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The Shape of Knowledge: Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology

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Article in Journal of Counseling Psychology · June 2020

DOI: 10.1037/cou0000527
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Running head: SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS 1
© 2020, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may
not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite
without authors' permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its
DOI: 10.1037/cou0000527
Please cite accordingly:
Grzanka, P. R. (in press). The shape of knowledge: Situational analysis in counseling psychology
research. Journal of Counseling Psychology. Advance online publication.
http://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000527
The Shape of Knowledge:
Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology Research
Patrick R. Grzanka
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Author Note
Patrick R. Grzanka, Department of Psychology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patrick R. Grzanka, The
University of Tennessee, Department of Psychology, 1404 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996.
Email: patrick.grzanka@utk.edu
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS 2
Abstract
Situational analysis (SA) is a powerful method for visually mapping qualitative data. As an
extension of constructivist grounded theory developed by Charmaz and others, Clarke’s
situational analysis encourages researchers to transform qualitative data into various visual maps
that can illuminate dynamics that may be obscured by more traditional analytic approaches.
Fifteen years since Fassinger’s landmark paper on grounded theory in counseling psychology
research, I make an argument for SA’s potential uses in counseling psychology using data from a
mixed-methods dissertation on White racial affect. I outline the exigency of SA and its
epistemological and methodological underpinnings in detail, with a focus on SA as a critical,
structural analysis. Each primary mapping procedure—situational, positional, and social
worlds/arenas maps—is introduced and examples are provided that illustrate SA’s unique
analytic capacities and insights. By way of SA, I argue for a “critical-cartographic” turn in
counseling psychology along four axes: promoting systems-level research and advocacy,
deepening consideration of intersectionality, cultivating alternative epistemologies beyond post-
positivism, and invigorating qualitative research on counseling and psychotherapy.
Keywords: qualitative methods, grounded theory, research methodology, situational analysis,
critical theory
Public Significance Statement: This paper explores situational analysis, an approach to
visualizing qualitative data that can help researchers conduct critical, structural analysis through
three mapping procedures: situational, positional, and social worlds/arenas maps.

The Shape of Knowledge:
Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology Research
In 2009, just as I was finishing my interdisciplinary, mixed-method dissertation, I found
myself constantly referencing Ruth Fassinger’s 2005 paper on grounded theory, which was
published in the last Journal of Counseling Psychology special issue on qualitative research and
which has now been cited nearly 1,000 times1 by scholars working across diverse fields,
including but certainly not limited to counseling psychology. That piece, like so many other
papers in Haverkamp and colleagues’ (2005) special issue, sparked a qualitative imagination in
me. Fassinger’s paper, in particular, specified a vision and version of grounded theory (GT) that
negotiated the complex methodological debates that are unavoidable in otherwise positivist-
rooted social science disciplines. From her standpoint as a feminist counseling psychologist,
Fassinger articulated pivotal questions: How can critical counseling psychologists use GT to
advance social justice research? How can we use GT responsibly and reflexively to represent the
experiences of marginalized groups and communities? How can we use this as a tool for actual
social transformation?
That year also marked the publication of Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the
Postmodern Turn by Adele Clarke (2005), one of GT-inaugurator Anselm Strauss’s students. As
I will argue in this paper, the introduction of situational analysis represented a landmark moment
of methodological innovation in GT. Situational analysis is what Clarke (2005) termed a
supplement to—not a replacement for—the “theory-methods package” that is GT. Through three
primary modes of analysis linked by a commitment to exposing the invisible-but-meaningful in
qualitative data, situational analysis involves cartographically mapping qualitative data. Given
1
956 citations according to Google Scholar, May 11, 2020.
(1) the well-documented challenges to teaching and training qualitative researchers to move
beyond description (Luker, 2008; Poulin, 2007), (2) psychologists’ stated goals of maintaining
rigor, trustworthiness, and fidelity across all forms of inquiry in psychology, including
qualitative research (Levitt et al., 2017a; Morrow, 2005; Yeh & Inman, 2007), and (3) situational
analysis’s explicit foundation in critical scholarship and Clarke’s (2005, 2012; Clarke et al.,
2015; Clarke et al., 2018) framing of situational analysis as a tool for social justice (e.g., Pérez &
Cannella, 2013), situational analysis represents an exciting methodological opportunity for
counseling psychologists and critical researchers across the discipline.
In this paper, I argue that situational analysis is a valuable tool for qualitative inquiry
both with and beyond GT methods. I will briefly review the epistemic and methodological
origins of GT, as well as Clarke’s argument for cartography as a heuristic in qualitative analysis.
Using previously unpublished dissertation data (Grzanka, 2010), I introduce the three modes of
situational analysis: situational, positional, and social worlds/arenas maps, and identify
important ways these mapping practices can deepen, enhance, and extend traditional GT and GT-
adjacent qualitative methods, such as critical discourse analysis. Finally, I identify four axes on
which situational analysis might fulfil recent calls within counseling psychology to improve the
methodological and transformative potential of research, teaching, practice, and advocacy. My
goals here are invitational and pedagogical: as Fassinger’s (2005) paper invited counseling
psychologists into the generative possibilities of GT research and taught some key ways to
employ GT, I hope to stimulate interest in situational analysis as a underused and nonetheless
potent tool for qualitative and mixed-methods research in counseling psychology and related
fields.
Situating Situational Analysis

Grounding Grounded Theory
Sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1965) originally developed grounded
theory while studying how terminally ill patients and families respond to their diagnoses with
physicians, nurses, and each other. Glaser and Strauss (1965, 1967) demonstrated the power of
inductive qualitative inquiry to illuminate social dynamics in ways that produced explanatory
theory grounded in data rather than existing ideas (e.g., performativity, habitus) or frameworks
(e.g., Marxism). Taking an unconventional approach, they criticized the landscape of mid-
century sociology for its reliance on theory-testing and philosophy-style deduction. In its place,
they offered a radically inductive approach to qualitative inquiry that prioritized the development
of explanatory frames from the situation at-hand, rather than deduction based on pre-existing
ideas: theory grounded in the data.
Though it was initially not enthusiastically received by the social scientific mainstream
(Kenny & Fourie, 2014), GT eventually achieved a superior status among qualitative methods
(Clarke & Charmaz, 2014). GT’s preeminence as an approach is attributable to its precise,
reproducible, and (at least if applied consistently) rigorous methods, including: coding,
memoing, saturation, and other concepts that today are synonymous with good qualitative
research, regardless of whether it is GT research (Levitt et al., 2017a; Morrow, 2005; Yeh &
Inman, 2007). GT’s use within and beyond psychology has resulted in methodological debates
and various iterations (Fassinger, 2005). While the Glasserian approach is sometimes associated
with realism and post-positivism, Strauss and student Juliet Corbin’s branch of the GT tradition
tends to reflect an epistemic orientation toward strong social constructionism; however, both
approaches have been used across epistemological frameworks. Strauss and Glaser’s student
Kathy Charmaz (2014), for example, developed a version—“constructivist” GT—that further

