It's Like Doing a Job Analysis: You Know More About Qualitative Methods Than You May Think

Through learning about and doing job analysis, industrial–organizational (I-O) psychologists likely already possess skills and knowledge relevant to doing and understanding qualitative research. We'll illustrate this by showing similarities between common job analysis practices and one particular qualitative research approach likely to be relevant to organizational research: grounded theory. Grounded theory was “discovered†in 1967 by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Though Glaser and Strauss later split in their methodologies (an occurrence not unlike the varied approaches to job analysis), the core idea of grounded theory is to develop a new theory of some process or phenomenon from the “ground†up. In the grounded theory approach, researchers typically collect mostly qualitative data—often including interviews (Creswell, 2007)—and simultaneously develop increasingly abstract codes, concepts, and categories from the data. In the final step of analysis, researchers develop a theory that subsumes all categories from the data. If researchers follow the Straussian tradition, categories can be fit into a theoretical framework that details a central phenomenon underlying the process of interest and the conditions that precede it, result from it, and shape the resulting categories (Creswell, 2007). We illustrate this framework in Figure 1. Grounded theory is particularly useful for developing an accurate understanding of many organizational processes and phenomena that I-O psychologists study.