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The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research.

Why this mattered

The 1968 Social Forces item was Helmut R. Wagner’s review of Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss’s 1967 book, The Discovery of Grounded Theory. The work mattered because it gave qualitative research a systematic program for generating theory, not merely illustrating existing theory or supplying descriptive field reports. Its central move was to make data collection and analysis reciprocal: concepts, categories, sampling decisions, and comparison across cases were to evolve together until an empirically grounded explanatory account emerged.

That shift made qualitative inquiry newly defensible in fields dominated by hypothesis testing, survey methods, and abstract “grand theory.” After Glaser and Strauss, researchers could justify interviews, observations, documents, and field notes as materials for rigorous theory construction, using procedures such as constant comparison, theoretical sampling, memoing, and saturation. This did not remove interpretation from research; rather, it made interpretation auditable, cumulative, and tied to visible analytic decisions.

The book’s influence reached far beyond sociology. It became a foundation for later qualitative breakthroughs in nursing, medicine, education, management, information systems, social work, and health research, especially where existing theory was thin or poorly fitted to lived experience. Later variants, including Strauss and Corbin’s procedural grounded theory and Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, revised its epistemology and technique, but they inherited its decisive claim: qualitative data could be a disciplined source of new concepts, not only evidence for theories made elsewhere.

Abstract

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