extended the social constructionist undercurrent of GT and embraced an expressly political
orientation (Charmaz, 2016; Mills et al., 2006). Charmaz’s is a flexible though no less rigorous
GT that she posits as a tool for social justice (Charmaz, 2011). Further, Charmaz’s approach
rejects the idea of the researcher encountering the empirical universe naively or in ways that do
not fundamentally affect the knowledge production process. In conversation with the debates of
the latter part of the 20th century regarding the relationship between science and feminism
(Haraway, 1998; Harding, 1987), Charmaz offered a deeply critical version of GT, wherein
critical signifies a sensitivity to structural power relations, especially the relationship between the
researcher and the researched (Charmaz, 2017; Denzin, 2015). Though not all critical uses of GT
are indebted to a single scholar or tradition, this type of critical, constructivist work generally
characterizes GT’s use in in counseling psychology (Levitt et al., 2017b).
GT in Counseling Psychology
Fassinger (2005) noted that by the publication of Haverkamp, Morrow, and Ponterotto’s
JCP special issue on qualitative methods, GT was already becoming popular in counseling
psychology research since Rennie et al.’s (1989) landmark paper exploring the method’s promise
in psychology. Researchers throughout the field have used GT methods to investigate a wide
range of topics, including: feminist group supervision (Burnes et al., 2012); client perspectives
on multicultural counseling competence (Pope-Davis et al., 2002); acculturation experiences of
sexual and gender minority immigrants (Fuks et al., 2018); intimate partner violence (Latta &
Goodman, 2011); perceptions of racist and xenophobic discrimination (Inman et al., 2015); and
ally identity development (Grzanka et al., 2015). In other words, counseling psychology
researchers have used GT to study all the kinds of things that counseling psychologists study,
including psychotherapy (Levitt et al., 2017b). Alongside consensual qualitative research (Hill et
al., 2005), thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), case study (Stake, 2005), narrative analysis
(Frost, 2018), phenomenology (Giorgi, 1985), and participatory action research (Kidd & Kral,
2005), GT became a dominant tool for qualitative psychological inquiry (Creswell et al., 2007),
particularly research on members of socially marginalized, stigmatized, or
systematically/historically under-represented groups and work that purports to take a critical
approach to mental health, well-being, and inequities (i.e., disparities) (Fassinger & Morrow,
2013).
Just as no method is imbued with magical properties (Grzanka, 2016), it is important to
recognize that GT is not a perfect method. Indeed, belief in a perfect method would, as Bowleg
(2008) argued, betray a kind of latent positivism, or faith in an unobscured and disembodied
representation of Reality or Truth. Further, GT is not always the best tool for the job (Creswell et
al., 2007). For example, there are circumstances under which theory-testing is more appropriate
than theory generation (e.g., Moradi et al., 2019), or times when thematic observations more
adequately answer research questions than new (explanatory) theories (e.g., Grzanka et al.,
2019). On the other hand, sociologists have observed how many studies that claim to use GT do
not actually produce new theories (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012), and yet GT procedures (e.g.,
inductive coding, memoing) may be useful even when theory-generation is not the primary
objective of a study. GT has been critiqued for its methodological rigidity—particularly the
analytic prescriptions of Glaserian and “classical” approaches (Charmaz, 2014), including
mandates for the discreteness of codes and somewhat arbitrary distinctions between coding
stages (e.g., open, axial). It has also been criticized for an oblique relationship to positivism and
scientism that undermines the potential for GT to actually ground theory-generation in
participants’ lived experiences and self-representations (Clarke, 2005). Yet, some of GT’s most
vocal critics are its biggest advocates, including Fassinger (2005), Charmaz (2014), and Clarke
(2005).
Even as counseling psychologists have largely embraced constructionist strands of GT
and some have conducted explicitly critical work (Levitt et al., 2017b), criticisms of GT’s
epistemic and methodological foundations merit engagement in order to understand the exigency
of situational analysis and its potential benefit to counseling psychology researchers. Note that
Harding (1987) distinguished methods from methodology by specifying methodology as the
theory and assumptions that guide of use of particular tools, i.e., methods. In this feminist
framing, epistemology (i.e., theories of knowledge) and methodology are deeply intertwined.
Accordingly, from her disciplinary standpoint at the nexus of science and technology studies and
medical sociology, Clarke (2005) outlined five primary “recalcitrancies” of traditional GT that
prevent it from being “pushed” around the “postmodern turn” (p. 11). To Clarke, these
recalcitrancies motivate situational analysis as a complementary analytic package or extension of
GT, because some traditional formulations of GT remain invested in positivist (i.e., modernist)
notions of truth, objectivity, and disembodied knowing that are dismantled by critical,
postmodern epistemologies (see also Gergen, 1973). Clarke encourages all GT researchers to
consider how the underlying logic of theory discovery may inadvertently affect even those
projects that aspire toward critical social constructionism. Accordingly, I elaborate Clarke’s five-
point typology to suggest traditional GT (pp. 11-18):
1. Lacks reflexivity, particular in terms of interrogating the co-constitutive dynamic
between researchers and researched, subjects and objects, knowledge and the material
world; fails to understand research as a process of representation that is always
political.
2. Oversimplifies complex dynamics in the interest of conceptual parsimony and
explanatory power; can effectively reduce qualitative data in ways that are analogous
if not directly comparable to more primarily reductionist qualitative approaches (e.g.,
content analysis) and quantitative methods.
3. Reduces social processes so as to emphasize singular explanatory dynamics rather
than overlapping, multifarious, and even contradictory processes in a given situation;
isolates situations to represent social worlds and contexts as discrete rather than
interactive and plural.
4. Interprets variation in data as “negative” cases or inexplicable, whereby coding
practices privileges consistency rather than diversity; reproduces quantitative
tendencies to identify and eliminate “outliers” in the data.
5. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly purports to “discover” (a la Glaser) the singular
Truth or achieve a methodological and epistemic purity; positions impersonality and
stability of data as desirable, rather than as reflective of a normative investment in
scientism and positivism.
In introducing situational analysis, Clarke (2003, 2005) did not argue that most GT research is
fundamentally flawed; likewise, I am not suggesting that counseling psychologists have
generally misapplied or misused GT. Nevertheless, Clarke’s framing of these problems as
recalcitrancies—stubborn tendencies that can be difficult to break away from—is helpful for
reinvigorating GT with critical self-reflexivity, a hallmark of feminist and social justice-oriented
research (Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2012; Levitt et al., in press). Accordingly, Clarke (2005)
suggested pushing GT around the postmodern or “interpretive” turn (Clarke et al., 2018) can
open up qualitative imaginations to generative, critical, and ultimately grounded accounts of

