Practice with these exercises to prepare for your seminars and wider research.

1. Choose a specific qualitative research study and ask of it:
(a) How well are the concepts grounded in data; how adequately are central claims supported by evidence?
(b) Can you identify core categories and subsidiary categories? What are the properties of these categories and what are the relationships between them?
(c) What strategies from grounded theorising might the researcher have pursued in order to generate a more ‘saturated’ or ‘thick’ theoretical account? Consider, here, theoretical sampling decisions that might have been taken, or comparisons that might have been made.

2. Grounded theorising involves an attempt to construct an account that is well defended against threats to its truth status. To what extent does this allow for alternative voices? Is this a desirable feature of qualitative research?