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Health Care for Women International

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GROUNDED THEORY AND GENDER RELEVANCE

Barney G. Glaser
a a

Mill Valley, California, USA Published online: 11 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Barney G. Glaser (2002) GROUNDED THEORY AND GENDER RELEVANCE, Health Care for Women International, 23:8, 786-793 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07399330290112317

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Health Care for Women International , 23:786793, 2002 Copyright 2002 Taylor & Francis 0739-9332 /02 $12.00 + .00 DOI: 10.1080 /0739933029011231 7

GROUNDED THEORY AND GENDER RELEVANCE

Barney G. Glaser, Phd, Hon Phd
Mill Valley, California, USA

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I am honored and humbled to be invited to give a plenary address at the Twelfth International Congress on Womens Health Issues. Ellie Covan and Phyllis Stern wished me to include in my address that the concept of male domination as a problem for all research involving women needs to earn its way into the research construct. More abstractly they wanted me to address how the grounded theory (GT) point of view and conceptual abstraction handles the issue of gender earning its way into a research analysis. They advised me of four assumptions that warrant discussion. First, in all health issues gender makes a difference. From a GT point of view this assumption is not correct. It is an empirical research matter whether it emerges as an issue. Before the research whether gender is neutral or not is not to be assumed. In order to study women using GT the researcher does not have to focus on them exclusively. If relevant, gender will emerge. I understand fully that focusing on gender is useful as a political, health, or social issue. I respect this issue out of research-for-women purposes, but it is not necessary for GT. I have seen many health research studies where gender is irrelevant, but the theory within can be applied speci cally to women. The second assumption is that male domination is the cause of womens problems. It is said that men are abusive on all dimensions. In GT research the answer is no, male abusiveness must emerge. In GT research there is no male bashing or accusing men as ogres, just as there is no assuming that women are she wolves. The third assumption follows from the second in that health organization is replete with male domination. Women do not have a targetee monopoly. Domination is a general process. It is based on an authority structure and general health procedure requirements. For example, men as well as women are immediately toned by health professionals. Then tone riding is gender neutral until it emerges differently. Irrespective of malady or procedure, how the toning occurs may or may not be related to how the relationship is toned as a latent pattern on a service. Gender

Received 2 August 2001; accepted 3 August 2001. Address correspondence to Barney G. Glaser, P.O. Box 123, Mill Valley, CA 94942, USA. E-mail: bglaser@speakeasy.ne t

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domination has to be discovered as emergent in GT. It forces the research to assume male domination. It must earn its way into the GT. The fourth assumption is that gender relevance gets into a GT theory two ways. It earns its way as an emergent category into the theory in new research or by emergent t by using a GT in subsequent research. Second, applying a GT that does not have gender as a category can be used on a gender population. For example, one can apply a theory on abusive power relationships to women as well as to children or men or elderly or impaired, and so on.

GROUNDED THEORY
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The assertions above are based on the notion that conceptualization is the core category of GT. We all know or have an idea what conceptualization is in general. Here I will detail those properties of conceptualization that are essential for generating GT, so the reader can understand how GT can transcend speci c gender concerns yet help him or her in application. All that GT is is the generation of emergent conceptual categories and their properties integrated into hypotheses resulting in a multivariate theory. It is a rigorous methodology woven together by constant comparisons and conceptualization. Because of conceptualization, GT transcends all descriptive methods and their worrisome problems of accuracy. By transcending I do not say implicitly that description is bad, wrong, or unfavorable. Description is just different, with different properties than conceptualization, yet these properties are confused in the qualitative research literature. Actually description runs the world, however precise or vague, with conceptualization running a distant second. Thus gender can be described ad in nitum in descriptive studies but must earn its way in GT studies. Sociologists, psychologists, social psychologists, and other social researchers are mandated to conceptualize in the social sciences. GT provides a systematic way to conceptualize carefully. Yet many social psychological researchers still have little or no awareness of conceptual levels. Thus they describe and use gender tiny topics as we see in so many of the papers in this womans health congress.