complex social problems, especially those faced by members of oppressed populations (Espín,
1993). The postmodern turn, in Clarke’s framing, involves identifying and marking socially
constructed binaries, interrogating the ways that power shapes the methodological process, and
situating research contextually in local and broader struggles for social justice.
In this sense, Clarke’s (2005) postmodern turn is thoroughly consonant with qualitative
research in counseling psychology. Accordingly, situational analysis speaks directly to (1)
longstanding calls in the field for social justice action (Spanierman & Poteat, 2005; Goodman et
al., 2004) and (2) to counseling psychologists’ training in strengths-based and multicultural
approaches in the interest of alternative ways of knowing and doing psychology (Fine, 2018).
While many counseling psychologists are already using GT as a tool for social justice (see
references), I follow Fine’s (2012, 2018) recent provocations to widen the methodological
imagination in “revolting times” as consonant with the self-reflexivity so central to Clarke’s
(2005) argument. Furthermore, this special issue marks an occasion to refine, expand, and be
self-critical of even long-established best methodological practices (e.g., Frankfurt et al., 2016).
As I detail in the following section, situational analysis leverages the strengths of extant critical
approaches to GT by encouraging reflexivity at all stages of the research process; embracing
complexity; envisioning “situations” rather than discrete constructs or isolated processes;
sensitizing analyses to the centrality and meaning of difference; and valuing the researcher’s
subjective interpretive skills as central to theory construction. The remainder of this paper is
dedicated to introducing Clarke’s situational analysis (hereafter “SA”), with a focus on how SA
can advance critical psychology (Fine, 2012; Prilletensky & Nelson, 1997), including a
counseling psychology rooted in social justice (Moradi & Grzanka, 2017).
Doing Situational Analysis

Because SA follows Clarke’s (2005) call to understand discourse as the flows of
power/knowledge through institutions (Foucault, 1972) and attention to the role of discourse in
producing subjects and ordering differences (Foucault, 1978), SA is particularly adept at
attending to sites of silence in data. In other words, by not thinking of qualitative data
exclusively as manifest evidence but as a discourse(s) about a situation, SA helps researchers
uncover what is present and not present in a dataset (cf. Gordon, 1997). What is not being said or
articulated often offers insight into the form and shape of knowledge as structural, rather than
(simply) individual or subjective. And the shape of knowledge—what is known and what is not,
positions taken and not taken, actors and actants implicated and implicating, historical
contexts—facilitates understanding the structural dimensions of a situation. Such a structural
perspective, I argue, moves qualitative inquiry beyond the descriptive or the particular and
toward the critical and explanatory, which is a key goal of GT. This analytic pivoting toward the
explanatory is a unique strength of SA: when stuck in the process of merely describing
qualitative data, SA’s three primary analytic exercises facilitate conceptualizing data relationally
and visually. In the following three sections, I describe procedures for and provide examples of
situational, positional, and social worlds/arenas mapping using data collected as part of my own
dissertation study.
The Illustrative Dataset
In the examples that follow, I use two types of qualitative data, print media coverage and
interview transcripts, collected as part of a mixed-methods dissertation on White racial emotions
(Grzanka, 2010). The White Racial Affect Project (WRAP) was expressly interdisciplinary and
involved three intertwined studies drawing on theory and methods from counseling psychology,
critical social psychology, sociology, and American studies. The research was organized around
questions about White racial affect—in other words, the feelings of race and antiracism (Grzanka
et al., 2020). This research extended scholarship on Whiteness by taking an intersectional
approach to the gendered and sexualized dynamics of emotion, as well as the fundamental racial
politics of feeling. Part 1 involved a critical discourse analysis (Clarke, 2005) and SA of media
coverage of three moments of particularly intersectional, public controversy at the end of the 20th
century: the firing of Black actor Isaiah Washington from the ABC television series Grey’s
Anatomy (headed by a Black woman showrunner) for allegedly twice calling a White gay
colleague a gay slur; the fallout of radio “shock jock” Don Imus’s referring to the championship-
winning Rutgers University women’s basketball team with a gendered racial slur; and White gay
journalist Anderson Cooper’s perceived emotional coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. These controversies were selected from a range of
similar events (e.g., Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s controversial performance at the 2004
Super Bowl) for their temporal proximity to the actual interviews, prominence in national
culture, and capacity to facilitate direct conversation about issues of race, gender, and sexuality.
Part 2 composed the initial development and validation of a psychometric scale to measure
White guilt and shame (Grzanka et al., 2020), items of which were developed from the study of
these public controversies. And part 3 involved two in-depth, semi-structured interviews each
with White college students (N = 10), during which the participants watched footage from these
public controversies and then talked through their thoughts and feelings with the interviewer and
principal investigator, a White cisgender queer man (me). The interviews took place at least one
week and no more than one month apart to facilitate the development of trust and rapport-
building, particularly in the context of discussing painful emotions related to racism,
homophobia, and misogyny. Data were analyzed using GT and SA. I describe the key tenets
(goals, procedures) for conducting SA maps using illustrative data from parts 1 and 2 in the
sections that follow.
Though in my own work I have tended to move through these exercises sequentially,
Clarke (2005) stressed that SA is an iterative and non-linear process meant to facilitate data
interpretation during all stages of the research process. Further, SA is meant to supplement—not
supplant—existing GT procedures, namely coding, memoing, and auditing (Fassinger, 2005).
Though SA may be valuable in other interpretivist-constructivist projects outside the formal
boundaries of GT (i.e., in related inductive approaches such as critical discourse analysis or
narrative analysis), Clarke posits SA as an extension of GT, not a replacement. In SA, the
situation itself becomes the object of analysis. According to Clarke et al. (2018), the
“fundamental focus of a GT analysis is on action in interaction. What is happening?” (p. 108). In
SA, they assert the fundamental focus is on relationality via mapping the situation. The situation
is an important concept for a range of theorists ranging from American pragmatist John Dewey
to feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (Clarke et al., 2018); thinking situationally, as the
cartographic (i.e., map-making) exercises below will illustrate, facilitates taking into account
discursive materials encountered in the study (even if they were not conceptualized as “primary”
data points) and historical elements that, again, might not initially seem relevant.
Thinking situationally means, according to Clarke (2005), understanding the problem or
issue under investigation in terms of the social worlds/arenas that co-constitute the situation. In
the WRAP, for example, White participants’ experiences of racial guilt and/or shame was
understood as inextricable from the 2008 election and the political ascension of Barack Obama.
The study was not about Obama, but Obama was certainly part of the situation. This emphasis on
the situation (i.e., the social-historical embeddedness of the research process) is aligned with the
analytic process of “abduction” that Clarke, Friese, and Washburn colleagues (2018) characterize
as central to SA (see also Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). As opposed to the strict induction of
classic or Glaserian GT (i.e., driven exclusively by data, from the ground up), SA encourages
consistent analytic pivoting between concrete empirical data and more abstract, conceptual ideas,
including mapping and memoing. The abductive gestalt of SA may help researches avoid getting
stuck in description and failing to connect empirical, manifest evidence to conceptual
frameworks that help researchers understand what [this given situation] means.
Situational Maps
Typically, the first kind of map created in a SA project, a situational map is an attempt to
descriptively identify all of the human and nonhuman elements related to the situation of inquiry
(Clarke et al., 2018). The situational mapping process helps researchers purposefully and self-
reflexively construct the study’s content and boundaries based on empirical evidence and critical
thinking. Though usually extended from messy (i.e., free form) to ordered stages, situational
mapping should not be confused with free association or brainstorming. This key stage in the SA
process is guided by preliminary empirical evidence, review of the existing literature (as relevant
and necessary), and the researcher’s and any relevant collaborators’ standpoint and perspective-
taking on the situation of inquiry. Situational mapping in the WRAP project began prior to the
dissertation proposal stage and extended through data collection and writing, moving toward
analytic connection-making between concepts and constructs that Clarke and colleagues (2018)
have more recently termed “relational” analysis.
For counseling psychologists familiar with Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems
theory, it might be tempting to compare or even equate situational mapping with his
conceptualization of the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of influence on the individual.

