The Grounded Theory Method and Maternal-Infant Research and Practice

Perinatal nurses have found qualitative methods helpful in capturing the social, cultural, and relational aspects of their work with women and their families. This article describes the components of the grounded theory method and illustrates each with examples from recent maternal-infant studies. Grounded theory is an inductive method of qualitative analysis that generates theory from data. The grounded theory method includes several key strategies such as theoretical sensitivity, theoretical sampling, constant comparison, increasingly abstract consideration of the data, and discovery of a core variable or basic social process that describes the pattern of the phenomenon under study. This method may strengthen qualitative nursing studies because of its generalizability and applicability across settings. By remaining grounded in and connected to the data, grounded theory can be adapted to many contexts, making it useful to the practicing nurse. Knowledge generated from grounded theory has great potential to assist us in our inquiry into the needs of mothers, fathers, infants, and their families.