Are you building your original codes into categories? One thing you need to avoid in GT is simply continuing the the initial or open coding throughout, and then moving on to create categories. Instead, your later coding should build on your earlier work. (I believe Saldana refers to this process as coding "cycles" -- but in GT you do not have to complete a full initial cycle on all of the data before your codes begin to consolidate and evolve.)

Also, what indicates to you that you have not reached saturation?

Many thanks, David L Morgan for the clarifications. I feel that it is not saturated yet as I keep getting new insights from new interviews which are interesting and in my opinion worthy to take into account in relation to the research objectives. So far, I have completed seventeen interviews. Or, should I stop and construct the data structure based on the existing data? Much appreciated.

Hisham,

you're essentially doing Grounded Theory. Coding is done in cycles, the purpose (invoking 'constant comparison' of all codes) of which is to pare down your data to the essentials of 'what's going on' in a studied scenario; you then integrate these essentials into a statement of your Grounded Theory.

Job done.

The number of coding cycles that you implement, will, at minimum, depend on which 'version' of Grounded Theory you do (e.g. Glaser, Strauss and Corbin, Charmaz, etc.).

Some will state that GT is 'hard' or 'very hard' to do; in my opinion, it's not.

You are right about the definition of saturation but 17 is already a lot of interviews. Maybe you need to reframe your topic to match the amount of information you are getting.

At this point I think you need to do more coding rather than more interviewing.

Lots of thanks and much appreciated

David L Morgan & Philip Adams

Looks like I need to revisit my rqs and ros. Will do that. As for the initial or first code , they are more than three hundreds now to go for the categories. I have also refined the categories twice now.

Angelina Inesia Forde I think part of the issue here might be the difference between applying GT versus generating GT. The Glaser article you reference above is about the application of existing GT theories to different substantive areas, and as far as I can tell, it is not much different from Lincoln and Guba's transferability.

But your question of how to extend or modify existing GT is what I have always thought of as an unaddressed paradox in GT: If you are to do GT with no preconceptions (a major tenant of Glaser's), then how can you use existing GT results in further work that involves GT? If there is no way to build on any prior GT, all we can ever produce are a series of substantive GTs that can never be combined or compared. Glaser's answer to this seems to be the difference between substantive and "formal" theory (p. 50), but I do not know how much he or any of his students ever wrote about this.

In my opinion, the production of a GT always involves a process of comparison between evolving GTs (especially through theoretical sampling). Personally, I do not see how this is different from comparing a pre-existing GT to further efforts at developing theory in a given area. But maybe this is just me?

At any rate, I believe the issues you are raising are worth pursuing, but you will probably have to wait until after you finish your thesis.

Again, thank you very much Angelina Inesia Forde

Qualitative especially grounded theory method has always interest me and sometimes reading the books and articles alone is not enough to understand the methodology.

Angelina, Here is an an article I wrote on pragmatism and GT. I don't know if the specifics will be useful to you, but at least it is an example of how GT could evolve.

Hello

In the analysis of interviews

First do the first three interviews as a pilot, then re-evaluate whether the questions should be changed or not. After reviewing the questions and finalizing them after each interview, you can do both manually and using MaxQ DA software. Analyze and codify one of your interviews. Just do not do all the interviews together. Read your interviews several times one by one. Go back and read the interviews over and over again until the participants repeat and say the last three interviews. Consider reaching saturation. Set aside blessing during the interview

Listen to the interviews several times and read them repeatedly so that the code is not left out

Good luck

Fahimeh Barghi Shirazi many thanks for your kind advice. Much appreciated.

Angelina Inesia Forde I think Charmaz moved closer to pragmatism in the second edition of her book, but I also think that constructivism has become a kind on default position for those who reject realism.

I find it interesting that the early pragmatists spent so much of their efforts on distinguishing pragmatism from realism, but essentially ignored the differences between pragmatism and what we would call constructivism (or idealism in more philosophical terms). But since both realism and constructivism center on ontological and epistemological issues, that would make them equally opposed to pragmatism.

If you want to pursue pragmatism further, I have attached another one of my articles.

I personally think that both Charmaz and Antony Bryant underestimate the differences between constructivism and pragmatism. In contrast, Strauss, in the introduction to the 3rd edition of (by then) Corbin and Strauss does a more thorough job of connecting GT with pragmatism.

Angelina Inesia Forde I am familiar with the table you mention from the Charmaz article, but the problem I have is that she seems to want her version her Constructivist version of GT to be a method with both Pragmatism and Constructivism as its philosophical basis. This won't work because Pragmatism and Constructivism are incompatible (or incommensurable, if you will).

More specifically, Constructivism is built around ontological and epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality and the possibility of truth, while Pragmatism is completely agnostic about both of these issues. Instead, for Pragmatists, the philosophy of knowledge is built around action and its consequences.

Plus, her table side-steps the whole issue of prior beliefs and preconceptions. I don't think that either Pragmatism or Constructivism would accept the idea that one can act in the world without having beliefs about how that world operates. But Constructivists largely ignore this issue while Pragmatists make it central. And I don't think that vague allowances for "sensitizing concepts" in GT can solve the problem, because preconceptions cannot be limited to a few broad beliefs.

In contrast, my Pragmatist orientation would argue that prior beliefs are not just unavoidable but essential in understanding how people (including researchers) act. My response to the "problem" of preconceptions is to argue for a more intense focus on researcher reflexivity, starting before data collection and continuing throughout. Charmaz is certainly in favor of reflexivity, but she doesn't say much about how to incorporate it into her version of GT.

So, these are some of the reasons why I said in my prior post that I think Charmaz underestimated the differences between her version of Constructivist GT and a fully Pragmatist GT.