However, Clarke (2005) expressly rejected Strauss’s similar multi-level theoretical framing; she
developed SA in order to better reflect postmodern and interpretive principles (Foucault, 1978;
Gergen, 1973). As such, situational mapping rejects a hierarchical (e.g., from lower to higher
order) or binary (e.g., micro vs. macro, agency vs. structure) ethos by considering relevant
elements in total relativity and empirical specificity. Situational maps do not presuppose, for
example, a priori categories of “micro” or “macro” elements, which impose a theoretical
framework on the situation of inquiry rather than ground the organization of the data on the
data’s terms. Instead, the situational mapping framework (1) helps researchers identify potential
kinds of empirical elements that might—or might not—be encountered in the situation and (2)
insists that the SA process itself should clarify the nature of those relationships. In this sense,
situational mapping is always structural, even when identifying implicated actors or objects that
seem individual or tangential to the situation, such as an individual person not directly involved
in the study (e.g., Barack Obama in the WRAP).
The situational mapping process is designed to illuminate how things that might not
initially seem “macro” at all, such as a powerful individual, a new technology, or a new
bureaucratic policy, are indeed functioning in structural terms that are influencing multiple sites,
individuals, and dynamics in the situation of inquiry. Moreover, by challenging researchers to
consider nonhuman actants (i.e., objects that play a role in a situation), situational mapping may
be especially hard and beneficial to counseling psychologists less attuned to consider the role of
nonhumans in research. For example, in the WRAP, Hurricane Katrina was a key actant in the
study through which ideas about race, class, and social inequality were co-constituted. The
hurricane was not a participant, but the storm was implicated in processes germane to the study,
including participants’ lay theories of race, assignment of blame for the storm’s consequences,
and manifestations or denials of White guilt over systemic racism. Further, by foregrounding
cultural, organizational, and popular discourses, this component of the mapping process may
further resist psychological tendencies to detach research from its social embeddedness or to
neglect the historicity of observed social phenomena (Gergen, 1973; Orford, 2006).
Clarke (2005; Clarke et al., 2018) describes the first stage of the situational mapping
process as “messy.” But messy does not mean useless or bad. Making messy situational maps is
a generative process uninhibited by the precision and eventual taxonomy of the GT process.
Messy situational maps require nothing more than the researcher and a note-taking device.
Guided by an interest in capturing “the situation” as defined by Clarke, this messy process helps
the researcher experiment with ideas and poke at the boundaries of relevancy to the situation.
The first messy maps will likely be sketched before formal analysis has commenced, because
data collection may have yet to begin or may be in preliminary stages. As such, messy maps can
help researchers articulate their assumptions and predispositions vis a vis the data. Messy maps,
at least at the onset of the project, can expose what investigators are thinking about a project,
including expectations about what will or should become relevant. Messy map-making
incentivizes questions such as: “Does this matter? Does it not? Why or why not?”
This stage of the mapping process is key to identifying discursive elements that may be
outside of the immediate scene of inquiry but that should inform theoretical and purposive
sampling efforts in the research design process. Similarly, this process can mark what is
otherwise unmarked, including those elements of the situation that have become so naturalized
that they are taken for granted or invisible, including power and privilege. These messy
situational maps become ordered situational maps (Figure 1) and then eventually, relational maps
(Figure 2), as the process pivots from identification (i.e., what matters here?) to analysis (how
does this matter?). In relational mapping, which occurs literally on top of messy situational
maps, relationships between elements in the situational maps are uncovered via empirical
evidence and analysis. The lines that connect ideas should not be hypothetical; they should
represent empirically substantiated dynamics or connections that have been uncovered in the
research process, such as the relationship between guilt and Hurricane Katrina in Figure 2. In the
actual writing process, these lines might first be memos that become fleshed out paragraphs that
finally become sections of a manuscript. Relational mapping is one of the reasons to retain messy
situation maps throughout the research process; there is no such thing as a “bad” map.
Messy situational maps are never final, but they are always iterative and sometimes quite
valuable. Like memo-writing in the GT process, messy situational maps will almost certainly not
wind up in a final manuscript but may eventually generate key analytic insights. Clarke and
colleagues (2018) note that old messy maps should be revisited throughout the research process,
providing much needed perspective when, for example, the researcher finds themselves stuck
with a developing theory or wrestling with an idea that is not fully accounting for important parts
of the situation. Returning to earlier drafts that detailed pre-data collection expectations can also
reveal if something is missing from the data, which may potentially represent a site of silence.
Particularly germane to psychological research, I suggest situational maps catalyze anti-variable
thinking in qualitative research design. Often, qualitative research in psychology merely applies
qualitative methods to quantitative questions, such as a qualitative evaluation of a construct (e.g.,
disordered eating, depression) that is otherwise typically assessed quantitatively or via an
established assessment tool. This kind of thinking—what I have referred to elsewhere as
psychology’s epistemic riptide (Grzanka, 2017)—roots even qualitative research in individual
processes and constructs that makes it difficult to conceptualize and even “see” structural
processes, including intersectionality or overlapping systems of oppression (Bowleg, 2008).
Situational maps are not merely the recitation of relevant constructs that would otherwise be
identified as dependent or independent variables. This kind of mapping unmoors variable-
centered thinking (Grzanka, 2016; Zeiders et al., 2013) from the center of the qualitative scene,
instead foregrounding environmental factors, discursive elements, and nonhuman actants, in
addition to key individuals, groups, historical issues, and spatial factors in the situation.
Not all GT studies are multi-sited (Clarke, 2005); that is, not all projects that use GT or
SA involve multiple study locations or multiple methods (see Guetterman et al. [2019] for an
overview of mixed-methods GT approaches). However, by focusing on the situation rather than
strictly participants or an activity, SA facilitates both imagining implicated environments not
directly under investigation and, when appropriate, managing these multiple sites in the research
process. For example, in the WRAP, the university from which survey respondents and eventual
interview participants were drawn was a key spatial element in the study. Figure 1 shows how
the university as a space was connected to or at least implicated in participants’ meaning making
around the public controversies that did not immediately seem to have anything to do with the
university. So even though empirical elements of one part of the study—the discourse analysis of
media texts described in the next section on positional maps—were not obviously connected to
other parts of the study, the situational mapping process helps to see and make connections that
are not otherwise evident. In this case, issues on campus and in the immediate region influenced
how respondents made sense of the public controversies; this meaning making was actually vital
to the study. Finally, as Clarke et al. (2018) underscore, situational mapping is about embracing
uncertainty rather than foreclosing upon potential dynamics that are obscured by otherwise
variable-centered or post-positivist analyses. Because this process is so iterative, situational

