Abductive Grounded Theory: An Educational Framework for Teaching Theory Generation

Abstract

Grounded Theory is one of the most widely taught qualitative research methodologies in doctoral education and is commonly presented as an inductive approach to theory generation. While this emphasis has provided researchers with valuable analytical procedures, comparatively little explicit attention has been devoted to the reasoning through which qualitative theories are developed. This conceptual theory-building article argues that research methods education can be strengthened by making abductive reasoning more explicit within Grounded Theory. Building on scholarship in Grounded Theory, abductive reasoning, theorising, and doctoral education, it proposes Abductive Grounded Theory (AGT) as an integrated conceptual framework for teaching the generation of qualitative theory. AGT conceptualises theory generation through five epistemic capabilities that describe the cognitive work of abductive inquiry and six methodological design principles that operationalise these capabilities within qualitative research. Rather than introducing abductive reasoning as a new methodological principle, AGT integrates and extends existing scholarship by translating previously dispersed ideas into a coherent pedagogical and methodological framework for doctoral education. The article discusses the implications of this framework for teaching research methods and doctoral supervision, and outlines directions for future research on theorising, researcher cognition, and AI-supported qualitative inquiry. In doing so, it contributes to contemporary debates on doctoral education by reframing theory generation as an explicit, teachable capability and offering a structured framework to make the logic of qualitative discovery more transparent.