From Description to Explanation: Strengthening Conceptualisation in Qualitative Research Through Classic Grounded...

Qualitative research continues to grapple with the challenge of moving beyond rich description toward explanatory insight. While Classic grounded theory is explicitly designed to generate theory through conceptualisation, researchers frequently struggle to sustain conceptual-level analysis in practice, resulting in descriptive or thematic outputs. This paper addresses this methodological problem by making explicit the analytic work required to move from description to explanation. Drawing on classic GT, it identifies common points of descriptive drift, demonstrates how descriptive codes can be reformulated into conceptual codes, and introduces the Conceptual Lift Practice Loop as a practice-oriented articulation of this analytic work within the constant comparative method. In doing so, the paper clarifies how conceptualisation is enacted in practice without reducing it to procedural technique. This contributes to strengthening methodological rigour in grounded theory research. The paper has particular relevance for nursing, where grounded theory is widely used to examine complex clinical, organisational, and workforce processes, and where explanatory insight is critical for informing practice beyond local contexts.