mapping builds revision into the process, effectively reframing analytic “mistakes” into
opportunities for reconceptualizing taken-for-granted ideas in the research process.
Positional Maps
It is tempting sometimes to think of qualitative inquiry as devoid of the epistemic
consequences of quantitative research, as if qualification is a fundamentally less potentially
violent (Dotson, 2011) process than quantification (Grzanka, 2016; Bowleg, 2008). But
qualification in SA is a data reduction strategy and therefore involves some degree of reduction.
Reduction does not have to be reductionist, however, and SA’s ambitions are to accurately and
robustly construct the situation of inquiry. Consistent with Levitt et al.’s (2017a) description of
fidelity as an intimate connection between the researcher and their phenomena under
investigation, SA encourages fidelity through iterative mapping and multiple kinds of mapping—
in addition to all of the procedures (e.g., auditing, member-checking) researchers would normally
use in a GT study to ensure trustworthiness (Levitt et al., 2017a; Morrow, 2005). Accordingly, I
see positional maps as productive reduction: these exercises identify the key axes on which
issues in the situation are enacted. These maps ask the researcher to visualize and specify the
terrain on which issues are negotiated in the situation. I can attest that this is the single most
useful process I have ever engaged when working with my own data and/or a student’s project
when the goal is to push beyond description/summation and into genuine analysis.
The first step in the positional mapping process is to identify axes of position-taking. In
Clarke et al.’s (2018) formulation, the objective here is to consider bipolar continua on which
issues are being debated or contested in the situation. These do not have to be active debates
insomuch as your participants may not be actively disagreeing with each other or even
interacting; rather, these positions should represent some element of ideological difference in the
sample. In the WRAP study, positional maps played a crucial role in the process of conducting a
critical discourse analysis on print media texts about three loci of racial controversy: Cooper’s
coverage of Hurricane Katrina; the Don Imus scandal; and Washington’s firing from Grey’s
Anatomy. Obviously, this kind of media analysis is not common in counseling psychology,
though it is in other parts of critical psychology (Cole et al., 2012). The objective in the WRAP
was to use coverage of these moments to think about how social actors (i.e., journalists)
articulate and make sense of these moments in which guilt, responsibility, and blame were
negotiated in highly public spaces, which were defined by major news outlets as classified by
circulation numbers and LexisNexus (see Grzanka [2010] for methods and inclusion criteria).
Data gleaned from this component of the project would inform both survey item development
and structure the in-depth interviews to be conducted in the third and final phase of the study.
Recall that SA, like GT, is not driven by extant theory but by inductive, reflexive data
analysis. In the WRAP, I was not interested in testing existing ideas, such as theories of negative
self-conscious affect (Tangney & Dearing, 2002), but in understanding how various social actors
created and assigned blame during moments of racial, sexual, and gendered conflict. I was
concerned with discourses of guilt, responsibility, innocence, and individual versus collective
constructions of emotion, and I was especially interested in the extent to which emotions were
articulated (i.e., rhetorical constructions of affect) and named (i.e., specific invocations of
feelings, such as guilt, anger, remorse) in the data. In addition to memoing, positional maps were
a key data organization tool as I attempted to synthesize over 100 news articles that addressed
each of the three sites of public controversy. The axes on which I ultimately framed these events
emerged from questions about the data, not from existing theories of race, gender, sexuality or
emotion. And these axes came to inform not only conclusions about these data but how I related
to other aspects of the project. These positional maps exposed substantive currents in the flows
of discourse about these controversies which, I argued, were cases of more pervasive ideological
systems that maintained White supremacy, as well as intersecting heterosexism and patriarchy, in
the language of multiculturalism (Grzanka & Maher, 2012). Figure 3 depicts three positional
maps included in the WRAP. Notice that positional maps are not primarily about placing
individual respondents or data points on the map. This is about the discourse in your situation,
not the numerical quantity of respondents. The aims of positional maps are in stark contrast to
the quantitative impulse in psychology that is recapitulated by reviewers and editors alike when
they ask: “how many?” or the countless other questions that are about quantifying otherwise
qualitative data. Positional mapping asks researchers to consider if “how many?” is not the right
question. What if we need to be asking, “why would someone (not) feel this way?”?
These relatively parsimonious maps in Figure 3 represent 2x2 framings of the positions
taken up in mass media discourse on these three issues. In the case of Anderson Cooper’s
“emotional” coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans—specifically the
mismanagement of the disaster by federal, state, and local governments that resulted in chaos and
loss of life within New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast region—the positional axes
represented evaluations of Cooper’s coverage. Note that a site of silence emerged here quickly
and consequentially: the idea that Cooper’s coverage was bad and unemotional did not enter the
discourse I surveyed. Instead, journalists debated the extent to which Cooper was or was not
overly emotional, and the quality of his coverage was assessed accordingly. In the Grey’s
Anatomy scandal, coverage debated the extent to which Washington’s identity as a Black straight
man may or may not have played a role in his firing. Another axis of position-taking regarded the
relative amount of guilt assigned to Washington for having referred to T. R. Knight with a gay
slur. Finally, in the Don Imus affair, the axes interestingly mapped onto the same dimensions as
the Grey’s Anatomy controversy: does Don Imus’s identity matter, and is he guilty/worth of
punishment? These ordering principles of the discourse played an essential role in the
conclusions I drew from my analyses and from the other components of the WRAP. Positional
mapping helped me to see how axes of perceived culpability across sites were shaped by
intersecting social systems, including race, gender, and sexuality. As I have suggested above, this
element of SA helps to uncover not only the content or substance of data but the shape of
knowledge, which is essential to tracing the structural dimensions of the situation.
Later iterations of maps might actually specify the number of people who took each
position (Grzanka et al., 2015) and axes might be imagined beyond bipolar continua (Grzanka &
Schuch, 2020), even though this diverges from Clarke’s (2003, 2005; Clarke et al., 2018)
original specifications. I have personally found that identifying the number of participants who
took up specific positions relative to others can advance rather than minimize the goals of SA,
because identifying outliers in qualitative inquiry can be about privileging these unusual
positions, rather than eliminating or controlling for them as we might do in quantitative analysis
(i.e., what Clarke [2005] calls treatment of the “negative” case). But the analytic thrust of this
positional mapping process remains on identifying positions, not individuals. Accordingly, this
work amplifies the feminist and critical theory-driven concepts of standpoints and positionality
(Haraway, 1988), rather than frequencies or correlations. However, one can imagine using this
exercise even in quantitative work, particularly the murky mixed-methodological realm of survey
design where focus group and/or interview data may be used to generate items that reflect
bipolar continua of agree vs. disagree (Worthington & Whittaker, 2006).
Social Worlds/Arenas Maps

