Grounded theory: a thumbnail sketch This distinction between "emergence and forcing", as Glaser frames it, is fundamental to understanding the methodology. Most of you, whatever your discipline, will have been exposed more to hypothesis-testing research than to emergent research. The research processes you have learned and the thesis structures you have internalised are those of hypothesis testing, not of emergence. Doing grounded theory well is partly a matter of unlearning some of what you have been taught or have acquired through your reading.