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Studying Illness and Dying through

Constructivist Grounded Theory
Linda Liska Belgrave and Kathy Charmaz

Introduction

The sociological study of death and dying and the grounded theory
method made a simultaneous debut. Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L.
Strauss’s (1965) book, Awareness of Dying, brought death and dying
into sociological purview, and put the experience of death and dying
on the agenda of grounded theorists. Any review of death and dying
through using grounded theory methodology must therefore begin with
this study of the social organisation of dying in US hospitals. Glaser
and Strauss demonstrated that sociologists could bring new analytic
insights to the study of death and dying, thus contributing to both
their discipline and professional practice. Subsequently in 1967, the
authors published their initial statement of their methods for studying
dying, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research.
This book profoundly influenced the social scientific study of illness,
dying, and death, and rapidly spread qualitative methods far beyond
the confines of sociology. Glaser and Strauss’s argument in the Discovery
book not only answered numerous criticisms of qualitative research but
also set forth a new agenda for qualitative inquiry.
Grounded theory is a systematic method of building inductive theo-
ries from data to construct middle-range theories. The method involves
simultaneous data collection and rigorous scrutiny and development
of the researcher’s emerging theoretical categories. Constructivist
grounded theory, our focus here, is a contemporary version of the
method. Constructivist grounded theory adopts methodological strate-
gies of the original version but shifts its epistemological foundations
and integrates recent methodological developments in qualitative
inquiry.

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L. Van Brussel et al. (eds.), The Social Construction of Death
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
 Studying Illness and Dying 35

In this chapter, we want to demonstrate how constructivist grounded

theory may deepen our understandings of illness, dying, and death. We
begin with a brief overview of the origins and logic of grounded theory
before discussing constructivist grounded theory. We then introduce
symbolic interactionism, the theoretical perspective with which the
method is most associated. Next we discuss illustrative studies in death
and dying and focus on novel insights yielded by grounded theory,
particularly constructivist approaches. Finally, we explicate devel-
oping an analysis of disclosing serious illness to show how construc-
tivist grounded theorists work with data. As our examples attest, many
grounded theory studies of illness, death and dying address individual
experience (see Corbin and Strauss, 1988; Carricaburu and Pierret, 1995;
Ciambrone, 2007; Hinojosa et al., 2008). However, we contend that
researchers can use the method to address larger social issues and offer
some suggestions about how to do it.

The emergence of constructivist grounded theory

Constructivist grounded theory developed from the original statement

that Glaser and Strauss first articulated in The Discovery of Grounded
Theory. The constructivist version (Charmaz, 2000, 2014) aims to
preserve useful grounded theory strategies and to integrate recent devel-
opments in qualitative inquiry such as reflexivity and co-construction
of data. Thus, constructivist grounded theory shares Glaser and Strauss’s
notions that: (1) systematic, comparative, inductive qualitative research
can generate theory; (2) qualitative research must be judged on its own
canons; (3) the purpose of grounded theory is theory construction; and
(4) using the strategies of grounded theory can raise the theoretical level
of the emerging analysis.
Constructivist grounded theory differs from earlier versions by chal-
lenging positivistic assumptions in Glaser’s (1978, 1998) version of
grounded theory and in Strauss and Corbin’s (1990, 1998) first two
editions of Basics of Qualitative Research. The constructivist version
brings subjectivities into inquiry and attends to participants’ language
use, liminal assumptions, and situations. Constructivist grounded
theory can thus play a significant role in the field of thanatology, as
it goes deeper into participants’ meanings of illness, dying, and death
than earlier versions and acknowledges the researcher’s interpretive
role in understanding and representing these meanings. Constructivist
grounded theory emphasises the interactive nature of the method as well
as its inductive beginnings, iterative form, and comparative analyses.