Thinking About My Grounded Theory Project
MAIS 640 – ePortfolio Assignment One
In this post you’ll discover:
A bit about me.
Answers to some relevant questions like “Why Grounded Theory?”, “Why Homelessness?”, and “Why Now?”.
Some Thinking About My Grounded Theory Project.
Three Questions
When approaching any complex societal issue, the problem of perspective is paramount. Who are we in relation to the issue and the people who are part of that issue, either as subjects or as those engaged with providing services to those subjects?
Do we approach the issue with perspectives and answers in hand, i.e. do we know that homeless individuals are simply down-on-their-luck and therefore only require a hand-up to help them regain a position as productive citizen? Do we know that homeless individuals as a rule have suffered traumatic incidents that affect their abilities to function in society, and therefore require medical or psychological interventions to heal them? Do we know that we have had to overcome difficulties ourselves, but succeeded, and that therefore homeless individuals lack drive and character and should be deterred from their activities through punishment?
These preconceptions and many more colour our perception of the ‘issue’ of homelessness, and they all contain implicit theories about homeless individuals and why they exist. A theory tied to the first viewpoint might be the “everybody wants the same thing and therefore will strive toward it when given a chance” theory. A theory tied to the second viewpoint might be the “homeless individuals have damaged selves” theory. A theory tied to the third might be the “everyone can make it if they try hard enough” theory.
However, these are all theories that try to make sense of the phenomenon of homelessness from an outsider’s perspective. What kind of theories do homeless individuals themselves have about their place in the world? So far, none of studies I’ve read of homelessness explore that topic.
That is why Grounded Theory is a relevant approach for this project, because it is possible to code and analyze interviews with a range of homeless individuals. Grounded Theory process will allow concepts and categories to arise from their own words and will help me theorize, from the inside out, what homelessness is and the reasons for it.
Two reasons, one proximate and one general.
The proximate cause was writing a one-act play with a homeless person as a character, and after doing so realizing that I knew nothing about homelessness or homeless individuals. This led to a series of engagements with street newspapers, social action projects, and other sources of information about homeless individuals, all with the intent of understanding more about homelessness to create more theatre or written works.
The general cause is tied to the first and has sprung from it. The more I studied homelessness and people experiencing housing precarity, the more I realized that it was a problem with a solution. So I became involved in advocacy and education groups to help support a solution.
Homelessness is an issue that intersects with many other issues in Alberta and Edmonton society like poverty, inequality, racism, colonialism, mental illness, and addiction. Trying to understand it from a societal perspective leads to questions about societal values, economic systems, and political ideologies. Trying to understand it from a personal perspective leads to questions about agency, personal responsibility, and ultimately to questions about our role in making a better society.
It has many tendrils, and we are all entangled in the housing system.
This project comes on the heels of many others. Some of these are listed in the Research and Building page. However, the only real answer to ‘Why Now?’ is because it is always time to try and engage with making our society better.
After a previous project, the digitization of a street newspaper called Alberta Street News, a reporter asked, “Will you continue being a social activist?” If a simple act like helping preserve an important social and cultural resource was activism, the default position of most people in Edmonton must be social inactivity. Which means they only strive to make society better in ways that are sanctioned and governed by existing institutions such as church and state, which includes political parties of all stripes. The obvious problem with this is that existing church and state institutions are responsible for the current situation, so they must in some ways benefit from it. For the individual, the question remains about how to try and make things better: to fight from within or outside the current institutions, or to operate independently and try to make change?
I choose both, and this Grounded Theory project will help me understand homeless individuals better, craft a theory or theories about how they make sense of their situations, and use that theory or theories to create better artistic products and to guide social activism.
Thinking About My Grounded Theory Project
For my Grounded Theory project, I intend to analyze a set of interview transcripts generated by talking with people experiencing homelessness about their lives. The research question I’m beginning with is:
“What common concepts or rationales do people experiencing homelessness use to explain their own histories as homeless individuals and/or the societal structures that they feel constrain their abilities to move out of homelessness?”
In thinking about my project, I realized that I’ve engaged with the topic of homelessness from a variety of perspectives throughout my course work in MAIS. Following are some brief descriptions of the courses and my engagement in each.
MAIS 602: Doing Interdisciplinary Research
MAIS 602, Doing Interdisciplinary Research, is a foundational course in the MAIS program designed to provide students with core competencies for carrying out research across disciplines. MAIS 602 recommends and emphasizes the importance of literature reviews, a practice which runs counter to Grounded Theory Research practice. Three important points surfaced during the literature review and the building of a research question for the course.
Two primary perspectives are taken in respect to homelessness in both research and policy construction; the first that homelessness is a societal/structural problem, and the second is that homelessness is a personal problem.
