Professor Vivian Martin will contribute to the discussion ‘The Future of Grounded Theory: a response to Professor Barry Gibson’. She will also be in dialogue with Professor Antony Bryant in their session ‘Theorising the Pandemic‘.
Professor Vivian B. Martin is Chair in the Department of Journalism and coordinates the American Studies Program at Central Connecticut State University. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines. For seven years, she was an op-ed columnist for the Hartford Courant with her work appearing in newspapers around the country. She was drawn to grounded theory because many aspects of it, from open-ended interviewing and field work to ongoing memo- writing, had similarities to her longform work in journalism. She was introduced to grounded theory by her mother, a social work professor who incorporated grounded theory in her work and qualitative research course.
Vivian’s first grounded theory was a master’s degree study of longterm unemployment following layoffs , which produced self-reconstrution as its core. Her doctoral work on news and everyday life produced a grounded theory on ” purposive attending.” A fellow of the Grounded Theory Institute, she organized several of the troubleshooting seminars. Dr. Barney Glaser conducted to assisst students and other novices. She has taught grounded theory and, with Astrid Gynnild, is co- editor of ” Grounded Theory: The Philosophy, method , and work of Barney Glaser,” a collected of articles from authors from eight countries that has been translated into Japanese. At home in interdisciplinary social sciences, especially sociology, she is particularly interested in the possibilities of formal grounded theory. She continues writing general nonfiction such as a memoir she co- authored with her mother, Dr. Ruth Martin (“Beatrice’s Ledger: Coming of Age in the Jim Crow South”).