Constructionism and the Grounded Theory Method

I n the introduction to this Handbook, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium suggest that a social constructionist approach deals best with what people construct and how this social construction process unfolds. They argue that the constructionist vocabulary does not as readily address the why questions that characterize more positivistic inquiry. In their earlier methodological treatise, The New Language of Qualitative Method (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997), they proposed that naturalistic qualitative researchers could address why questions “by considering the contingent relations between the whats and hows of social life” (p. 200). To date, however, most qualitative research has not addressed why questions. In contrast, the grounded theory method has had a long history of engaging both why questions and what and how questions. What is grounded theory? The term refers to both the research product and the analytic method of producing it, which I emphasize here. The grounded theory method begins with inductive strategies for collecting and analyzing qualitative data for the purpose of developing middle-range theories. Examining this method allows us to rethink ways of bringing why questions into qualitative research. A social constructionist approach to grounded theory allows us to address why questions while preserving the complexity of social life. Grounded theory not only is a method for understanding research participants’ social constructions but also is a method that researchers construct throughout inquiry. Grounded theorists adopt a few strategies to focus their data gathering and analyzing, but what they do, how they do it,