Although the grounded theory method was not designed with nursing science in mind, it is one of the most prevalent and theory-producing qualitative methods in nursing. Changes in the grounded theory methodology have been debated in numerous articles. What has not received much attention, however, is a central idea of the grounded theory method—the basic social process. The goal here is to raise for consideration the idea that change is needed in nurse researchers' understanding of the basic social process; there is a need to reformulate this substantive concept of the grounded theory method so as to render it more congruent with nursing ontology and productive of nursing knowledge.
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