Hi Everyone,
I kept thinking about Kyeonghue's question Wednesday about the relationship between grounded theory and positivism. Here are some further thoughts about it.
In class, I said that I believed grounded theory to not be positivist in nature due to how much it privileges research participants' words, making a link between lived reality and multiple versions of that. However, going back to Glaser and Strauss' work, I think the relationship is more ambivalent. Grounded theory moves the pursuit of knowledge from deductive to inductive, but does not theorize clearly and explicitly whether multiple contradictory truths may exist. Instead, they posit that overarching metanarratives are insufficient for understanding all lived experiences. Contrast that, say, to Deleuze and Guattari's well known philosophies on the relationship between patterns and aberrations, and grounded theory starts feeling much more positivistic. Glaser and Strauss do not theorize as to the multiplicity of truths held in a particular moment, which is one of the features of postpositivism.
As always, I encourage you to do some of this kind of thinking for yourself, as part of doing advanced philosophical studies. Instead of trusting when any professor, book, or article categorizes any approach, read against it a bit and look for how the approach uses particular lines of logic.
be well,
Leigh.
The Rogers readings on CDA from this week reminded me of the difference between students and learners. Here is a short link I found that essentially illustrates that idea, http://www.edutopia.org/blog/difference-between-learners-and-students-terry-heick
ReplyDeleteIt seems very connected to the differences between learning and acquisition in the reading.
This was amazingly helpful in crystalizing some things for me. Thank you for this. Looking forward to potentially discussing it more.
ReplyDelete