Angelina Inesia Forde I don't want to go through your comments on a point by point basis, especially since the first thing that strikes is your claim that pragmatism is relativistic. In contrast to relativism, pragmatism does deal with the inter-subjectivity of shared belief, so it is hardly relativistic. In particular, Dewey's version of pragmatism emphasizes shared beliefs within communities.

The reason why even Egon Guba admitted that constructivism cannot avoid a slide into radical relativism is because it makes the construction of reality into an entirely individual process. In contrast, pragmatism emphasizes the experience of the world, and explicitly makes this a collective rather than am individualistic process. For example, consider William James on the "blooming buzzing confusion" that infants experience versus the much more orderly experience of the world in adult life. Most of that orderliness occurs from belonging to a community of shared beliefs that are transmitted to its members. There is nothing comparable to this in constructivism.

For pragmatists, there is always a world that we encounter through our experiences, and our beliefs about that world arise from our experiences of it. And that world as well as our beliefs about it are continually subject to change, depending on those experiences. Some of these experiences seem to remain constant (e.g., gravity) while others are much more malleable (e.g., social relationships), but either way it is experience based on actions that guides us in our dealings with world. In terms of relativism, pragmatists would say that you can indeed construct the world anyway you want, but you must unavoidably bear the consequences of acting on those beliefs. I don't know of any such role for action and its consequences in constructivism.

I could address more of the issues that your raise, but the underlying message would be the same throughout: pragmatism and constructivism have very different philosophical bases. Consider the ontological question of whether there is such a thing as reality. Constructivists basis their philosophy on denying the existence of an external reality, but pragmatists would say this is a non-issue because there is nothing more than experience, whatever its sources may be. Similarly with regard to epistemological questions about truth, constructivists base their philosophy on denying any such thing, but pragmatists would say that this is also irrelevant because what really matters is our ability to learn from the consequences of our actions.

So, whether we are talking about abstract philosophy or how the social sciences use that philosophy, pragmatism will always stand apart from any system based on assumptions about ontology and epistemology, including both realism and constructivism.

It is certainly news to me that constructivists accept the existence of an external reality. Once again going back to Egon Guba, he argued for an ontological and epistemological "collapse," so that once you accepted a non-realist ontology, a subjectivist approach to truth was inevitable. But, accepting the existence of an external reality leads directly to a correspondence theory of truth.

And neither Dewey nor James would accept an equation of truth with utility. For them, arguments about truth were just a diversion from the primacy of experience. According to James, "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events," so truth is not a matter of utility, it is dependent upon experience. And Dewey not only refused to speak of truth but even avoided the word knowledge to ensure that no one accused him of discussing epistemology. Hence, his well known emphasis on "warranted assertions," based on experience.

And even if pragmatism is often confused with utilitarianism, it is hard for me to imagine that this is an argument in favor of its similarity to constructivism. Tell a pragmatist that they are really a utilitarian and you will get an argument. Tell that to a constructivist and all it will provoke is confusion.

But I am used to the difficulties that non-pragmatists have in conceiving of how radically different it is from the meta-physical versions of philosophy that have dominated the social sciences. From Lincoln and Guba (1985) on, the grounds for our methodological differences have been debated in terms of ontology and epistemology. Rejecting that version of philosophy requires a major paradigm shift, and those who were either raised during the paradigm wars or taught by mentors who made their careers during those debates, are unlikely to give up their certainty about the appropriateness of that framework.

Thus, as Kuhn argued, paradigm transitions are more likely to be led by a new group of scholars, rather than by the conversation of those who are attached to the previous set of beliefs. In this case, those of us who took mixed methods research seriously could not translate our experiences into an incommensurable gap between realism and constructivism. So it is hardly surprising that this different approach to social research led to a parallel interest in a pragmatism as a different paradigm.

Of course, my own argument is that pragmatism is hardly limited to mixed methods and is equally applicable to all forms of research. Following Dewey, I accept that research is one particular form of experience, and that as in the rest of life it is the consequences of our actions that determine our beliefs.

Hello

Dear Colleague

Please read this page link

https://delvetool.com/groundedtheory

Angelina Inesia Forde I am not sure why you keep referring to "truth" in regards to pragmatism. As I have tried to stress, pragmatists have no theory of truth, because they consider this a hopeless issue.Two thousand plus years of Western philosophy have failed to resolve debates about the possibility of truth, so pragmatists insist on starting over.

Of course, those who pursue traditional approaches to the philosophy of knowledge keep trying to find a theory of truth in pragmatism, since their own paradigm insists that one always has an epistemology, no matter how covert it is. But as far as pragmatists are concerned, that is someone else's problem.

The problem is that none of James' works accept a "theory of truth" as it exists in its classical epistemological form: Can one create statements that are representations of reality? This is clear in not only the many quotes from James in what you sent, but also from the very beginning of the editor's introduction: "About the work. . . . In his Pragmatism, William James characterizes truth in terms of usefulness and acceptance. In general, on his view, truth is found by attending to the practical consequences of ideas."

For pragmatists, neither a correspondence or a coherence theory of truth is of any interest, in contrast to action and its consequences.

Thanks, Hisham Yaacob for the good question and professors for the valuable answer.

The conversation seems to have deviated from answering the topic question.

AS David eludes to in the top post, in GT, you've got a few things going on at the same time as you move from initial open coding to that which is conceptually more inclusive of elements in the scenario under study.

As he says, "...you do not have to complete a full initial cycle on all of the data before your codes begin to consolidate and evolve."; indeed, you can't (don't), because all data is under Constant Comparison until you're getting no more new data overall---Saturation---and you come up with a 'final version' GT according to your amassed data.

Many thanks Philip Adams for the concise points.