Grounded Theory and Disability Studies: An Investigation Into Legacies of Blindness
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Grounded Theory and Disability Studies: An Investigation Into Leg ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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  • from previous literature: ‘[Reading] closely line by line to ascertain what exactly the author is saying without imputing what was said, interpreting it or reifying its meaning’ (Glaser, 1998, p. 24).
  • Interchangeability of indices. In addition to the induction of theory, Glaser argued that categories can also be developed and then evolve through the constant comparison of data. Thus, concepts that were not previously seen to exist rise up and are identified for future reference and comparison. ‘When comparing incident to incident when coding his field notes, the researcher begins to see a pattern and a concept emerges that fits it. A category or its property has emerged’ (Glaser, 1998, p. 25).
  • Latent patterns and core category analysis. Perhaps most radically, Glaser argued that induced theories were nothing more than connected concepts, the categories they belonged to, and the indexes that they referred to. It was as if these theories had skeletons of such concepts, joined through the joints or bodily systems of categories.

    • As the researcher constantly codes, analyses and theoretically samples for more data, the latent structural pattern of the substantive theory emerges…. This category soon becomes classified as the core category because most other categories are related to it. This core category provides and becomes the latent structure of the theory. (Glaser, 1998, p. 26)

    To understand its development, grounded theory should be seen as part of a greater academic movement of methodology in this era. Its development took place in an intellectual environment in which the infallible, wholly positivist nature of all forms of data was being questioned in both the natural and social sciences, yet there was a need to strive for and understand objective, empirical data at the same time. In particular, The Discovery of Grounded Theory was published less than a decade after the Austrian-English philosopher of science Karl Popper’s English translations and new writing on the falsifiability of truth were released (Popper, 1959, 1998) and only 5 years after the first publication of the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific