A couple of years ago, a young woman came up to me after a speaking event and said, “I hope you
won’t think this is weird or rude or something, but you don’t look like a researcher.” She didn’t say
anything else; she just stood there waiting and looking confused.
I smiled and asked, “What do you mean?”
She replied, “You seem so normal.”
I chuckled. “Well, looks can be deceiving. I’m so not normal.”
We ended up having a great conversation. She was a single mother getting her undergraduate
degree in psychology and loved her research classes, but her faculty advisor wasn’t encouraging her
to pursue the research track. We talked about work and motherhood and what researchers are
supposed to look like. It seemed that I was missing the mice, the long white lab coat, and the Y
chromosome. She told me, “I pictured older white guys working in labs and studying mice, not a
soccer mom studying feelings.”
The journey that led me to become a researcher was anything but a straight and narrow path, which,
ironically, is probably why and how I ended up studying human behavior and emotion for a living. I
was a college drop-in and drop-out for a number of years. During my “off semesters,” I waited tables
and tended bar, hitchhiked through Europe, played a lot of tennis ... you get the point.
I found the social work profession in my late twenties and knew it was home. I did a two-year stint
in junior colleges to raise my GPA enough to get into a big university with a social work program. It
was in those junior college classes that I fell in love with the idea of teaching and writing.
After years of dropping out, I graduated with honors from the University of Texas–Austin with my
bachelor’s degree in social work when I was twenty-nine and immediately applied for graduate
school at the University of Houston. I got accepted, worked hard and finished my master’s, and was
accepted into the doctoral program.
During my doctoral studies, I discovered qualitative research. Unlike quantitative research, which
is about tests and statistics that give you what you need to predict and control phenomena, qualitative
research is about finding patterns and themes that help you better understand the phenomenon you’re
studying. They’re equally important approaches but very different.
I use a specific qualitative methodology called Grounded Theory.^1 I was fortunate enough to be
trained by Barney Glaser, one of the two men who developed the methodology in the 1960s. Dr.
Glaser commuted from California to serve as the methodologist on my dissertation committee.