ABSTRACT
Dimensional analysis evolved during many years of close collaboration between Leonard Schatzman and Anselm Strauss, and subsequently between Schatzman and his graduate students at the University of California, San Francisco. Although each of the second-generation versions of grounded theory found in this collection took a slightly different path, each has its roots in the same intellectual tradition initially described in The Discovery of Grounded Theory. As one of several second-generation grounded theory traditions, dimensional analysis proposes a coding sequence and an explicit focus on perspective that differs somewhat from the other grounded theory approaches included here. This chapter provides an overview of the history, evolution, and focus of dimensional analysis and proposes an alignment between everyday understandings of the social world and the analytic processes involved in research, a message that was particularly important to Schatzman as he mentored generations of novice researchers.