CONCEPTUALIZATION
Three important properties of conceptualization are (1) latent pattern naming by concepts that are categories and properties, (2) the enduring grab of the concepts, and (3) the concepts are abstract of time, place, and people. (1) GT is generated from much data of which many participants are usually empirically unaware. GT is applicable to the participant as an explanation of the preponderance of their behavior, which is how they are resolving their main concern, which concern they are not aware of conceptually, if at all. It is just what they do! GT is not a description of their voice; it is a generated abstraction from both their doings and their meanings, which are taken as the data for the conceptual generation of GT. GT uncovers and names the many latent patterns the participants do not understand from their particularistic accounts, and especially so the social ctions that are involved. Naming a pattern (a category) does not give voice to the participants. It designates a latent pattern that yields as a consequence

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many diverse voices. It is the underlying cause. It is an abstraction that is conceptualized. (2) The enduring grab of GT concepts is not pertinent to this lecture. Brie y, concepts in general, whether conjectured, impressionistic, or carefully generated by GT procedures have instant enduring grab. The concept can instantly sensitize people to seeing a pattern in an event or happening or substantive area that makes them feel they understand with know-how. The person feels like he can explain the behavior he sees. The generator of the concept becomes known for it. For example, think of pseudofriending as a control mechanism in professional clients control. (3) The important property for this lecture is that conceptualization is abstract of time, place, and people. Conceptualization transcends. It transcends the routine perceptions of participants or perceptions of nonparticipants. Thus it transcends gender attributions about people. Unless then as the GT proceeds and gender emerges as a relevant category, the GT can only be a general theory that can be applied to a substantive action scene as an emergent t for future research or for application. If it is applied to women, then constant comparison with new data can show how the GT in emergent application can explain a gender situation, but the latent pattern of the GT is general. It is just speci cally applied, that is all. I will give an extended example of this in a moment. Most researchers and writers on methodology do not have a theoretical clue of what it means to be abstract of time, place, or people. The result is that GT is down-abstracted to just another qualitative data analysis with a few concepts and lot of description. In fact, for most researchers, it is hard to give up time, place, and people in favor of abstraction. Routine qualitative description is most natural and taught in most qualitative research courses. GT in abstracting from time, place, or people allows the researcher to develop a general GT on a core variable such as cutting back, supernormalizing, credentializing, cultivating, host tolerance, pluralistic dialoging, atmosphering, desisting residual selves, client control, awing, probable safety, cautionary control, and so many others. This conceptual delimiting stands in stark contrast to qualitative researchs lengthy descriptions that endeavor to descriptively map a substantive area in an accurate, nontranscending way.

Place
While a GT may have been generated from a unit, or many units, if adequate theoretical sampling was used, it does not describe the unit. The GT gets applied to the unit to explain the preponderance of behavior in it. Thus a GT is not generalized from a speci c unit to another similar and/or larger unit or number of units. A GT generalizes to a transcending basic social process, topology, cutting point, or other theoretically coded core category. One can nd credentializing or client control everywhere. In fact the GTs latent core pattern may relate many seemingly disparate units. The GT does not describe the whole unit. It just denotes an emergent core category (usually a process, but not necessarily) within it. If the researcher nds it hard to give up the wholeness or full description of the unit, he or she will feel impelled to

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insert face sheet data as well as context. The inclusion will surely cite gender whether relevant or not, whether it earned its way into the theory or not. Gender will appear as descriptively necessary whether or not emergently needed. Researchers who are not clear on the distinction between conceptual and description become easily confused about whether the GT describes a unit, conceptualizes a process within it, or both. Let me be clear that it only conceptualizes a process or other theoretical code.

People
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It is hard for many a GT researcher only to relate concepts and not relate concepts to people. People become labeled or actioned by a concept like it is their whole being. In GT behavior is a pattern that a person engages in; it is not the person. People are not categorized, behavior is. Thus men are not dominators or abusers, they engage in dominating behavior or abusing behavior as women or children or police or political of cials may do.