Through the article “Perceptions of Housing and Shelter among People with Histories of Unstable Housing in three Cities in Canada” by Sylvestre et. al., one of the primary insights was that people are generally not “homed” or “homeless”, but that “that for many individuals being homeless and being precariously housed are not distinct and dichotomous conditions. There are people for whom the line between the two is ambiguous and easily traversed in either direction” (446). This is an important insight for further research into perceptions about what a home is and means for different people.
“When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide: Evaluating public support for homelessness investments in Canada” (Doberstein and Smith 2019) revealed a convergence between people on the conservative and progressive side of the political spectrum. Members of both groups were more in favour of funding for homeless individuals if those individuals could be shown to be ‘deserving’ of the support, within the general rubric that people who suffered from things beyond their control deserved support more than the ones who seemed to be responsible for their own situation through bad choices.
MAIS 623, Introduction to Trends in New Media: Digital Humanities
MAIS 623, Introduction to Trends in New Media: Digital Humanities, explores how digital technology and society interact with a focus on critical inquiry in the humanities. For that course, I studied how computer technology, specifically database programs designed to hold information about people being served by the homeless-serving agencies in Edmonton, affected how those people were treated and how they were managed by the system. Two interesting insights grew from that process:
- Available research suggests that homeless clients are rarely consulted in the development of software programs intended to provide service to them.
- Neoliberal ideology that posits individual autonomy and responsibility flows through every aspect of the political and economic information system in Canada dealing with housing and homelessness, from the policy ideas at the federal level to the agencies responsible for working with homeless individuals to the construction of the individual who accesses those services on the street in Edmonton.
LTST 693 – Creative Writing
LTST 693 is an advanced creative writing course, designed to give students the opportunity to work on an extended and significant piece of work. For my project, I undertook the creation of a full-length playscript based on verbatim materials. Verbatim means ‘word for word’, so the materials I used came directly from transcriptions of interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness, newspaper reports, Hansard transcripts (from the Legislative Assembly of Alberta), street newspaper articles, and songs. Being in an interdisciplinary program, I tried to integrate concepts from across disciplines: a theoretical perspective from Literary Studies to question the existence of the author, a theoretical model from Cognitive Psychology to help determine the content, a theatrical aesthetic developed by Bertold Brecht, and practical rules for handling nonfiction material learned through Creative Nonfiction.
I learned the necessity of having a point of view, because all this material is meaningless without a human perspective. Unbeknownst to myself, I also attempted some identification and refinement of concepts similar in intent but dissimilar in process to that of Grounded Theory. In her book Constructing Grounded Theory, Charmaz lists one of the components of Grounded Theory as “Constructing analytic codes and categories from data, not from preconceived logically deduced hypotheses” (Charmaz, 7). In the LTST 693 project, I used a simplistic device called a word cloud generator to help me identify the most prominent concepts in each interview transcript, compared those across the interviews, and then merged these concepts into one group to help structure the script. It is an active question whether those concepts will prove useful in this project.6
MAIS 604: Planning and Action for Community Change
MAIS 604 introduces the student to the history and theoretical background and development of planning for the public sphere. Delving into the political and philosophical underpinnings of planning, the course relies on a basic principle that changing society for the better is a positive goal and that using rational tools to do so is the best way to achieve change.
Part of the process for planning was evaluating the discursive framework around homelessness, and I discovered many academic articles analyzing dominant and missing discourses. Insights revealed through this process were:
- that the voices and stories of homeless individuals themselves were missing from almost all the discourses about them, even the articles purporting to support more housing or services
- another missing but foundational discourse had to do with what constitutes a home – the literature of housing programs always assumed that everyone’s goal was to move along a ‘spectrum’ of housing that started at temporary shelter and ended with a house
- an associated but broader missing discourse was about the proper way of living together as human beings, with neo-liberal ideologies of independence and individualism accepted without question.
Summary and Next Steps
As perhaps may be apparent for anyone familiar with Grounded Theory, this previous research into homelessness is exactly the wrong way to approach a Grounded Theory project. This leads to the first challenge I see in relation to my Grounded Theory project and my previous academic work—it will be challenging to code and analyze interview transcripts with homeless individuals without having the insights from previous research guide my thinking.
