My name’s Maria Grant and I originally established The Grounded Theorist as a repository of resources which may be of use during my PhD* at Liverpool John Moores University. Since that time The Grounded Theorist blog has become a valued resource for anyone interested in using Grounded Theory in their research. The Grounded Theorist blog is now regularly accessed from over 110 countries across the globe including Australia, Brazil, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States of America, and Trindad & Tobago (March 2023).
Building on the success of The Grounded Theorist blog I established the @GroundedTheory twitter account as a hub for all things grounded theory, and founded a local Grounded Theory Network. In November 2018 the network held it’s inaugural Grounded Theory Symposium, @GTNetwork1 #GTNetwork18, a national event for grounded theory PhD students and early career researchers to present their research journey and experiences of the methods used.
If you know of a resource which could usefully be added to the blog, or would like to write a post, get in touch at MariaJGrantFCLIP@outlook.com
* Constructing an Understanding of Professional Academic Writing (Viva Passed: 28 March 2022)
Using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), I’m employing in-depth qualitative interviews and social network analysis of publication portfolios to explore how academics acquire the skills to write and publish accounts of their work. The mixed methods approach combines the strengths of participant narratives, visualisation of co-author networks and descriptive structural analysis to locate and understand formal networks in their social and cultural contexts (Bellotti, 2016). An in-depth understanding of writing experiences and longitudinal changes in writing patterns will be constructed, while the structural properties of publication portfolios will distinguish similarities and differences in network typologies and structures which superficially appear identical. Data are used to construct an understanding of common attributes of a successful professional academic writing career and the events which facilitated academics’ professional writing skills development. The intended outcome of this research will be a model of writing experiences and practice from which evidence based structures will be developed to support academics in writing for publication.
References
Bellotti K (2016) Qualitative methods and visualizations in the study of friendship networks, Sociological Research Online, 21 (2), 2-19.
Charmaz K (2014) Constructing grounded theory, London, Sage. 2nd Ed.
Outputs
Grant MJ, Lotto RR, Jones ID (2020) What we can learn from elite academic staff publication portfolios: a social network analysis. ASLIB Journal of Information Management, 72(4), 605-624: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AJIM-10-2019-0300/full/html
The Grounded Theorist 