Problematizing Categories in Qualitative Analysis: Implications for Theory Building.

An essential building block of qualitative analysis is categorizing data into constructs. Yet, while categorization theory is blossoming in other disciplines its central insights have, surprisingly, not been applied to qualitative analysis. In published work scholars often assert that their analytical process occurs by merging lower-level constructs into higher-level ones. We challenge this approach and showcase how a broader set of analytical moves prevalent within categorization theory can help generate better theory. Building theories from qualitative data often necessitates analyzing heterogenous data that encompass multiple perspectives and temporalities; generating categories from such data is messy and can rarely be accomplished exclusively by merging. We develop a framework showing how relying on multiple analytical moves when handling heterogenous data fosters better theory. In addition to the merging move, we identify several other analytical moves'e.g., asking questions, splitting constructs and sequencing constructs'and link them to theory development. We also spell out the promise of the multiple-moves framework by relating it to various temporal stages or goals of a research study. Ultimately, our framework provides researchers with a diverse and flexible set of analytical moves that can be used to interrogate data and to better align methods and theory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]