ABSTRACT
Nancy Grimm (1996) and Muriel Harris (1995) remind us of the promise that writing centers hold as sites of literacy research. In these articles, they caution us that studying literacy in writing centers is not an easy task. My own experiences as a tutor and writing center researcher have taught me that writing tutorials cannot be reduced to Likert scales and statistical significances. Nor can they be represented adequately by simple descriptions and anecdotal evidence. Neither can writing center ideologies and institutional relationships be explained satisfactorily through deductive theorizing. My ongoing quest for better methods of studying literacy practices in writing centers eventually brought me to grounded theory, an interpretive methodology originally developed by sociologists who wished to simultaneously describe and theorize the complexities of human interactions. Social scientists use grounded theory to study such phenomena as chronic illness, status passages, remarriages, and professional socialization. Researchers and practitioners in anthropology, psychology, nursing, and education have also embraced grounded theory because of its general “way of thinking about and conceptualizing data” (Strauss &; Corbin, 1994, 275).