Time
Perhaps the most important aspect of conceptualization is that concepts last forever, descriptions are soon stale dated. Concepts are timeless in their applicability. They even last longer than the hypotheses they were rst used in. Since GT concepts are rigorously generated, since they can make a continuing mark on us with grab, and since the GT is general, the GT researcher can make a lasting contribution by generating a theory of domination that explains any domination, as well as gender domination. To simply describe womens domination in a particular substantive area can soon change. It is more lasting to generate a theory on dominating, and then apply it wherever. I have written much on conceptualization and I suggest the members of the audience who are interested read my books on how to generate a GT, that is, how to take the conceptual leap out of description. Here in closing I wish to give some examples of the lasting power of GT for gender studies by rst doing the general substantive theory and then applying it. GT allows many a researcher to claim this power of explanation of what is going on and, in your case, particularly for in uencing womens situations. Given our brief discussion of conceptualization regarding latent pattern, enduring grab, and abstraction from time, place and people, most people can begin to feel the power of conceptualization. It gives the power to transcend the descriptive, to generate wise grounded propositions that explain behavior in a substantive area, to organize and make meaningful many seemingly disparate incidences into latent patterns to be used in relevant future research or in application. GT power gives control by its sensitizing concepts, its generalizability, and its being abstract of what many would see beforehand as a necessary category such as gender.

DOING GROUNDED THEORY

Gender does not own a theory. A GT or other theory is usually more general. Yet if the researcher does not do a general theory that is gender neutral at the start,

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he or she may think it is a gender related theory, when it actually is not! It is only gender related in application, as I will show in the Chinese mothers study below. Or procedural medicine applies to all illness conditions whether gender related or not. With some variation women are not special unless gender emerges so when doing GT. Gender relevance often washes out by a gender neutral latent pattern on the conceptual level, if a gender bias is started with in the research. It makes most sense to start GT research as gender neutral and then see what emerges and earns its way into the theory. Thus rst do a study of dominating, abusing, or favoring. Then see how it helps explain a gender relevant situation like gender abuse or breast-feeding support. The GT researcher will usually be surprised at what she discovers when starting gender neutral. The apparent gender study may really be gender neutral. The gender neutral theory will be more powerful, more fundamental. Forcing gender on a study restricts and even can short circuit its power. Thus studying marital division of labor is rst; then see if it varies between heterosexual and homosexual households or marriages. It did not in the studying I was involved in. To say it did vary beforehand would have distorted the theory in favor of issues. A general GT study of organizational careers should come rst before analyzing the issues between men and womens career chances and passages. Merit can be androgynous and rewarded as such to the surprise of many. GT adds power to the world of research, and to gender research in application or emergence. It does not change it. Descriptive qualitative studies will continue in full force and predominate the research scene. There is suf ciently big money, interest, and sound careers involved in descriptive gender studies. They can be immediate-consequence and issue-oriented studies. Competitive gender studies or men against women are popular. Number studies on women are popular. They deal with description of vital issues. GT does not take this away from descriptive-oriented researchers. GT is just an alternative, not a conversion. Doing the general, substantive theory rst adds more variables to the theory that make its application to a gender problem, such as abuse of women, more powerful.

EXAMPLES
Listen to these core categories from GT studies. They are general to age, sex, gender, marital status, ethnicity, religion, educational level, and so forth. Yet they can be applied to any problem within these face sheet data. They are pluralistic dialoging, client controlling, regimen control, issue realms, supernormalizing, credentializing, cutting back, awe inspiring, creative undermining, preserving life, relationship toning, desisting residual selves, balancing care, host tolerance, cautionary control, personal legitimizing, awareness contexts, infracontrolling, illusioning, relevancy experience, competence displays, stamina displays, enduring in silence, pooling social support, competitive knowing, default remodeling, enhancing creativity, and covering. I could go on as there are so many more. All these core categories come from sound GT research. All could be used to guide further emergent research or be applied to help explain gender problems. But do the substantive GT rst. As I said, the researcher will be surprised at what emerges and how powerful is their application. For example, a GT of dominating processes helps explain empirical problems of domination whether of children, elderly, bureaucratic workers, women, and so forth.

