Grounded theory

This qualitative grounded theory study updated the framework, including a definition, of Appreciative Administration. Bloom et al. (2013) first introduced the concept of Appreciative Education in a New Directions for Student Services article. Appreciative Education’s framework is harnessed by the power of the organizational development theory of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987), the relationship-building theory-to-practice framework of Appreciative Advising (Bloom & Martin, 2002; Bloom et al., 2008), and an Appreciative Mindset. Bloom and McClellan (2016) coined the phrase Appreciative Administration to describe how higher education administrators could lead their organizations by harnessing the power of Appreciative Education. To date, there is no research on how higher education administrators are using Appreciative Education in their administrative practices.
The purpose of this grounded theory study was to examine how higher education administrators infuse the Appreciative Education framework into their daily administrative practices. The study included 21 professionals, who met the following criteria: (1) had at least one full-time person reporting to them; (2) had participated in a formal Appreciative Education training. The experiences of the 21 study participants were captured through semi-structured 60-minute Zoom interviews. Subsequently, eight of the 21 participants participated in a focus group via Zoom to provide feedback on the study’s initial themes and sub-themes. Data was analyzed through three rounds of coding: (1) initial coding, (2) focused coding, and (3) theoretical coding.

This qualitative grounded theory study created a theory, including a definition, of
overcommitment in undergraduate students at a four-year public institution. Although overcommitment has been studied for decades, the concept of overcommitment in undergraduate students has not been thoroughly explored. Undergraduate students can overcommit in a variety of domains, including academics and co-curricular activities.
The central research question for this study is, how do full-time undergraduate students define overcommitment? Overcommitment has been tied to several mental and physical health issues. With student mental health issues on the rise on college campuses, it is imperative that overcommitment in undergraduate students be explored and defined. This study included 21 undergraduate college student participants, who met the following criteria: (1) enrolled as a full-time undergraduate student; (2) identified by a higher education professional as committed or overcommitted. Data was collected through a demographic survey, as well as, 60-minute semi-structured interviews on Zoom with each student participant. Data were analyzed through three rounds of coding: (1) open coding, (2) axial coding, and (3) selective coding.
Three major themes emerged from the analysis of the undergraduate students’ overcommitment definitions: doing too much, lack of basic self-care, and detriments to mental and physical health. After synthesis, it was determined that undergraduate students define overcommitment as “taking on too many commitments to the overall detriment of mental and physical health, due to the lack of basic self-care.” The interview codes were ultimately developed into themes to create the theory of undergraduate student overcommitment as evidenced in the Undergraduate Student Overcommitment Model and answer the remaining research sub-questions about identification, challenges, benefits, and social supports and strategies. The theory explains undergraduate students’ rationale for overcommitting and has six levels: self, family, peers, school, future dreams and goals, and society.

Animal rights organizations, in attempting to affect institutional change in industrial
animal agriculture, face an institutional mountain. I show how these organizations,
though contesting institutions which are highly reified, tacitly endorsed, and historically
inertial, leverage emotional experiences and regulation to incrementally move this
mountain. Using a grounded qualitative study of interview data from animal rights
advocates and archival data generated by animal rights organizations, this study finds that
animal rights organizations have encoded both response- and antecedent-focused emotion
regulation into two distinct strategies used to garner support for their institutional change
project: transgression mining and seed planting. Furthermore, this study expounds upon
the role of moral emotional experiences in the individual-level process by which persons
alternate into support for animal rights organizations and their goals, here labeled
autodidactic frame alignment. Drawing on Goffman’s backstage/frontstage distinction,
this study illustrates how emotion’s role in institutional change efforts varies across both level of analysis and areas of interactive life. In doing so, this research adds empirical
weight to and extends recent theoretical work expounding upon the emotionally-charged
nature of the lived experience of institutions.

Marvin Weisbord's (1992) Future Search Conference model is an innovative organizational planning method recently employed by the College of Nursing at Florida Atlantic University in the preliminary stages of the Global Environmental Project for Healing and Health. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to identify the basic social process (BSP) of a particular social world: the future search conference. A purposive sample of six participants volunteered to describe their perspective on "what happened" and "what was going on" at the conference entitled, "Discovering Common Ground: The Future of Health, Healing and Environment," February 23-25, 1995. Glaser and Strauss' (1967) constant comparative method of data analysis was used to identify the BSP, "Finding Common Ground." This enabled conference participants to cope with the unique conditions of a future search conference (sequestration, diverse population, and self-management) while accomplishing the goals of the conference.