Articles Grounded Theory: a Promising Approach to Conceptualization in Psychology?

There is a growing body of opinion that psychology suffers from an elaborate research technology that overemphasizes theory verification and impairs thinking and discovery. Grounded theory is advanced as an approach to research that can address this crisis of method in psychology. The grounded approach is described and illustrated in terms of its application to psychotherapy process research. The emphasis on theory creation characterizing the approach is examined within the history of induction. The challenges to and limitations of grounded theory are discussed. There are growing indications that psychology as a discipline is undergoing a crisis of confidence about its research methods. These rumblings of discontent were felt two decades ago when Bakan (1967) characterized psychologists as playing at science in much the way children play at being cowboys, imitating every aspect of cowboy life except the one which is most central — taking care of cows. In much the same way, Bakan contended, psychologists have been concerned with developing an elaborate research technology while ignoring the main work of science — thinking and discovery. The fault does not lie entirely with contemporary psychologists. It has been pointed out that psychology imitated physics with its emphasis on hypothetico-deductive research while in retrospect the fledgling science might have found astronomy or zoology, with their emphasis on Research leading to this paper was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants 451-83-3642 and 410-83-1264 to David Rennie. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of D. Bakan, G. Cupchik, K. Danziger, R. Goranson, L. Heshusius, R. Kroger, A. Mahrer, J. Martin, S. Mor, A. Shaul, I. Silverman, J. Weiser, M. Westcott, and L. Wood who commented on earlier drafts of the paper. Reprint requests may be sent to David L. Rennie, Department of Psychology, York University, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3. description, more appropriate models (Endler, 1984; Kendler, 1986). As a result, the ensuing technology has increasingly dictated the kinds of studies that are done and has made theorizing less common and less respectable than energetic but trivial research (Bakan, 1967; Brandt, 1982; Endler, 1984; Gergen, 1982; Koch, 1981; Secord, 1982; Silverman, 1977). Many theories that have been developed have been tested by disjointed investigations of irrelevant hypotheses (Arthur, 1983). Even when the hypotheses of studies have been more closely tied to theories, testing has been contaminated by research participants responding to their own inner hypotheses about the experiments in which they are engaged (Orne, 1962; Silverman, 1977). Furthermore, speculation that investigators themselves are incapable of shedding biases despite the most rigorous experimental approaches (Kuhn, 1970; Polanyi, 1969) has received empirical support