Juliet M. Corbin - Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory

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[p. vii ]

Also, at my intellectual core perhaps is the sense thathowever nave you think thisthe world of social phenomena is bafflingly complex. Complexity has fascinated and puzzled me much of my life. How to unravel some of that complexity, to order it, not to be dismayed or defeated by it? How not to avoid the complexity nor distort interpretation of it by oversimplifying it out of existence? This is of course, an old problem: Abstraction (theory) inevitably simplifies, yet to comprehend deeply, to order, some degree of abstraction is necessary. How to keep a balance between distortion and conceptualization? (Strauss, 1993, p. 12)

Whenever an author is asked to write a revision of a text there are always those persons, including this author, who say, Is another revision necessary? Wasn't everything said in past editions? I thought so, yet when I looked at the 2nd edition of this book I realized how much both the field of qualitative research and I had changed since its publication.

I grew up intellectually in the Age of the Dinosaurs, or so it seems when I read the literature pertaining to qualitative research today. I carried within me the values, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge of my profession and the times. I believed what I was told and wrote about it. But one day I looked about and found that I had been labeled a post-positivist (Denzin, 1994). Oh dear, I thought, I've been classified and labeled just like we do in qualitative research! It seems that while I was going about business as usual, a Qualitative Revolution was taking place. As part of that revolution the word interpretation, the byword of qualitative research in the old days, became pass. The new qualitative jargon centered on letting our respondents talk for themselves. Also, it was now considered okay to go native, a dreaded accusation in the old days. It gets worse. I knew my research world, like that [p. viii ] of Humpty Dumpty, had tumbled down when the notion of objectivity was dismissed as impossible to achieve. Instead of being the objective researcher, the postmodern movement put the researcher right into the center of the study. But the final assault on my research identity came when the notion of being able to capture reality in data was deemed a fantasy. All is relative. There are multiple perspectives. The postmodern era had arrived. Everything was being deconstructed and reconstructed

It's safe to assume that I was just a little exasperated and concerned as I heard about these new ideas. I feared that researchers would become so concerned with examining their own navels and telling nice stories that they would lose sight of the purpose of doing research (at least from my perspective) and that is to generate a professional body of empirical knowledge. Most of all, I feared that qualitative methods would lose whatever credibility they had accrued within the scientific world. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were some valid points being made by the postmodern, deconstructionist, and constructionist schools of thought. With my original research bubble burst, I wondered what was left. I have to add to this confession that during these past years I was doing a lot of teaching in various countries on how to do analysis, and the interactions with students also helped shaped my new understanding of qualitative research.

It wasn't until I was asked to write the 3rd edition of Basics that I started to think about putting my thoughts together. As I drafted an outline for the book, I was confronted with a series of questions. Questions such as: What are methods? Are they merely sets of procedures? Or are they philosophical approaches with few, if any, procedures? What role do procedures play in research? Are they guides, or just a broad set of ideas? What and how much structure is necessary to give students? And what is the role of the researcher? How can the researcher be acknowledged while still telling the story of participants? How much or how little interpretation should be involved?

Part of the challenge I faced in writing this new edition was determining who I was as a researcher. I was trained as a grounded theorist. At the time of my training, supposedly there was one grounded theory approach, though this point is open to debate. Throughout the years, what was initially grounded theory has evolved into many different approaches to building theory grounded in data. Each evolution has been an attempt to modernize or to extend the original method, bringing it more in line with contemporary thought. Yet, I also wanted to hold on to the methodological vision of Anselm Strauss, now deceased, who continued to believe until the end of his life in the value of theory and its importance to the development of any professional body of knowledge. Complicating this last point was the fact I no [p. ix ] longer believed that theory construction is the only way to develop new knowledge.

Thick and rich description, case analysis, bringing about change in a difficult situation, and telling a story are all valid reasons for doing research. Each form of research is powerful in its own way. I came to realize that in order to remain true to Strauss's vision, yet still hold on to my own beliefs, I would have to find a way in this book of accommodating other research goals in addition to theory building. Then, too, there is the whole issue of complexity as pointed out in the quotation by Strauss introducing this Preface. Since complexity was so important to Strauss, there is no doubt that the method presented in this book would have to provide a way of capturing some of that complexity. In other words, I would have to find a way of blending art with science and interpretation with complex storytellingqualities that certainly characterized Strauss's writing. Strauss was, to those who knew him well, the master storyteller, though no one can deny the scientific contribution of his work.

Needless to say, with all things considered, I wondered if I could live up to the challenge of writing the 3rd edition, and I felt rather daunted when I first sat down to write. I procrastinated, wrote and rewrote as one does when trying out ideas. But once I got into the groove of writing I found myself enjoying the process. I discovered that I wasn't delineating a whole new method. I was modernizing the method I had grown up with, dropping a lot of the dogma, flexing some of the procedures, and even thinking about how computers might enhance the research process.

In this 3rd edition of Basics, I try to keep Anselm's vision in mind as I write. My aim is not to recreate his approach to analysis, but to combine what was good about the old editions of Basics with some aspects of contemporary thinking. I don't wish to be labeled as a this or a that because once labels are applied they tend to stick. Labels don't take into account that times change, the state of knowledge changes, and, most of all, people change along with these.

This book is based upon the belief that though there are multiple interpretations that can be constructed from one set of data (I've done this myself), generating concepts is a useful research endeavor. It is useful for two reasons. First, it increases understanding of persons in their every day livestheir routines, habits, problems, and issuesand how they handle or resolve these. Second, concepts provide a language that can be used for discussion and debate leading to the development of shared understandings and meanings. The understandings can then be used to build a professional body of knowledge and enhance practice.