Taking a First Look at Grounded Theory

As coming from a different background than social sciences, textual analysis, coding, and interviews were always research methods that are too less quantifiable to validate a concrete outcome. However, it was time to take a more closer look into these methods as well, as we started to do quite some qualitative analysis recently, and a more structured approach towards the development of a theoretical concept was needed. Thus while writing on an journal article around the theme 'crowdfunding' with my students, we simply wanted to try a more structured approach to tackle the research problem.

Nevertheless, we heard some things about the Grounded Theory, but as far I never considered it as research method for my works. But let's give it a trial. Firstly, it's a new theory and will require a bit of background work, and discovering of literature to gain an understanding of the method. Second, we will require some software package to perform the analysis. Third, to build a conclusion will differ from the previous approaches that I have been considering or attempting.

Let's start with the first point - where can I find background information about the theory? If you should ever run into the same problem, here are a few interesting links:

• Good old Wikipedia provided the essential basic information about the theoretical context:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
• Nevertheless, I needed a more practical and descriptive source, where the theory has been applied on a case. I can warmly recommend the following research article, which I would suggest to anyone who would like to use this method for the first time: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/11/128
• There are many training videos on YouTube, which I also can warmly recommend:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRL4PF2u9XA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8CnKUVY8oE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwmDRh5l7ZE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em3dRhwQEAA
• A good description of the process of coding / or techniques for coding can be found on:
• http://www.aquad.de/materials/manual_aquad7/manual-e.pdf
• http://gtm.vlsm.org/gnm-gtm2.en.html#1 
• http://iier.org.au/iier16/moghaddam.html
  

Next step, which software packages are available to ease the process in doing a grounded theory based research. In general, a good online resource for describing all the software packages can be found on:

http://www.content-analysis.de/software/qualitative-analysis. However, I played a bit with the following packages, as they are freely available, and provide the features that I would need:

• http://www.aquad.de/ (Open Source)
• http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/ (Open Source)
• http://provalisresearch.com/products/qualitative-data-analysis-software/freeware/ (Basic Version is Freeware)

**** more to come ***