Writing My Grounded Theory

      

           At this point I have already collected, transcribed, and coded, and categorized all of the data from Twitter. Now I needed to critique my processes and make sure I haven’t missed anything or think about if I could have done something in a different way. I did wonder if there were alternative methods or platforms for gathering data that would have been better. Of course, interviewing or surveying people and asking if and why they use social media to access news instead of traditional methods would have likely given me the most direct answer. However, the logistics of the ethics approval process would have been cumbersome, so the data from Twitter will have to suffice. Data from other social media platforms might have been helpful as well however, the search tool within Twitter turned out to be a very useful tool. Of course, I tried searching other social media platforms but because tweets are mainly narrative, the results seemed much more relevant to my research. 

During this stage of the course, we dive into actually writing up our research paper. This is where all the hard work needs to come together. I found the information from Woods (2006) regarding writing qualitative research to be extremely helpful. Specifically, the framework for organizing a qualitative research paper in a traditional method on page 37 was very helpful. Although I was already familiar with the format of a research paper, I have never really received specific details about the layout of a paper during my university career. It allowed me to start to organize my paper with the necessary headings and start to fill in details under each heading. I do find I’m still struggling with how to organize my thoughts. I thought that the hard work was behind me and writing everything up would be the easy part but that not turning out to be the case. I know what I want to say but it does feel like it’s hard to come up with the right words and make sure everything makes sense. To try and get past this, I started writing bullet points under each section of all the points I wanted to discuss. Then I slowly started adding more detail about each point and everything started to come together.

I wanted to ensure the literature review did not overshadow my research, as Stebbins (2001) explained that the purpose of a literature review within grounded theory research is to show what little research is done in that particular area (p. 42). While there is a lot of research around social media and news, I did not really find research specific to why people use social media to access news rather than traditional methods. However, within the research about social media and news, I did find more general information related to accessing news through social media that I felt still added to the overall picture. It also assisted me with more in depth understanding of social media practices, which was helpful.

                I was a bit confused at what point I should put what my theories are. I had a general research question of wanting to know why people use social media to access news and a basic theory that it was because of accessibility. However, because of the exploration process and the potential for that theory to evolve over time, I didn’t know where that fit within the documentation. Since I am trying to use grounded theory methods, I really wanted to highlight the exploration part of my research journey and it was difficult to figure out where that fit within the layout. In the end I touched on it over multiple sections and hoped that I got my point across.

                I also wasn’t quite sure how to approach the actual analysis section. Again, I felt like I was going to fall back on my quantitative ways and wanted to state how many tweets were related to this or that or how many were under a certain category. But then I read chapter four from Stebbins (2001) and he explained that quantitative generalization should be avoided when writing up exploratory research (p. 46). I realized I really needed to stick to qualitative generalizations as much as possible. I also realized that the qualitative generalizations were essentially my themes, and I needed those to explain the results of my research.

                In the end I decided to organize the analysis section by the themes that developed from the data. I ended up with four main themes of accessibility, realism, validity of news, and censorship. Organizing by theme allowed me to discuss each one in detail and explain the content from the tweets and categorization that led me to recognizing that theme. The themes that developed weren’t necessarily theories for answering my research question, but rather important topics that arose from the data. I did not want to be so rigid in sticking to my initial theory, but rather see where the data took me. This felt like a more authentic grounded theory method.

                In chapter eleven, Charmaz (2014) explained how writing up the research is an iterative process with re-thinking, revising, and re-writing (p. 285). I have felt like this has been my experience of writing everything up; I keep going back and changing words or moving different points around, so things hopefully flow better. I found that re-evaluating and revising was much better after taking some time away from the writing process. I would do some writing, and then come back in the next day or two and review it with fresh eyes. My perspective and thoughts also changed slightly as I read through the last chapter from Charmaz (2014). The readings helped me fine tune my thoughts and provide better organization to my writing.

                I found the memos I had written extremely helpful during the process of writing up my draft. It helped me remember why I made certain decisions or took a certain pathway during the exploration process. They were also a reminder of all the parts of the exploration process that I might not have remembered if I had not documented them. I can see now that if I had not had those memo writings, the process of writing my paper would have been much more difficult. I think it is also a good tool for reflecting on the research process, which is part of the grounded theory process according to Charmaz (2014).

                I found writing the discussion and conclusion section a bit difficult. I wanted to highlight the need for further research but still validate the research I had completed. I found it difficult to summarize my thoughts as qualitative research certainly isn’t as black and white as quantitative research. However, I still wanted to do it justice and encapsulate all of my findings. I also wanted to re-iterate the grounded theory methods as I used as I felt that was important to underline.

                The last part of the write up was adding the appendices which was fairly easy as they were already completed for the most part. I just had to make some formatting adjustments and decide which parts to include. I included my memo writings, as well as a sample of the coding and categorizing of my data. My theoretical sampling was included as part of my memo writings. I’m hoping these appendices provide more insight to my grounded theory processes.

One thing that surprised me was how much I enjoyed the creative part of it. I never really thought of myself as a creative writer, but I felt a bit more freedom because of doing qualitative research. It allowed me to write more about my thoughts rather than definitive data, and I enjoyed that much more than I thought I would.

                Overall, I found completing this project to be very rewarding. I was initially very skeptical of grounded theory because of my career in data analysis. It really felt like qualitative research could not be conducted in a standardized, methodical way. However, going through this process has proved that assumption wrong. Sometimes it took me until after completing a part of the research to realize that I had actually embedded grounded theory into my process. All along I kept worrying that I wasn’t sticking to grounded theory methods, but in the end, I realized I always pulled myself back from falling into the quantitative approach.

References

Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory. (2^nd ed.). Sage.

Stebbins, R.A. (2001). Exploratory research in the social sciences. Sage.

Woods, P. (2006). Successful writing for qualitative researchers. (2^nd ed.). Routledge.