Grounded Simulation - Advances in Social Simulation - page 345

Grounded Simulation

Martin Neumann

University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany
[e-mail]

Abstract. This paper investigates the contribution of evidence based modelling
to Grounded Theory. It is argued that evidence based modelling provides addi-
tional sources to truly arrive at a theory in the inductive process of a Grounded
Theory approach. This is shown at two examples. One example concerns the
development of an ontology of extortion racket systems. The other example is a
model of escalation of ethno-nationalist conflicts. The first example concerns
early to medium stages of the research process. The development of an ontolo-
gy provides a tool for the process of theoretical coding in a Grounded Theory
approach. The second example shows stylised facts resulting from a simulation.
Stylised facts are broad patterns which are characteristic for certain domain
fields. Thus they generalise over a particular case. This provides credibility for
the claim to inductively generate a theory, i.e. to overcome a purely descriptive
level.

Keywords: Grounded Theory, Evidence Based Modeling, Theoretical Coding,
Ontologies, Theoretical Sensitivity, Stylized Facts.

1 Introduction

In the past years, research in computational social science has reached a certain stage of
scientific maturation [1,2]. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the research area
of a cross-fertilisation of simulation and the standard methods of empirical social re-
search [2]. This paper aims at exploring additional sources of empirical credibility that
evidence based modelling approaches can provide to the qualitative account of
Grounded Theory. The objective of this paper is not to examine the diverging variants
of Grounded Theory approaches [3]. Rather, the research question of this paper is to
investigate the question of what is a theory in the Grounded Theory approach.
This paper will enfold two main arguments: first , it will be shown that the research
process of evidence based modelling has a number of parallels with the Grounded
Theory approach. This suggests to take experiences and guidelines of Grounded The-
ory approaches into account explicitly in a research process of evidence based model-
ling. This thesis addresses primarily ICT specialist working in the field of evidence
based modelling. Second, a more surprising result may be that evidence based simula-
tion provides methodological tools as well as terminological concepts to strengthen
the theoretical element of a Grounded Theory. The objective of this argument is to
inform specialists in the field of Grounded Theory about the possibilities of a meth-
odological cross-fertilisation of Grounded Theory and evidence based simulation.