text. Looks like it might be a complete rewrite. --Writethenread (talk) 17:42, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

That book was published in 2019 and most of this article predates it. Perhaps the copying was in the other direction? - MrOllie (talk) 18:06, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, all very confusing. Do you think we should do anything? --Writethenread (talk) 18:24, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

@Writethenread:@MrOllie: The entire entry was poorly written when I came to open it. I tried to edit it a little at a time. I was stymied by the Nomenclature section but did not check for plagiarism in the split methodology section or any other section. I wasn't thinking about plagiarism because so much of what I read was too poorly written to have been plagiarized!

I edited a little of the split in methodology section but I did so without knowledge of the book user:Writethenread identified (Research Methods in Social Science Statistics). BTW, I had reverted all the GT abbreviations and replaced them with the term "grounded theory." I did that because some parts of the article contained the term "grounded theory" and in later parts of the article the abbreviation "GT" was used, giving the article an uneven look. I think the GT came from the plagiarist because GT is what the author of the book Research Methods in Social Science Statistics used. What a mess!

Would it be helpful if we deleted the section covering the split in methodology given our own and WP's rejection of the use of plagiarized text? I guess that the "split" section was written by undergraduates, who sometimes don't understand the rules pertaining to plagiarism. We could delete the suspect text and invite editors who are experts in this area to cover the issue of the split. What do you Writethenread and MrOllie think? Iss246 (talk) 19:02, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Given the dates I think it is unlikely that this article plagiarized the book in question. If I'm wrong about that and we copied them just blanking and/or rewriting this article wouldn't be a solution, we'd have figure out exactly when the copyright violation happened, revert to before that, and get an admin to delete the bad revisions from the article history. - MrOllie (talk) 19:43, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

It's more than just that section. Philosophical underpinnings, stages, premise, and nomencleture are all in that book. I feel like agreeing with user:MrOllie . --Writethenread (talk) 19:47, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

The book in question is published by Ed-Tech Press which has been found to be a non-reliable source that republishes Wikipedia articles: see Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 304 § Odd publisher: Ed-Tech Press and Wikipedia:New page patrol source guide § Science and technology. I haven't compared the content of the article and the book, but judging from the discussion above and this knowledge of the publisher, this is likely a case of republishing Wikipedia content, not plagiarism. Biogeographist (talk) 20:34, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

User:Biogeographist, thanks for the heads-up. I'm stuck on what to do about the Nomenclature section. Do you have a suggestion regarding that section? Iss246 (talk) 20:46, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

No, I don't have any suggestions at this time, though I can see that the article needs more work. Biogeographist (talk) 12:24, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Hello User:Biogeographist, user:MrOllie, User:Writethenread. I think we have a made some progress in improving the entry for Grounded Theory although we still have some distance to go. Iss246 (talk) 20:09, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Grounded theory is a type of theory not methodology

Grounded theory is a type of theory and not a method. Glaser and Strauss's (1967) book, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, suggests ways to discover grounded theories. The book has a chapter on discovering theory from quant data. The relevant qual method is the constant comparative method. I think the article has some momentum now on the stance that it's a method, so I'm hesitating to wade in...! Andi Fugard [they/them] (talk) 11:17, 26 December 2023 (UTC)