Professor Cathy Urquhart in seven

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1. How is qualitative research methodology evolving?

It has definitely evolved to respond to the increased diversity of data sources that are available, especially online sources. Given the preponderance of visuals on social media, I still find it surprising that researchers don’t do more analysis of visual data.
I’m quite excited about the advent of computational theory development in my own discipline of information systems, where people are actively thinking about how to leverage large data sets from various digital sources and use them in conjunction with qualitative data to build theory.

2. What role can grounded theory play in the current research landscape?

Grounded theory shows no sign of stopping, and has become much more popular in business and management disciplines in recent years. It endures because it is a proven method of building new theory and, at the same time, providing deep insights into the data.
Because grounded theory is useful where little or no previous theory exists, it’s ...