Getting Started

In my career as an educator, I found that PhD students stumbled on the most basic questions about how to get started with a grounded theory study, what to study, and how to craft the research question. Students find it most difficult to be open to emergence-to trust that the core category will emerge if study participants are allowed to divulge their main concern as they perceive it. The following is advice from Barney Glaser on how to overcome these fears. Excerpted from chapter 4 of Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis (1992), and edited for clarity, Barney Glaser's advice on these issues is timeless.