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Confessions from a grounded theory PhD: experiences and lessons learnt

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Grounded Theory (GT) is used within HCI research, but nuances and more modern interpretations of the method are rarely discussed. This paper has two intentions: to offer guidance on practical issues when applying GT, and to clarify the space of methodological possibilities. We describe an extended GT study on understanding why practitioners choose particular usability evaluation methods. We describe five stages in this study to highlight our experiences and choices made. We draw out seven practical and methodological considerations in applying GT in a CHI context. This challenges the more traditional inductive and objective positions on GT use; it sensitizes novices of GT to these issues; and through the extended case study it provides substance for debate on issues that affect those that use qualitative methods more broadly.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2011
      3530 pages
      ISBN:9781450302289
      DOI:10.1145/1978942
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 07 May 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. constructivist
      2. distributed cognition
      3. grounded theory
      4. method
      5. qualitative
      6. resilience engineering

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