Page 236 - Encyclopedia of Nursing Research

GROUNDeD THeORY n 203

strategy is to use the exact language from the social life, called core variables or basic social
program announcement or the foundation’s processes. According to its sociologist origi-
mission statement when describing the pro- nators, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss G
posed plan. It is not in the grant writer’s best (1967), grounded theories should be relevant
interest to try to convince a foundation or and should work to explain, predict, and be
other funding entity that they should want to modified by social phenomena under study.
fund a project not clearly within their man- Data are not forced to fit existing theories but
date just because it is a worthwhile project. rather are used to develop rich, dense, and
Thus, the first challenge for all grant complex analytic frameworks.
writers is to find the most appropriate fund- Grounded theory as an original mode
ing agency, foundation, or professional orga- of inquiry oriented to the discovery of
nization for their proposed project. Although meaning emerged from the social philos-
the NIH (http://www.nih.gov) is the major ophy of symbolic interactionism and an
large funder of health-related research in intellectual tradition in social science called
the United States, other funding opportuni- pragmatism. Both emphasize (a) the impor-
ties may be found at the following Web sites: tance of qualitative fieldwork in data col-
http://fundingopps.cos.com, http://www. lection to ground theory in reality, (b) the
grantsnet.org, and http://fdncenter.org. nature of experience as a process of contin-
Finally, there are a number of references uous change, and (c) the interrelationships
to assist grant writers, and several recent among conditions, interpretive meaning,
articles from the nursing literature are and action. Knowledge is viewed as rela-
cited here. The NIH also has Web sites with tive to particular contextual circumstances.
helpful hints for grant writers. These can Such a worldview was in contrast to the
be accessed through Office of extramural dominant paradigm that emphasized stabil-
Research at the NIH at the following Web ity and regularities in social life.
site: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/writing_ Grounded theory, as a qualitative, non-
application.htm. This Web site not only mathematical analytic process, is particu-
provides detailed information for writing larly well suited to nursing studies that are
grants, particularly those to be submitted to conducted to uncover the nature of clinically
the NIH, but also has a direct link to grant relevant phenomena such as chronic illness,
writing tip sheets provided by different caregiving, and dying in real-world rather
institutes throughout NIH. than laboratory conditions. The resulting
theoretical formulation not only explains
Lauren S. Aaronson human experience and associated meanings
but also can provide a basis for nursing inter-
vention research and nursing practice.
The influence of grounded theory meth-
Grounded theory ods has been particularly striking in the evo-
lution of nursing research because Glaser and
Strauss, who developed the method, were
Grounded theory refers to a method of professors in the School of Nursing at the
qualitative research that seeks to explain University of California, San Francisco, start-
variations in social interactional and social ing in the 1960s. Consequently, many of the
structural problems and processes. The goal seminal methodological references and land-
is to generate theory from the data and resul- mark publications of findings in the nursing
tant conceptual schema. The grounded the- literature can be traced to nursing doctoral
ory approach presumes the possibility of students who studied and collaborated with
discovering fundamental patterns in all of them in the 1970s and 1980s. Subsequently,