Doing a grounded theory study is dynamic and exciting. The method is responsive to your data, your analysis and to you. Allow the stages to guide you but not constrain you. Use your imagination to visualise and conceptualise your data – so that your theory has imagery and movement, whilst being rigorously grounded in your data.
Have a look at the following short guide to the grounded theory process, and for a more detailed, practical guide try Using Grounded Theory: How to Develop Theory for Managed Change (Scott, 2025).
Starting with the (more) inductive phase
🔎 Identify your substantive area
This is simply your broad area of interest – the field you want to explore. Your study will then focus on a specific substantive population within that area.
| Substantive area of interest | Substantive population | Authors |
| Dying in US hospitals | Nurses caring for dying patients | Glaser and Strauss, 1965 |
| Chronic illness | People who are chronically ill | Charmaz, 1983 |
| Work practices in journalism | Journalists | Gynnild, 2007 |
| Midwifery healthcare in Ireland | Pregnant women | Hudson, 2025 |
➛ You can select a population (as I did) or allow the perspective – specific population – to emerge during analysis (as Dr Kate Penney did).
☎️ Begin data collection and open coding
Open sampling
In grounded theory, data collection and data analysis are integrated activities that you perform from day one and throughout the study. In the more inductive phase data collection or “open sampling” is conducted with an open mind. It is “conducted in as unstructured a way as is feasible and [ …] many forms of data can be collected as long as they are of the study’s substantive area of interest” (Scott, 2025, pp. 40 – 41).
You might use:
- research conversations with individuals or a group of individuals, face-to-face or remotely
- observations of the substantive area itself and activities occurring within the substantive area
- public or private record irrespective of form including:
- photographs
- videos
- diaries
- paintings
- sculptures
- biographies
- television broadcasts
- news reports
- surveys
- government or organisational documents
- Descriptive data arising from interpretations of surveys, statistics, and other numerical data*.
Open coding
Open coding means coding with an open mind. When open coding you use the “constant comparison” method to rigorously compare incident-to-incident (where an incident is something that you notice in the data); incident-to-concept; concept-to-concept. Over time, as a result of your hard work and systematic analysis, you will be able to identify the core category and the main concern. It’s not magic – it takes effort!
The core category is the concept to which all other concepts are related. It often – but not always – explains the behaviour in the substantive area in relation to how the main concern is resolved or processed. For example in my study the main concern was finding time to study and the core category was ‘temporal integration’. For Glaser and Strauss, however, in their seminal study “Awareness of Dying”, their core category was “awareness context”**.
Identifying the core category marks the end of the inductive phase.
💡Write memos from day one
Memoing is crucial. Your memos are your private space where you write your ideas about your codes/concepts and the possible links between them. Don’t worry about writing ‘bad’ memos, your memos will mature as your skill and your theory develop.
⚠️ Few memos = thin theory. Write often, even if rough!
For example, here are some early memos I wrote for a study on people having elective hip or knee surgery.
TREATING
Informing: people by books, classes, meetings with professionals.
Assessing : by meeting, medical tests
Complying: learning, abstaining e.g. homeopathic meds, keeping clean
Operating….
CAPACITY
Compromised capacity… many facets… one of which is target of surgery.
Pre-op capacity… compromised capacity. Gateway. Post op capacity… increasing… Capacity hoped for/aspired to.
ASPIRATION
Too high? Says who? There is clearly over optimistic… beyond medical capacity e.g. returning senior person to teenage capacity. There is achievable optimistic which wasn’t reached because … Which was PM?
EVALUATION
Evaluating risk of harm. Considers reputation of surgeon, hospital.
DECISION POINT
The pain outweighs the perceived risk of harm …. until the pain creates a tipping point… pain (quality of life) > risk of harm
Entering the (more) deductive phase
When you understand an issue that is important to your population and have identified a probable core category, you will have started to delimit the boundaries of your theory. You are entering the more deductive phase in that your developing theory points to which data you need to collect next.
📝 Continue by theoretical sampling and selective coding
As you write your memos, questions will arise and you will notice gaps in your theory and concepts that need more work. This will prompt the question: who do I need to ask – or what do I need to interrogate – in order to learn more about these issues? Theoretical sampling is the act of collecting the data you need to answer your questions. Selective coding means coding only that data that you need to develop the core category and related concepts. Your theory begins to take shape in your memos.
