Grounded theory - a lens to understanding clinical reasoning

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Clinical reasoning is fundamental to medical education and clinical practice ( Schmidt & Mamede, 2015). Despite its centrality, clinical reasoning is often regarded as difficult to conceptualise and teach ( Charlin, 2012; Pinnock & Welch, 2014). The pivotal role of clinical reasoning constitutes a compelling case for better understanding, more efficient teaching and practice that is more systematic and evidence-based. Clinical reasoning has been regarded as an art rather than a science ( Braude, 2012) and has attracted less research effort than befits its important function. The authors examined the suitability of grounded theory methodology to provide a more complete understanding of the clinical reasoning process. Grounded theory and clinical reasoning are processes which both qualitatively evaluate and analyse information from an interview subject as well as additional sources and arrive at a robust, defensible theory to explain their findings. Grounded theory offers considerable utility for (i) understanding and modelling clinical reasoning, (ii) researching clinical reasoning and (iii) as a heuristic for teaching clinical reasoning skills. This paper explores the parallels between grounded theory methodology and clinical reasoning, as well as the suitability of grounded theory as a framework for informing and transforming our understanding of clinical reasoning.