Situational Analysis as Critical Pragmatist Interactionism

Abstract

Situational analysis (SA) is an extension of constructionist approaches to grounded theory (GT). Over the past half-century of GT in practice, major contributors have generated different emphases. 1 Glaserian GT sustains positivist functionalist traditions, while Straussian GT – always pragmatist and interactionist – also became increasingly constructionist. Kathy Charmaz (2000, 2006, 2009, 2014, 2017a) has most clearly developed the pragmatic interactionist line of GT through social constructivism, which has also become relentlessly critical and oriented toward social justice. It advances this project by ‘locat[ing] the research process and product in historical, social and situational conditions’, and ‘excavating the structural contexts, power arrangements and collective ideologies’ in the study focus (Charmaz, 2017a: 34–35). Justice and injustice are ‘enacted processes’ (Charmaz, 2005: 508). SA extends this critical interactionist approach to GT – rooted in coding – through additional analytical techniques that are rooted in mapping situations of inquiry.