Analysis continues until you have sufficient saturated concepts to explain how people resolve or process their shared concern and what varies how that concern is resolved or processed.
Saturate concepts
Saturation has a particular meaning. The page “Reconciling grounded theory perspectives” explains that each code/concept that you develop is an “index of meaning”: each code/concept will have several incidents – pieces of data – that together suggest the name of the code/concept.
“We know when a concept is saturated using the mechanism of the ‘interchangeability of indicators/indices’. This simply means that if you have, for example, ten incidents indicating a concept, when the 11th incident is noticed you could swap it in for any of the existing ten incidents without needing to change the name of the concept. Thus, when you are learning nothing new about the concept as confirmed by the mechanism of the interchangeability of indicators and the concept continues to fit the data, the concept is saturated” (Scott, 2025, p. 104).
🔄 Sort your memos to structure and shape your theory
Sorting your memos is a continuance of constant comparison. Now, instead of comparing incidents and codes, you are comparing idea to idea. The purpose of sorting is to bring structure and shape to your theory.
- Begin by printing out your memos, reading one and cutting out the useful ideas from the memo
- Place your ideas about the core category in the middle of a large flat space
- Place your ideas about your concepts from all your other memos, around the core category
- Be ready to write more memos as you carry out this comparison and sort your ideas.
During your study it is a good use of time to read other grounded theories to understand more about the different shapes of different grounded theories. The shape of a theory is determined by the theoretical code(s) used. This means it is helpful to read about different theoretical codes so that when you come to sort your memos, you can recognise which theoretical code(s) best organise your concepts.
- Use your theoretical codes to guide how you write a draft of your theory.
📚 Integrate the literature the grounded theory way
The design of research degrees often requires the grounded theory researcher to have three forays into the literature.
- The initial literature review, which is not required by the grounded theory method***but can be useful as a background chapter
- The second foray is a form of theoretical sampling and starts with a search on your core category. You can expect to find useful data, which can be selectively coded and written into your draft theory.
✍️ Write up your theory
Before the third foray into the literature, write up your theory for your thesis or report. I suggest that you:
- Write a one page summary of your theory beginning with the main concern followed by an overview of how the population processes or resolves their shared concern
- Present the theory in full. Write in the present tense to emphasise that this is a theory about what is likely to happen in the future and NOT findings about what happened in the past
- Be careful with your use of quotes as this can tip the theory into recounting the past (Scott, 2025, p. 152 – 153).
🗂️ Situate your theory in the literature
The third foray into the literature involves situating your study within the literature.
Dr Maleeya Buravas does a marvellous job of using her theory as a theoretical framework to organise the literature in relation to implementing green strategies in organisations:
📈 Show how your theory can be useful as well as relevant
The power of the grounded theory that you produce will lie in its implications, which can be used to inform and guide managed change. Watch the video below to see the implications of Dr Catherine Stoddart’s theory “Crisis Stewardship: What do leaders need to take action in a crisis“.
If you follow this iterative process, you will produce a grounded theory. The richness and quality of that theory will reflect the depth of your engagement with the method and the analytical skills you develop along the way.
Grounded theory in qualitative research
Please see the following chapters in Using Grounded Theory: How to Develop Theory for Managed Change for a fuller, illustrated explanation of the process of generating a grounded theory using qualitative data:
Chapter 3: Collecting grounded theory data
Chapter 4: Data analysis: Part 1 (inductive stage)
Chapter 5 Data analysis: Part 2 (deductive stage)
Chapter 6: Conceptual integration
Chapter 7: The final stages
Chapter 8: Integrating grounded theory with a research degree
* There is a separate set of procedures for developing grounded theory from raw quantitative date. (See Glaser, 2008).
** In the examples provided in the overview, the central concepts that explain these processes are also the core categories. Bear in mind that the core category is not always a process, for example for Glaser and Strauss the core category was “awareness context” (Glaser & Strauss, 1965).
*** The grounded theory research method prefers that the problem – the main concern – is that as described by participants, rather than pre-defined by literature.
Helen Scott PhD
Grounded Theory Online
September, 2025