Barney Glaser

Barney Glaser was an American sociologist, born in San Francisco in 1930, who earned his doctorate at Columbia University in 1961 under Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld before joining a research collaboration at the University of California, San Francisco. With Anselm Strauss he developed grounded theory, an inductive method for generating theory directly from qualitative data rather than beginning from a preexisting hypothesis, set out in their 1967 book The Discovery of Grounded Theory and the 1965 study Awareness of Dying. He later founded Sociology Press in 1970 and the Grounded Theory Institute in 1999 to continue developing and promoting the method independently of Strauss's own later revisions to it. He died in Mill Valley, California, in 2022.