The last kind of SA maps encourage researchers to pursue Strauss’s (1978) original
vision of social worlds/arenas as constructed, contested, and overlapping terrains of social life
beyond individual or small group processes. Because of their sociological orientation, these may
be the most uncomfortable maps for counseling psychologists to create. Nevertheless, that is one
reason why I think social worlds/arenas maps may be the most important. Clarke and colleagues
(2018) underscore that social worlds/arenas maps are about organizational processes, which are
distinct from organizations, such as a university, hospital, or company. They assert that
organizational analyses reveal how “meaning making and commitments are organized and
reorganized again and again over time” through porous and highly dynamic interactions between
and among collectivities (p. 150). Because the focus in these maps is on social action rather than
variables, these maps (like all of SA) require honing one’s skills in sociological thinking, which
is invaluable for understanding how individual subjectivities shape and are shaped by social
ecologies. Though a full overview of Strauss’s (1978) social worlds theory warrants a book-
length treatment, I introduce key concepts and examples here that can guide counseling
psychologists in this unique analytic exercise.
Social worlds are groupings of varying sizes that are collective and organized around a
shared activity and one of more shared perspectives. Social worlds may be very small, such as a
therapy group, or very large, such as an entire academic field (e.g., counseling psychology).
Counseling psychology is actually a great example of a social world: while an organization (i.e.,
Division 17 of the American Psychological Association, Society for Counseling Psychology)
does represent and is constituted by counseling psychologists, counseling psychology as a field is
not equivalent to Division 17. In Strauss’s (1978) terms, then, we can conceptualize counseling
psychology as a social world defined by shared training experiences, epistemic and political
commitments, and areas of practice or social action (e.g., science, clinical work, teaching,
advocacy), even as there may be great diversity within the social world of counseling
psychology. Further, the boundaries of the group may change rapidly or very slowly, and its
membership may fluctuate. Similar to positional mapping described earlier, however, social
worlds are not simply aggregates of individuals who identify the same way; social worlds
represent collectivities with shared interests and action. So, while heterosexuals may not
represent a social group, straight allies might (Grzanka et al., 2015).
Arenas are made up of multiple social worlds and represent areas of debate and
contestation. Arenas are discursive sites insomuch as social worlds produce ideas about the arena
and about other social worlds. To continue the counseling psychology example, we might
consider master’s level credentialing and licensure to be an arena constituted by multiple
overlapping social worlds (e.g., counseling center staff, private practice clinicians, university
faculty, division leadership) and organizations, including the APA, Division 17, etc. These
various stakeholders both produce the terrain of the arena—debates over how to provide master’s
level psychology degrees that would enable licensure to practice therapy—and are influenced by
the arena. Clarke et al. (2018) provide extensive guidance on how to identify additional elements
of social worlds/arenas, but I will focus on here social worlds, arenas, and organizations.
Figure 4 represents one social worlds/arenas map I made in the WRAP to manage the
complex relationship between discourse about Hurricane Katrina and the artificially constructed
study environment in which I recruited survey respondents to participate in two in-depth
structured interviews about various topics related to race, gender, and sexuality. Recall that I
analyzed media texts in part 1 of the study; connecting the ideas in those texts to my participants
became a key part of my SA process, because I asked my respondents to respond to controversy

in these arenas and then explain to me how it is that they arrived at their conclusions about, for
example, guilt, collective responsibility, and ethics in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My
participants did not represent a social world, because they were not a working together around a
shared commitment—they did not even know each other or interact like they would in a focus
group study. But that did not mean that other social worlds were not acting upon them. Based on
the data gathered as part of the mass media discourse analyses, I mapped “The Katrina Arena” as
constituted by seven social worlds: news media, activists, federal government (including
Congress and FEMA as organizations), local/state government, New Orleans residents, Gulf
Coast residents, and the audience (i.e., those outside the region not directly affected by the storm
but who watched its coverage). The participants (P1, P2, etc.) are located barely outside the
arena in the university, which is another organization. Note that all boundaries on the map are
purposefully permeable, because the actual boundaries of these worlds, arenas, and organizations
are mutable, fluid, and historically contingent.
A number of insights can be gleaned from this process, in which one should ask: who
makes up these worlds, and what do they want? The answers to these questions should be driven
by the data, not by normative assumptions or existing theory. That is why, for example, my
Katina map (Figure 4) does not exhaustively include all possibly relevant social worlds that
could have anything to do with Katrina. This Katrina map represents the data and boundaries of
my research project or, in SA terms, the situation. Surely, the historic disaster of Hurricane
Katrina cannot be contained in one map! But this map helps me to see social worlds relationally.
For example, the news media are positioned orthogonally to all the other social worlds and most
directly opposite the governmental social worlds whose failure to act after the storm exacerbated
the crisis. Earlier drafts of this map included a single world, “Area residents,” that was later
divided into two overlapping social worlds to better reflect racialized constructions of Black
New Orleans residents and White greater Gulf Coast region residents. Memoing is once again
essential to this process, which should involve memoing about individual social worlds’ work,
interactions between worlds, and the boundaries of the arena. Naming and articulating social
worlds’ various commitments helps specify what is actually happening in a given situation, as
opposed to tacit assumptions about social groups and organizations. This iterative process of
mapping, memoing, and re-mapping can play a key role in identifying gaps in the data, as well as
when saturation has been reached. A social worlds/arena map can help researchers think through
questions such as, “Do I need to know more about this social world? What kinds of data will
help me understand this social world(s) and its commitment(s)?” In a longitudinal or historical
project, multiple maps may be drawn to illustrate how the arena has changed over time, which
can facilitate comparative analysis. In any project, revisions to a map are essential as more data
is gathered and iterative analyses reveal new dynamics in the arena.
Finally, Clarke et al. (2018) note that not every SA project lends itself to social
worlds/arenas mapping, because not every arena has organized social worlds; they even offer the
example of a project in which individuals were acting, though no collectivity with a shared
commitment had yet formed. But I would caution readers from taking this caveat too seriously. I
certainly did not “see” these maps as evident at the start of the WRAP. Like all researchers, my
subjective assumptions, preliminary data collection, and prior research experiences informed my
initial understanding of the situation when I designed the WRAP, which originally focused on
White individuals’ intersectional experience of racial emotions. Rather than use established
theory to connect these emotional experiences to structural dynamics, social worlds/arenas
mapping encouraged me to yoke subjectivities to structures by way of empirical evidence.

