Grounded Theory Method in HCI and CSCW

Speaker
Michael Muller
Research Scientist and Staff Member, IBM Research

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Grounded Theory Methods (GTM) are a set of thought processes and procedures for qualitative data analysis that can help a researcher pursue a highly disciplined exploration of a new area, or of a domain without a dominant theory. The thought-processes and procedures are focused on the data, and always return to the data—i.e., the “grounding” in GTM is grounding in the data. In GTM, there is no hypothesis to be tested. Rather, research is guided by open-ended questions, and by a set of rigorous strategies that guide data collection, the choice of which data to sample, and the method for developing and testing insights into the data. The result is a rich, deeply interwoven description of the phenomena, and a set of new open-ended questions for further work. In this talk, I provide an account of the multiple forms of grounded theory, and a synthesis of the multiple views of method for use in HCI and CSCW.

Speaker's Bio

Michael works as a Research Scientist / Research Staff Member in the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Group. He is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design.and he has also been recognized through several invited book chapters in handbooks of human-computer interaction, keynote speaker at SIGDOC 2007, membership on panels at the National Science Foundation, and a three-year appointment to a study group at the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in the 2007 book, Human-System Integration in the System Development Process: A New Look. Over the years, Michael has worked in qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis of people-at-work, focusing on the discovery and documentation of workers’ skills, and the development of innovative services to help people work together. The Grounded Theory talk is based on a series of collaborations in qualitative studies with IBM colleagues, notably Sandra Kogan, David Millen, and Jennifer Thom-Santelli.

Michael’s current research is under the umbrella of CUE’s long-standing interest in social software (leading to Lotus Connections Activities and Lotus Connections Dogear), and the recently announced Center for Social Software. This year, Michael is working with Elizabeth Daly and intern Liang Guo to develop solutions to the problem of “social overload”—i.e., the large volume of update-messages that can occur in enterprise social software application-suites such as Lotus Connections. Their current experimental prototype uses a hybrid model of personal social graphs and object semantic graphs to calculate improved, topic-focused filters for streams of update-messages that occur in enterprise collaborative systems, with the triple goals of reducing social overload, improving relevance, and preserving or even enhancing the discovery of new information. Last year’s work, Return On Contribution (ROC), provided a first metric of the benefits from individual contributions to other users in enterprise social software applications.

Speaker's Website
Website

Host
John Zimmerman