Wilson Centre and Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Wilson Centre, MD Program and Department of Paediatrics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2019 Oct;24(4):827-837. doi: 10.1007/s10459-018-9849-7. Epub 2018 Aug 9.
The objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking. Academics use an array of techniques, methods and conceptual apparatuses to achieve this goal. The question we explore in this essay is the following: Does the grounded theory approach, in the constructivist version developed by Kathy Charmaz, provide the necessary methodological tools for the creation of knowledge and theories beyond everyday thinking? To conduct our analysis, we have drawn on the rationalist epistemology originally developed by Gaston Bachelard and taken up a few decades later by Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues to look at the epistemological foundation of the CGT methods as defined by Charmaz. We focussed on two distinctive epistemological features characterising constructivist grounded theory (CGT): the use of inductive reasoning to generate interpretative theory; and the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity as the preferred path to knowledge making. While the usefulness of CGT for conducting qualitative research and understanding the perspective of social actors has been acknowledged by scholars in health professions education research and other research areas, the inductivist logic on which it draws raises questions concerning the nature of the knowledge yielded by this approach. As we argue in this article, it is still unclear in what way the interpretative theory generated by CGT is not a duplication of everyday thinking expressed through meta-narratives. It is also unclear how the understanding of social phenomena can be refined if the use of inductive procedures logically implies the creation of a new theory each time a study is conducted. We engage with these questions to broaden the epistemological conversation within the health professions education research community. It is our hope that scholars in the field will engage in this epistemological conversation and advance it in new directions.
科学的或更广泛地说，学术知识的目标是提供对超越常识和日常思维的社会和自然世界的理解。学者们使用一系列的技术、方法和概念工具来实现这一目标。我们在本文中探讨的问题是：在凯西·查尔马兹（Kathy Charmaz）发展的建构主义版本中，扎根理论方法是否为超越日常思维的知识和理论创造提供了必要的方法工具？为了进行我们的分析，我们借鉴了加斯东·巴舍拉（Gaston Bachelard）最初提出的理性主义认识论，并在几十年后由皮埃尔·布迪厄（Pierre Bourdieu）和同事们采用，以探讨查尔马兹（Charmaz）定义的 CGT 方法的认识论基础。我们专注于建构主义扎根理论（CGT）的两个独特的认识论特征：使用归纳推理生成解释性理论；以及主观性优先于客观性，作为知识创造的首选途径。虽然健康职业教育研究和其他研究领域的学者已经承认 CGT 对于进行定性研究和理解社会行为者的观点很有用，但它所依赖的归纳逻辑引发了关于该方法产生的知识性质的问题。正如我们在本文中所论证的，CGT 生成的解释性理论在何种程度上不是通过元叙事表达的日常思维的重复，这仍然不清楚。如果使用归纳程序在每次研究中都逻辑上意味着创建一个新理论，那么如何深化对社会现象的理解也是不清楚的。我们参与这些问题，以在健康职业教育研究界扩大认识论对话。我们希望该领域的学者参与这种认识论对话，并将其推进到新的方向。
