Barney Glaser

Barney G. Glaser is most famous for co-founding the 'grounded theory' methodology alongside his colleague Anselm Strauss. This approach revolutionized qualitative research by providing a systematic way to generate theories directly from empirical data rather than testing existing theories.

Glaser and Strauss introduced their groundbreaking method in their 1967 book 'The Discovery of Grounded Theory.' The book argued against the prevailing academic trend of solely verifying grand theories, advocating instead for building theories from the ground up.

In the late 1970s, Glaser and Strauss famously had a falling out over how to apply grounded theory. Glaser believed that theories should emerge strictly from the data itself, while Strauss began advocating for the use of predefined coding paradigms to structure the data.

Following the split with Strauss, Glaser published several books further detailing his strict version of the method, most notably 'Theoretical Sensitivity' in 1978. In this book, he emphasized the researcher's intuition and the constant comparative method to let the data speak for itself.