ABSTRACT
Grounded Theory Methods are a set of practices for exploring a new domain, or a domain without an organizing theory. The practices are strongly grounded in the data and the theory is said to emerge from the data. Outside of the strict workplace context, grounded theory has helped to understand social phenomena in families, the needs of families managing collections of music, and viewing the contents of videos related to smartphones. Grounded theory originated in sociology, and has become a key methodology in certain fields such as nursing. K. Charmaz writes, Grounded theory methods consist of simultaneous data collection and analysis, with each informing and focusing the other throughout the research process. In more personal domains, grounded theory has been used to study people’s formative experiences with computers, impression management during disease, and value issues in games software. Grounded theory has tended to be used in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work in two distinct ways.