Again, such data-driven analyses can enhance the fidelity of a given project by maintaining an
intimate relationship between researchers and their data (Levitt et al., 2017a). In sum,
challenging oneself to think through social worlds theory (Strauss, 1978) may help actualize
counseling psychologists’ ongoing aspirations to structural and systems-level analysis and
intervention (Mallinckrodt et al., 2014; Moradi & Grzanka, 2017; Shin et al., 2017), a point to
which I return in the conclusion.
A Critical-Cartographic Turn in Counseling Psychology?
In this paper, I offered a primer on SA as a potentially valuable tool for critical
qualitative inquiry in counseling psychology. I used the WRAP to demonstrate how three forms
of mapping—situational, positional, and social worlds/arenas—can facilitate data analysis and
theory-generation above and beyond traditional GT analysis, though not as a replacement for
GT. Explicit in this elaboration of SA is an argument that these analyses could help counseling
psychology researchers achieve goals that have been elaborated in the pages of this journal
(Moradi & Grzanka, 2017) and other leading venues (Hargons et al., 2017; Nadal, 2018), at
conferences (Jackson, 2019), and in other professional discourse about the future of the field
(Goodman et al., 2004). Borrowing from Clarke’s original framing, I conclude by discussing
how SA might usher a critical-cartographic turn in counseling psychology along at least four
axes of work that reflect central commitments of the field. I link the terms critical and
cartographic here to invoke a sensitivity to relations of power and inequality (i.e., critical) that is
informed by mapping the shape and structure of those power relations (i.e., cartographic).
Further, I suggest these axes were at least implicit in Haverkamp and colleagues’ 2005 special
issue, and I offer them as a provocations—not critiques—of that earlier, foundational thinking on
the qualitative question in counseling psychology.

First, the questions of systems-level analyses and systems-level advocacy in the interest
of social justice are hardly new concerns in counseling psychology (Speight & Vera, 2008; Vera
& Speight, 2003). But there has been much handwringing about how to do so, and at times it has
felt like we—including myself—have been guilty of making more “calls to action” than plans of
action when it comes to systems-level advocacy (Grzanka & Frantell, 2017). It has been over 10
years since the first APA accredited counseling psychology program adopted a scientist-
practitioner-advocate model (Mallinckrodt et al., 2014), and yet social justice training still
connotes a kind of vanguard in the field. SA is not an advocacy tool in and of itself, but I have
argued that it incites structural thinking at all stages of the research design process that
destabilize normative, “best” (but not unproblematic) research practices. By emphasizing the
situation rather than variables, SA encourages research design in structural relief. Clarke (2003,
2005) and colleagues (Clarke et al., 2018) have extensively detailed SA’s origins in critical
inquiry and its many political ambitions and influences, including feminist and antiracist
scholarship and social movements. Setting traditionally trained social scientists off to conduct
GT analyses can result in reductionist codes, over-simplifications, and a reliance on conceptual
parsimony and construct discreteness over and above accuracy, validity, and complex
representation of the empirical world (Clarke, 2005; Fassinger, 2005). Surely, consciousness-
raising and education in critical theories and perspectives is a prerequisite of actually conducting
critical research (see Levitt et al., in press). Though much GT research has produced critical
scholarly interventions, the mere practice of GT analysis will not, in and of itself, produce
structural analysis. SA will not automatically do so, either, but it can help researchers get there.
Sociologists, social workers, and community psychologists have been attending to science and
advocacy at the structural level for generations (e.g., Morris, 2015); drawing on these rich,
interdisciplinary knowledges and integrating structurally oriented methods will only help
counseling psychologists continue to turn attention toward justice, power, and inequity as matters
of social—rather than merely psychological—concern.
Second, based on my use of SA in projects that are informed by intersectionality theory, I
suggest that SA is a tool for “using intersectionality responsibly” as described by Moradi and
Grzanka (2017). Moradi and Grzanka called for a moratorium on the phrase “intersecting
identities” in counseling psychology, and they join a chorus of scholars who are concerned with
how some psychologists have implemented intersectionality as a theory of identities, rather than
a way of understanding and resisting systems of interlocking inequality (Carbado, 2013; Warner,
Settles, & Shields, 2018). SA resists identitarian thinking in all mapping stages by instead
sensitizing analyses to action in the situation and the organizational forms that are manifesting in
the data. Like SA, intersectional analyses are those that think relationally about categories and
situate social categories historically and contextually within systems of domination (Dill &
Kohlman, 2012; Shin et al., 2017). SA emphasizes co-constitution and co-production, two
related sociological concepts that describe how different things come to make each other up (i.e.,
social worlds and arenas) (Clarke, 2005). As a substitution for multiple identities, a phrase that
merely signals that individuals identify as more than one thing at the same time, co-constitution
can help researchers better understand how systems of domination are co-creating each other.
SA mapping procedures expose the social embeddedness and inter-connectedness of
psychological processes, power relationships, and systems of inequality. Whereas multiple
identities or intersectionality-lite (Grzanka & Miles, 2016) rhetoric (1) implies discrete identities
that come together in some individuals (but not others) and (2) denotes no specific critique of
power, SA maps visualize the co-creation of systems and subjects as various positions are taken
up in the data and various social worlds materialize. For example, in the WRAP, Cooper’s
gender performance and sexuality were implicated in the evaluation of his “emotional” coverage
of Katrina (e.g., he was “hysterical”), even though his then-undisclosed sexual orientation was
not named in the data. In other words, his social identity (as a not publicly out gay man) was not
particularly germane to the situation, insomuch as his critics did not invoke his sexual
orientation. Nonetheless, sexuality, gender, and race intersected to co-create the positions taken
up by powerful social actors to evaluate the legitimacy of his coverage. Understanding this
intersectional dynamic via positional mapping helped later in the project to see how my
interview participants articulated gendered and sexualized narratives of guilt and shame often
without ever saying anything about gender and sexual identities, per se.
Third, qualitative research in psychology (not just counseling) continues to wrestle with
the legacy of positivism and post-positivism (Bowleg, 2008; Ponterotto, 2005), and SA can help
reframe the conversation. Against accusations of methodological sloppiness, imprecision, non-
representative samples, and generally unscientific research practice, qualitative researchers have
spent a disproportionate amount of their time defending qualitative research. A defensive posture
has epistemic consequences, such as the ones detailed by Nash (2019) in her analyses of
defensiveness when it comes to the uses and perceived abuses of intersectionality. In the context
of qualitative inquiry in the social sciences, researchers have sometimes sacrificed some of the
most advantageous parts of qualitative design to conform to quantitative methodologies and
epistemic priorities, including quantifying data even within the context of qualitative research.
Limitations sections in qualitative manuscripts often practically apologize for the qualitative
nature of the study by positioning lack of generalizability—which is not a goal of most
qualitative research (Luker, 2008)—as a failure of the study. In the midst of ongoing professional
concerns about the reproducibility of findings produced by psychological science, open science
practices (e.g., preregistration of hypotheses and planned analyses, making datasets publicly
available) have been positioned as potential ways to enhance scientific rigor and accountability
in psychology (Nosek et al., 2015). While the open science movement has already produced
exciting developments across the discipline, open science practices have almost exclusively been
normed on quantitative methods practiced by exclusively quantitative researchers. Accordingly,
the open science movement will present major challenges to qualitative research in psychology,
as prominent qualitative methodologists have already elaborated (e.g., Syed, 2019).
Nevertheless, SA circumvents the quantitative/qualitative binary and its associated
dualisms (e.g., objective/subjective, essentialist/constructionist) by rejecting notions of
unmitigated scientific discovery (Clarke et al., 2018). As Clarke (2005) explained, the feminist
debates of the 1980s and 90s about science and empiricism buttress SA’s epistemic assumptions,
including the assertion that there are multiple, simultaneous truths about a given situation and
that it is researcher’s burden and opportunity to understand how these truths are made and
remade in relations of power. The debates over whether objectivity or truth exist come to seem a
bit tedious when positivism is thoroughly jettisoned for alternative, critical epistemologies
(Cauce, 2011; Collins, 2000; Haraway, 1988). Though unquestionably driven by data and
evidence, SA is rooted in a belief in the constructed nature of all empirical inquiry (cf. Gergen,
1973). Rather than view this a weakness or strength, SA takes social constructionism as self-
evident and then uses cartography as a heuristic to trace the shape of knowledge. Following
longstanding feminist reconfigurations of objectivity, Clarke (2005) reframed rigor as the extent
to which the researcher is accountable to their data, rather than the extent to which a finding is
able to be reproduced. Indeed, questions of reproducibility are complicated by SA (and other

