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Unit 1: Concept of Research

them—a position made very feasible by the greatly increased sophistication of quantitative Notes
methods. As this shift in emphasis took hold, the discovery of new theories became slighted
and, at some universities, virtually neglected”.
Glaser and Strauss (1967) argue that the emphasis on verification of existing theories kept
researchers from investigating new problem areas; prevented them from acknowledging the
necessarily exploratory nature of much of their work, encouraged instead the inappropriate
use of verificational logic and rhetoric; and discouraged the development and use of systematic
empirical procedures for generating as well as testing theories. To compensate for the overemphasis
upon verification, Glaser and Strauss urged that research designed to build empirically “grounded”
theories must be recognized as a legitimate social scientific pursuit independent of verification.
They saw no necessary logical conflict between empirically building and testing theories. But
they felt that the social and the psychological conflicts “reflecting the opposition between a
desire to generate theory and a trained need to verify it” were so strong that clear designation
of theory building as a proper research goal was essential: “when generating 'theory' is not
clearly recognized as the main goal of a given research, it can be quickly killed by the twin
critiques of accurate evidence and verified hypotheses”.
If we accept that generating theories empirically is not a substitute for empirical verification,
then building theories without immediate regard for testing poses no special logical problems.
However, it may complicate matters methodologically. One serious complication is that theories
are often built empirically using research methods that are different from the methods required
to verify them.
Each style of social research can be employed either to generate or to verify theories. But in
fact, purely generational studies tend to rely more upon fieldwork or nonreactive data sources
than upon experiments or surveys, and often more upon qualitative than upon quantitative
observation and analysis. The transition from generational to verificational research may therefore
involve a methodological shift as well as a change in the focus of problem formulation. Studying
a theory with different research methods provides an opportunity for fuller examination of
that theory. However, employing a new or different method also creates difficulties. It may be
far from obvious how, for instance, concepts and propositions developed through qualitative
field studies may be measured and operationalized in terms suitable for quantitative surveys
or experiments—or vice versa, how to design a field study to test a theory deriving from
surveys or experiments. There may also be questions about the appropriateness of the new
method to the theory’s content, or about whether or not operational hypotheses that can be
tested with that method do in fact adequately represent the theory and so provide a fair and
full test.
Bernstein, Kelly, and Doyle (1977) encountered these kinds of difficulties in formulating and
testing hypotheses derived from symbolic interactionist theories of deviance. These were theories
that had been generated largely in qualitative field studies. Bernstein et al.’s strategy was to
combine qualitative field observation with quantitative analysis of interviews and court records
collected for a larger sample of criminal defenders. This multimethod approach, which is an
example of the transition study described allowed them to use the fieldwork data to aid in
both the design and the interpretation of the survey and archival segment of their study. The
approach also permitted them to be open and sensitive to the kinds of firsthand field observations
that had prompted the initial theories. They thereby retained descriptive realism without
sacrificing either the quantitative precision required for verification or the generalizability
provided by their larger sample.

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