When i first started my qualitative research back in 2018, i thought interviewing people would be as simple as asking questions and collecting answers. But grounded theory quickly taught me otherwise recently, and it’s not just about what to ask, it’s about how you make sense of what people say
For starters, i began by creating a 2-level structure for my interviews:
- At the first level, i drafted general questions based on what grounded theorists might call Level 1 (L1) questions. These are broad prompts like “What are…?”, “How do…?”, or “Who might…?” and such, and the goal isn’t to confirm what i already know, but to open plausibility questions that might lead to new insights and for what i don’t know yet
- Then came the second level of questions: probing. For every interesting or vague response, i’d follow up with “Could you elaborate on that?” or “Can you give me an example?” This probing step became my way of refining the raw data, letting ambiguity and uncertainty reveals naturally instead of being forced
At the beginning, i learned to avoid presupposition questions, one of the questions that assume something is already true. I realized how easy it’s to accidentally ask leading questions, like “If we used this tool, would that help?”, instead of something open like “How do you usually handle this?”. The difference seems relatively small, but in grounded theory, that difference can determine whether you’re discovering patterns or just confirming your own biases
Sometimes, of course, i’d to switch and ask closed-ended questions such as asking like: “How many times?”, “Have you heard about…?”, or “Are you satisfied with…?” These weren’t for exploration but for precision and to seeking clarify and pin down specific details that might otherwise drift
Then came one of my favorite techniques: two-sided questioning. For instance, if one parent described giving their child a particular kind of curriculum and another did something entirely different, i’d ask my participant with :
“What do you think about these two approaches?”
This comparative questioning often revealed missing links or nuanced insights that single perception questions couldn’t capture. Over time, i also found myself applying the constant comparison method: every new answer that i received was weighed against previous ones. This wasn’t about contradiction, it was about building meaning layer by layer
When to stop
One of the hardest things for me to accept was knowing when to stop. Qualitative data doesn’t end with a single answer, it expands, mutates and overlaps. I learned that i’d to stop when the data became saturated: when new responses started repeating what others had already said, or when themes began overlapping into each other
To make sure my interpretations were solid, i leaned on triangulation by checking my insights against multiple sources like research papers, books, and my own interviews. Sometimes i also used member-checking: returning my interpretations to participants to validate whether i’d understood them correctly
Making sense of chaos
Here’s the truth that i’ve learned so far: the hardest part isn’t collecting the data, it’s making sense of it.
Accuracy, in qualitative terms, isn’t about numbers, it’s about capturing meanings faithfully. I tried to practice parsimony by explaining things as simply as possible without losing depth. When my data began to connect in meaningful ways, it started to feel alive, sometimes it felt like applicative, tangible, sometimes even transformative
Not every outcome had to become an app, a website, or a model. Some outcomes were quieter: field notes, reflections, or even small realizations that would later grow into bigger frameworks. During this phase, i experimented with methods like decomposition, comparative mapping, visual diagrams, and temporal bracketing. A fancy way of saying i paused when i found an “aha” moment that made sense, even if it didn’t fit neatly into my existing analysis
When things clicked, i drew inspiration from Strauss & Corbin’s open–axial–selective coding paradigm and the Gioia methodology, which moves from concepts to dimensions and finally to aggregated themes. These frameworks helped me see order within what initially felt like chaos