Sampling and Choosing Cases in Qualitative Research: A Realist Approach

Abstract

This chapter presents the first of three cases in the book, theoretical sampling in grounded theory. Brought together here are methodological accounts spanning nearly 50 years, from the groundbreaking writings of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in The Discovery of Grounded Theory to much more recent constructivist accounts of grounded theory. The debate about how theoretical sampling should proceed in a piece of research reflects wider methodological debates about how we generate legitimate knowledge about the social world. There is significant diversity discussed in this chapter. The boundaries of the case are defined by an enduring principle of grounded theory approaches within this diversity; theory emerges or is discovered through empirical investigation in which the decisions and implementation of theoretical sampling play a key role. The discovery of grounded theory Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss were concerned that qualitative research was seen, up to the 1960s in the United States, as largely an enterprise to verify theory. It was often used as a preliminary exploratory effort to provide insight and hypotheses to be tested more rigorously through quantitative methods. These methodologists wanted to show that qualitative research was an enterprise in its own right, capable of providing scientifically robust accounts of the social world. It was not merely a useful precursor to quantitative research. Qualitative research was quite capable, with the right methodological strategies, of generating credible, reliable, and useful theory derived from the qualitative investigation of social interactions. This theory, Glaser and Strauss (1967: 32) suggest, is a 'theory of process' which is an ever-developing and never-perfected product. Through a rigorous method of constant comparison, qualitative research has the ability to generate theory at different levels of generality. Theory may be empirical and substantive, such as patient care, race relations, or the relationships in an organisation. And at a higher level of abstraction, theory can be formal and conceptual social theory, of stigma, deviant behaviours, or authority and power as examples. Together these empirical and formal theories are described by Glaser and Strauss as theories of the middle range, drawing 1 02_Emmel_Ch-01-Part 1.indd 11 7/23/2013 4:56:49 PM sampling and choosing cases in qualitative research 12 on the work of Robert K. Merton. For Merton (1968: 39) middle-range theory is: Intermediate to general theories of social systems which are too remote from particular classes of social behaviour, organization and change to account for what is observed and to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all. Middle-range theory involves abstractions, of course, but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in propositions that permit empirical testing. The challenge of the discovery of grounded theory is to systematise a method that allows for a move from empirical observation to the generation of ...

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