Extended grounded theory: a methodology to combine multiple disciplines

Grounded theory (GT), a widespread qualitative research methodology, has been introduced to generate a theory from data that is gathered from one discipline. However, in many studies, we are required to involve multiple disciplines and generate a theory that explains a multidisciplinary phenomenon and incorporate combined concepts. The combined concept is either a generalized concept from one of the disciplines or a new abstract concept that can satisfy the properties of multiple disciplines. The GT coding phases are not able to extract these combined concepts. In this paper, an extended GT has been proposed. The proposed method can operate over multiple disciplines and extract their corresponding combined concepts. The proposed extended grounded theory (EGT) uses ontology matching and merging methods to merge the extracted concepts and proposes two new coding phases; namely “Description” and “Combination” phases. These phases overcome the challenge of describing combined concepts, the large number of concept dependencies, and the propagation of the description changes from one concept to other concepts. As a use case, the proposed methodology has been implemented over two disciplines of “Web Security” and “Computation over Encrypted Data” and resulted in the unified theory of “Developing Secure Web Applications over Encrypted Data.” This unified theory includes combined concepts such as Web Access Control over encrypted data and Operation of middle-boxes over encrypted data. In addition, EGT has been able to discover new combined concepts that were undefined previously in each of the two disciplines (e.g. XSS prevention with searchable encryption). As a second case study, EGT has been implemented over two disciplines of “Healthcare” and “Data Science” to generate a unified theory that explains the multidisciplinary phenomenon of “Privacy Preservation of Cloud based Health Data”. In addition to a unified theory, EGT generates a conceptual framework of the combined and new concepts that can be used for requirement elicitation and analysis. Furthermore, the researcher can use the concepts’ relationships to suggest a set of best-fit solutions to the elicited requirements.