In relation specifically to analytical work done in previous courses, as noted above from the LTST 693 project, I used a simplistic device called a word cloud generator to help me identify the most prominent concepts in each interview transcript, compared those across the interviews, and then merged these concepts into one group to help structure the script. Some important differences exist between this process and the process of developing codes in Charmaz’s methodology. The following table offers a brief comparison:
LTST 693 – Verbatim Play Script Project | MAIS 640 – Grounded Theory Methodology |
The word cloud generator identified words that featured prominently in the interviews. These words were primarily nouns. | Charmaz’s methodology emphasizes coding for action and processes, using gerunds to preserve the dynamic nature of action, and asks questions about how the individual fits into the process. |
The initial identification of concepts relied on grouping the words together based on similarity of subject matter. Words like “time,” “family,” “addiction,” and “place” became concepts that created a structure for the script. | Charmaz’s methodology emphasizes the identification of concepts through comparison of codes based on actions, analyzing tacit assumptions and implicit meanings, and trying to distill the meaning of the subject’s activities. |
The comparison of these concepts across different data points (different individual’s interviews) relied on comparing the subject areas such as family, law, and involvement with drugs or alcohol. | Charmaz’s methodology emphasizes the comparison of concepts based on the actions and processes inherent in each code, studying the data from the perspective of how each individual actively participates in the processes of which they are part. |
These analyses relied solely on edited interviews: the words and sentences of the interviewees were not altered, but their long interviews (approximately one hour) were reduced to five-minute monologues based on an evaluation of their narrative value. No other information such as field data or site observations was analyzed. | Charmaz recommends using everything as data, including the raw interview material, descriptions of locations and interview subjects, as well as personal reflections from the interviewer. |
Overall, the primary difference between the data analysis done in LTST 693 and the analysis recommended in Grounded Theory is the difference between static analysis and dynamic analysis, between looking at the individual’s situation and the themes that arise as opposed to delving deeply into the meaning being made through the individual’s engagement with a process. Another major difference was the deliberate attempt in the LTST 693 project to remove my positionality as a factor: I had each interview transcript reviewed by a third party who selected segments for inclusion in the final five-minute script, I sat with every interview participant and allowed them to make changes, and I purposefully attempted to minimize my reflection on the subject matter. In Grounded Theory, my positionality, my motives, and my relationship with the interviewees and the subject matter become data points to consider in the development of concepts and theories.
As Charmaz, (2014), discusses, the first steps of a Grounded Theory approach should be:
- “Conduct data collection and analysis simultaneously in an iterative process
- Analyze actions and processes rather than themes and structure
- Use comparative methods
- Draw on data (e.g. narratives and descriptions) in service of developing new conceptual categories” (15).
For the purposes of this Grounded Theory project, step one is completed, and the data has been collected. The next step will require going back to the original data and coding word-by-word or line-by-line, looking for actions and processes. Comparing concepts then across the data will be based on processes and how the individuals fit into those processes rather than how they relate to a common theme.
Concluding Thoughts
With that in mind, these notes, and the insights gained through my previous work, will be held in mind as the project continues but guarded against as predetermining conditions. As noted in the Study Guide, Glaser and Strauss, in their seminal work, The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research, admonish students, “to ignore the literature of theory and fact on the area under study, in order to assure that the emergence of categories will not be contaminated by concepts more suited to different areas” (p. 37). However, as they also acknowledge, pre-existing knowledge and experience are difficult if not impossible to forget. The unit study guide uses the useful terms “Emic” and “Etic” accounts to differentiate between material generated from the lived experience of participants and material generated from researchers and others looking at the situation from outside. Most of the theories reviewed in previous courses were etic, in the sense that they were articles written by academic researchers about homelessness, so those theoretical constructions can be used as sensitizing concepts to keep in mind. The Study Guide suggests that many stimulus-response dialectics can be used as sensitizing concepts, and those too will be kept in mind as the coding and “nuts and bolts” process begins. After pursuing this train of thought through Unit 4, and a discussion post by Anna Young, Professor Russ Wilde recommended the article, “The place of the literature review in grounded theory research,” by C. Dunne (2011). The takeaway, for me, was that the researcher must be aware of their own preconceptions and test them against the data on an ongoing basis. Dunne also argues, as this student as done in discussion posts on the topic, that the Grounded Theory process itself contains strategies such as memo-writing and constant comparison for negotiating with preconceptions. Dunne concludes that, “given the contrasting perspectives, each researcher must make an informed and justifiable decision regarding how and when extant literature will be employed in a grounded theory study” (118). I look forward to exploring the details about how to make that informed and justifiable decision in my own study as the work progresses.
Works Cited
Charmaz, Kathy. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Sage.
Doberstein, C., & Smith, A. (2019). When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide:
Evaluating public support for homelessness investments in Canada. International Journal of
Social Welfare, 28: 282–292
Dunne, C. (2011). The place of the literature review in grounded theory research. International Journal of
Social Research Methodology, 14(2), 111–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010.494930
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative
research. Aldine.
Shaviro, Steven. “Simondon on individuation” The Pinocchio Theory,
www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=471 Accessed 7 August 2019.
Sylvestre et. al. (2018). Perceptions of Housing and Shelter among People with Histories of Unstable
Housing in three Cities in Canada: A Qualitative Study. American Journal of Community
Psychology, 61:445–458