Constant Comparisons and

The purpose of this paper is to describe accomplishments and conundrums in a midcareer program of research with roots in the Strauss and Corbin seminars at UCSF in the early 1990s. My use of grounded theory methods in a succession of studies, all focused on family caregiving during cancer treatment, has generated theory on family caregiving skill, a phenomenon that was underconceptualized in the early 1990s. However, my successive grounded theory studies have raised a number of methodological conundrums pertaining to researcher perspective. I describe two here. First, how can a researcher develop grounded theory through successive studies without becoming so analytically enmeshed with previous study results that what gets noticed in new data is limited? Second, how strong a presence can a researcher's clinical perspective have in an analysis without violating the tenets of grounded theory? I argue that recent scholarship in grounded theory provides new ways of thinking about these conundrums.