Abstract

Conducting a doctoral research could be considered as a continuous invitation to the researcher to go out of the comfort zone. Each stage provides new and unexpected challenges. This presentation aims to offer the experiences, challenges, decisions and reflections of an international student in the journey of developing and conducting a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) study in the field of gifted education. CGT studies aim to move beyond description to provide new conceptualizations of participants experiences through the development of a theory based on emergent understanding (Charmaz, 2014). Challenges faced during the process of developing and conducting this CGT study have been related to the role of literature review and theoretical framework, data collection and analysis as parallel processes, sampling criteria, saturation of data, managing big amounts of information, and decisions made with the emergent categories. Additionally, as an international student language has been a big challenge in conducting interviews, understanding tacit meanings, and in writing up detailed findings. Addressing many challenges and being prepared to the upcoming ones, could be seen as an important source of stress or as a valuable opportunity to develop desired as well as unforeseen skills to grow up as a researcher. Being a reflective researcher (Charmaz, 2014) has been a critical process to gain awareness in how researcher’s interests, assumptions, and positions influence the study. Finally, it is important to take responsibility and a proactive attitude and behaviour, asking new questions, seeking for new answers, and seeing the studied phenomenon from new perspectives.