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Now let us review three womens studies from this perspective. 1. Toward a Chinese Conception of Social Support: A Study on the Social Support Networks of Chinese Working Mothers in Beijing, by Angelina W. K. Yuen-Tsang, 1997, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Stockholm, Sweden. This is a quite wonderful dissertation, except that it is assumed that gender owns the theory. But it does not. It is actually a general theory of social support that is applicable to all family members: wives, children, husbands, elderly, cousins, and so on. Therefore, she misses the opposite sex for her forcing. But the general theory comes through in spite of such forcing. Her GT explains how support provides refuge, shelter, strength, protection, powerful backing, security, no rules for support, certainty, lifelong unlimited continuous availability of resources. It provides an unquestioning , genuine, nonconditiona l structured pool of resources based on blood ties of providers and a communal nature. The family pool provides lifelong reciprocity, mutual sharing of pooled resources all received in a one-way ow with no immediate obligation. The communal support is collective rather than individual. Thus supporting an individual is for keeping the whole family in tact nancially, emotionally, and spiritually as expressed needs are spontaneously and holistically met. The goal is harmonious coexistence whether genuine or pretense. All this applies variably to both genders at all ages. The theory is gender neutral but distorted as a womens theory. Gender did emerge in the division of labor of providing those support aspects that appeared clearly as masculine or feminine tasks by the supporters for the supportee. The general theory emerges through the theory in spite of the claim that women owned the theory. The dissertation is excellent, to be sure, but could have been better. 2. Candies in Hell: Research and Action on Domestic Violence against Women in Nicaragua, by Mary Carroll Ellsberg, 2000, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umea University, Sweden. This dissertation, too, is excellent as far as it goes. This study deals in the magnitude of numbers of women (wives) experiencing male (spousal) abuse in Nicaragua. The idea is that numbers change laws, and the goal is to obtain laws that protect abused wives and prevent gender violence. The author says, Quantitative research has been useful for understanding the magnitude and some of the main features of wife abuse, it does not contribute much to the understanding of how women themselves experience violence. The women endure abuse for many years before leaving or even seeking help. Women who leave often return to the abusers many times, even after having suffered life threatening injury. Violent relationships present an ongoing process of entrapment and diminished coping capacity. She does a beautiful job in showing the magnitude of abuse on its principal features by the numbers. The only theory she has to explain the wifes entrapment and possible eventual disengagement from a husband is borrowed from an article written in 1989, 11 years before her research. The theory delineates the process of binding the woman to the man by rationalizing or denying the violence. The rst stage is the abused women enduring the violence by covering up, blaming themselves, and modifying their behavior to gain some control over the mans episodic anger. When enduring does not work, seeking help and disengagement start, and if successful, and often it is not, recovery can start. Women the world over cite a wide range of reasons for staying in the relationship, including fear of reprisals, shame and selfblame, economic and emotional dependence on the abuser, concern for the childrens lack of support from family and friends, and the hope that he will change.

