Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis

`Grounded theory is a highly influential way of working with qualitative data and Kathy Charmaz is a major player, both innovative and fluent. This book is a model student text: lively, carefully argued and full of vivid illustrations. Beginning students and professional researchers will find it to be required reading′ - David Silverman, Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor, Management Department, King′s College, University of London

Kathy Charmaz is one of the world′s leading theorists and exponents of grounded theory. In this important and essential new textbook, she introduces the reader to the craft of using grounded theory in social research, and provides a clear, step-by-step guide for those new to the field.

Using worked examples throughout, this book also maps out an alternative vision of grounded theory put forward by its founding thinkers, Glaser and Strauss. To Charmaz, grounded theory must move on from its positivist origins and must incorporate many of the methods and questions posed by constructivists over the past twenty years to become a more nuanced and reflexive practice.

Essential reading for students, new researchers and seasoned social scientists alike, this book is one of those rare things, a textbook that is both accessible to those new to the field but also one that has important things to say about the nature of social enquiry itself.

Kathy Charmaz was Professor Emerita of Sociology and the former director of the Faculty Writing Program at Sonoma State University. She joined the first cohort of doctoral students at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied with Anselm Strauss. She wrote in the areas of social psychology, medical sociology, qualitative methods, and grounded theory, and over her career wrote, coauthored, or coedited 14 books, including two award-winning works: Good Days, Bad Days; The Self in Illness and Time, and Constructing Grounded Theory.

She received the George Herbert Mead award for lifetime achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Leo G. Reeder award for distinguished contributions from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Professor Charmaz also gave workshops on qualitative methods, grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, and scholarly writing around the globe.