A Flexible Guide for Using Ethnography + Grounded Theory: An Example From Studying A Research Team’s Decision-Making Culture

Abstract

The benefits of interdisciplinary research teams are well-known; however, there can be challenges due to differences in how disciplines approach knowledge construction. To better understand how interdisciplinary research teams navigate these differences in thinking, we used tools from ethnography to discover the cultural knowledge created and used by an engineering education research team and individuals on the team. We then used approaches from constructivist grounded theory to interpret these insights and transform them into a preliminary model of how interdisciplinary engineering education researchers navigate differences in thinking. This methodology paper outlines our process and the benefits of combining approaches from ethnography and constructivist grounded theory to simultaneously explore group culture and individual perceptions. We describe how and why we combined approaches from these two methodologies to develop our preliminary model. The aim of this paper is to provide an example of how qualitative researchers can be creative with their methodological approaches to comprehensively explore their social reality under investigation.