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Given her rich data on gender violence, this borrowed theory misses much. Her data go way beyond it. It does not begin to explain all the variables in the last sentence above and more. If Mary had had a general GT on abusive power relationships or had generated one with her data, her recommendations for laws that protect women would have been far more powerful, complex, and effective on many other abusive dimensions besides the obvious one of physical. She needed a GT from her excellent data. Now let us look at one such GT on the general notion of abusive power relationship that applies to all abused people: children, men, women, elderly, disabled, bureaucratic subordinates, and so forth. It surely would have helped the study on gender violence in Nicaragua. It would have helped craft a law that is more inclusive of all the rami cations of gender violence. It would have helped women far beyond just physical violence. 3. The Miso Model: A Synthesis and Application of Domestic Violence Concepts to Leadership and Organization Theory, by Jaclyn Gisburne (Journal Unknown). Jaclyn has written extensively on this theory. For her writings and articles send to 260 East Butter eld, #213, Elmhurst, IL, 60126, USA. I can only give here the broad outline of her theory of abusive and negative controllers by violence that applies to heterosexual relationships as well as many other relationships. In both violence in the home and violence against a group or nation, the perpetrator is virtually undetected until after the violent acts, and even then many people are left wondering if those reporting against the perpetrator are not mistaken, because he seems so nice, sincere, and decent. People in power can become power abusers. They manipulate their positional resources (structural, cultural, and personal) to oppress, coerce, and thus control others they are in authority over. They have portable personalities no matter what their role or status. They have portable personalities; that is, no matter what their position they act out their personality tendency to power abuse. Their motivation to control others by coercion and through power abuse emerges irrespective of the social constraints of the situation. They need to feel their power and ascendancy over a dependent victim. Their power requires the dependence of their victim. They strike real terror in their victim, which is controlling. They put a threat to the victims in situ survival, whether job, recreation, marital, or even life, and so on. The victim feels the abuser can and will carry out their threat. The abuser has the authority. The abuser socially and psychologically isolates his or her victim from competing perspectives in all situations and sometimes structurally, as making a wife homebound. The victim feels an inability to escape. The power abuser salts the relationship with increments of kindness, which further confuse the victim, often making him or her feel ashamed or guilty. Needless to say, the power abuser bends rules the victim is trying to abide by to relieve or prevent the abuse. The power abuser is often aided by cultural enabling, whether the source is bureaucratic, ethnic, marital, or cultural inferiority. Their abuse at rst sight seems okay or appropriate. It can become a mythical truth, if left unchallenged. It becomes an accepted part of a lifestyle at work or at home. It becomes undebatable. Every act of abuse is an ego-enhancing purge for the abuser followed by rationalizations and a honeymoon phase, so all seems okay. This makes it dif cult to track when the next time of arousal to violence will occur, as it surely will. But this phasing violence has a cyclical nature that has shorter quiescent honeymoon

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periods between violent episodes and escalating severity of violence the next time it happens. The abuser is engaging in a self-socialization puri cation by his/her abuse. The abuse becomes a dysfunctional self-learning loop untouched by external circumstances. Gisburne calls it the VVD pattern. The abuser vindicates his/her self-image, validates the impending act, and discounts all social constraints that would obstruct it. The abuser becomes so sure of the impending violence that often he/she will tell others in advance of its impending nature. But it is hard for others to believe such violence would come from such a nice, kind person, so the warning goes unheard as a form of humor. It is joking about what could not happen. The violence to come is justi ed by the abuser and seldom prevented by others. The abusers purge and puri cation occurs and others outrage is after the fact. The power abuser frequently comes from a family wrought with violence and abuse and feels abandoned all his/her life from childhood on. The abuser sees himself as a victim to the maximum, which results in him becoming a tragic hero. His or her violence is never seen as wrong. It is seen as ghting back against bullies, against a bullying situation. The abuser in his or her own personality is a freedom ghter, irrespective of the irrelevance of the current victim to his or her plight. The abuse can easily grow from social psychological and structural battery type abuses to physical violence and eventually to total elimination of the object-victim as an apparent solution. But there is no nal solution, just arousal again and again with new victims being drafted to object position. Jaclyn Gisburne has written much on this miso model, which is grounded in an immense reading of research and especially dissertations. It is a brilliant grounded formal theory. She shows how the model works well when applied to explaining abuse among nations and organizations as well as people. It is a good example of the point of this lecture, that a general GT can be applied to explain womens problems, as well as many other problems, more powerfully than a GT or conceptual description that has preconceived gender focus as an issue from the start. It is more complex with more variables to work with as access to alleviating problems. In the Nicaraguan case of gender violence it could surely make new laws preventing spousal abuse more on target, since it could work with the cultural enabling, the social psychological deprivations on the domicile bound, social life and nancial areas of concern before the escalation to physical violence. I have chosen the abuse issue, but my point also applies equally to other healthrelated womens issues and bureaucratic career and job-related issues and so forth. We need more general GTs to be generated to apply to these issues.

REFERENCES
Glaser, B. G. (1978). Theoretical sensitivity. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Glaser, B. G. (Ed.). (1993). More grounde d theory methodology. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Glaser, B. G. (1998). Doing grounde d theory. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Glaser, B. G. (2001). The grounde d theory perspective: Conceptualization Contrasted with Description. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.