Pressupostos Ontoepistemológicos da Grounded Theory

Abstract

The present text will seek to frame the different approaches to the Grounded Theory (GT) methodology, in the onto-epistemological debate about the form and nature of reality and the substance of the relationship between the researcher and what can be known. Thus, this debate is founded on the need to know the nature of social entities, whether they are objective and thus possess a reality that is external to social actors or whether they are social constructions developed from the perceptions and actions of social actors. The belief that objective truth exists and that appropriate research methods are capable of providing correct and precise knowledge of what truth is has been the epistemological underpinning of Western science. In contemporary times, the terms "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are generally related to a perceiving subject (usually a person) and a perceived or unperceived object. The object is something that supposedly exists despite the subject's perception of it. In this way, objectivity is correlated with the notions of reality, truth and credibility. On the other hand, constructivism, as a thesis on the foundations of scientific knowledge is distinguished from objectivism which advocates that the researcher should employ the most successful methods of the natural sciences to investigate social science phenomena. Nevertheless, nowadays constructivism seems to have replaced objectivism as the dominant paradigm in sociology. The adoption of contrasting ontoepistemic assumptions may have been at the origin of the methodological dissensions that have shaken the restricted circle of researchers dedicated to the study and practice of GT. In fact, in the last four decades - after the publication of GT's founding text - transformations have occurred in the social sciences that the two founders, despite their divergences, could not have warned about