Abstract
The objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking. Academics use an array of techniques, methods and conceptual apparatuses to achieve this goal. The question we explore in this essay is the following: Does the grounded theory approach, in the constructivist version developed by Kathy Charmaz, provide the necessary methodological tools for the creation of knowledge and theories beyond everyday thinking? To conduct our analysis, we have drawn on the rationalist epistemology originally developed by Gaston Bachelard and taken up a few decades later by Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues to look at the epistemological foundation of the CGT methods as defined by Charmaz. We focussed on two distinctive epistemological features characterising constructivist grounded theory (CGT): the use of inductive reasoning to generate interpretative theory; and the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity as the preferred path to knowledge making. While the usefulness of CGT for conducting qualitative research and understanding the perspective of social actors has been acknowledged by scholars in health professions education research and other research areas, the inductivist logic on which it draws raises questions concerning the nature of the knowledge yielded by this approach. As we argue in this article, it is still unclear in what way the interpretative theory generated by CGT is not a duplication of everyday thinking expressed through meta-narratives. It is also unclear how the understanding of social phenomena can be refined if the use of inductive procedures logically implies the creation of a new theory each time a study is conducted. We engage with these questions to broaden the epistemological conversation within the health professions education research community. It is our hope that scholars in the field will engage in this epistemological conversation and advance it in new directions.
Highlights
It is uncontroversial to affirm that the objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking
The question we wish to explore in this essay is the following: Does the grounded theory approach, in the constructivist version developed by Charmaz (1990, 2005, 2008a, b, 2014a, b, 2017), provide the necessary methodological tools for the creation of knowledge and theories beyond everyday thinking? To conduct our analysis, we will focus on two distinctive epistemological features characterising constructivist grounded theory: the use of inductive reasoning to generate interpretative theory; and the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity as the preferred path to knowledge making
While the usefulness of constructivist grounded theory (CGT) for conducting qualitative research and understanding the perspective of social actors has been acknowledged by scholars in health professions education research and other research areas, the inductivist logic on which it draws—as advocated by Charmaz—raises questions concerning the nature of the knowledge yielded by this approach
Summary
It is uncontroversial to affirm that the objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking. Theories and concepts serve as the anchor and the driving force for the research process, from the construction of the research object to the construction of the social/scientific fact They serve to break away from everyday thinking, and to make visible—both empirically and conceptually— the underlying structures, processes, and mechanisms shaping the social (and the natural) world. Theory accomplishes two interconnected functions: (1) it breaks away from commonsensical thinking (i.e., preconstructed objects, ideology, taken-for-granted assumptions, false evidence) and, by doing so, (2) it opens up a space where new relationships between elements can be conceptually constructed and observed This is how, for rationalists, theory acquires its explanatory power and why it focuses on the underlying processes, mechanisms and structures rather than on fleeting visible phenomena. This is why rationalists, while acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of each researched phenomenon, see commonalities between them as they may be fuelled by similar processes
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