Grounded Theory

Grounded Theory (GT) is one of the longest established approaches to dealing with qualitative data, having been conceived in the 1960s and popularised in the 1970s, and for some considerable time it was seen as the market leader in qualitative research (McLeod, 2001; Payne, 2007). Having its origins in sociology and used extensively within the social sciences, GT was not, however, widely adopted by psychology until the early 1990s. Since then, as demonstrated through the publication of books such as this one, new qualitative research methods and strategies have been developed, creating many opportunities for qualitative researchers to select, adapt and combine approaches. Nonetheless, GT remains popular within applied psychology and other professional spheres such as education, nursing and health care. One of the reasons for its continued popularity is that there is a set of explicit guidelines to follow; additionally, there are numerous published studies within health and clinical psychology that can be used as exemplars of the approach