forms of critical qualitative inquiry; see Levitt [2021]) because the researcher and/or research
team’s standpoint is so fundamental to the knowledge produced in the study. Accordingly, in
designing SA, Clarke (2005) implicitly challenged reproducibility’s status as a scientific virtue
by rejecting positivist fixations on objectivity and the stability of knowledge. As counseling
psychologists look back at the influence of Haverkamp, Morrow, and Ponterotto’s (2005) work
and forward to the next 15 years of qualitative inquiry, I suspect the intertwined methodological
and epistemic implications of SA are at least as promising and generative as SA’s specific
methods/procedures.
Finally, I suggest that SA has specific utility in the context of counseling psychology for
facilitating innovative research on clinical work as a situation of inquiry. The dominant
framework of “process and outcome” has produced decades of important research on clinical
interventions (Kivlighan et al., 2000; Heppner et al., 2015). But SA has the potential to animate
clinical inquiry with research questions including and beyond process and outcome, inputs and
outputs. SA can help map psychotherapy as a situation. In the context of the rise of evidence-
based practice and the implementation of newer multicultural approaches such as cultural
humility (Hook et al., 2017) and structural competency (Metzl & Hansen, 2014), how might SA
facilitate understanding the ways that training directors, staff psychologists, trainees, faculty, and
clients navigate novel approaches in institutional contexts? What positions are psychologists
taking up in these debates, and how are they influencing how we train future psychologists?
Counseling psychologists have stressed the importance of studying the shape of change using
advanced quantitative methods (Frankfurt et al., 2016; Miles & Paquin, 2014), and this work is
vital. I have offered an introduction of SA to invite counseling psychologists to consider what
other questions we might ask about psychotherapy, mental health, inequality, and social justice.
Fassinger (2005) wrote that constructivist GT might push the field closer than any other
method—qualitative or otherwise (e.g., Fassinger & Morrow, 2013)—toward the scientist-
practitioner-advocacy model (Fassinger & O’Brien, 2000; Mallinckrodt et al., 2014), because of
GT’s emphasis on the integration of theory and practice, or praxis. I recommend SA as another
tool with which to achieve this goal.
Certainly, SA is not appropriate for all studies and is not without its limitations. One
major concern of researchers may be the additional time and resources SA mapping adds to the
already arduous process of qualitative data analyses, which are often un- or under-funded.
However, Levitt et al.’s (2017a) recommendations for ensuring fidelity and utility in qualitative
research do not suggest that time in and of itself should be a criterion that influences which
analyses should be adopted. In quantitative research, statistical software and advances in
computing power have undoubtedly made some analyses faster to conduct, whereas these same
technological enhancements have added new, sometimes time-consuming steps that have
become increasingly expected and which help ensure the validity of statistical claims (e.g.,
advanced structural equation modeling, missing data imputation). On the other hand, just
because one has the ability to conduct a complex statistical procedure does not mean that a
simple ANOVA might not produce similar or identical conclusions with much greater parsimony
and speed. Likewise, the question of whether to use SA in a GT study should depend upon the
research question driving the study and the resources available to investigators, among a variety
of other serious practical concerns.
As I have stressed above, SA is well suited to research questions that concern a process
and for which explanatory frameworks and contextually driven theory are the study aims.
Researchers will need to weigh the benefits of these analyses when determining the aims of their
study, familiarity with the given data set or population, and the researchers’ own self-efficacy
when it comes to qualitative inquiry. For example, not all projects may be understood as
situational or particularly contextual, and the philosophical presumptions of SA may contradict
the epistemic orientation of a given project or group of researchers. While a novice or seasoned
qualitative researcher starting a new research project might find these procedures to be
particularly beneficial for critically orienting their analyses, others might find SA to have
diminishing returns or to be somewhat duplicative of other analytic procedures. In these cases,
SA may not be appropriate.
SA maps themselves bring with them a set of epistemic assumptions: that positions can
be located on bipolar continua in positional maps, and that empirical data in the situation can
generally be categorized into a set of prescribed categories that include nonhuman actants and
temporal elements, among others. As researchers adopt SA in fields and projects that take these
procedures farther away from their disciplinary origins in medical sociology and science and
technology studies, researchers will inevitably contest certain precepts in Clarke’s formulation of
SA and create new ways of thinking about and conducting SA. As researchers routinely invoke
having taken a “modified grounded theory” approach (see Levitt et al., 2017b), we might see
counseling psychologists take a “modified situational analysis approach.” I view this as an
opportunity for greater methodological innovation, rather than a limitation. As optimistic as
Fassinger was in 2005 about GT, I am equally excited about what 15 years of critical-
cartographic work might look like in counseling psychology, because of how this work might
create forms of science and justice that truly exceed our current imaginations.
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Figure 1
Situational Map (Ordered), White Racial Affect Project (WRAP)
Individual Human Elements/Actors

Undergraduate students at the University
Me, as researcher
Celebrities and popular culture icons, specifically Anderson Cooper; Don Imus, Al Sharpton,
Rutgers Women’s basketball team; Isaiah Washington, Ellen DeGeneres, T.R. Knight
and the individual characters on Grey’s Anatomy
Collective Human Elements/Actors

Classrooms of sample participants
The University’s student body
White people
Racial minorities, especially Black Americans
Americans (generally defined)
Television consumers
Discursive Constructions of Individual and/or Collective Human Actors

White people as racist, ignorant and defensive – White stereotypes
Black people as angry – Black stereotypes
Racial identity no longer matters
Gendered racial dynamics
Sexualized racial dynamics
Classed racial dynamics
Gendered racism
The University as a predominantly White institution (PWI)
The University as a diverse and multicultural institution
Americans as multicultural melting-pot and/or colorblind society
Americans as racist
Television consumers as uncritical consumers (viewing habits)
Television consumers as active viewers (viewing habits)
Political/Economic Elements
Increased diversification of colleges/universities
Controversy over televisual representations -- the politics of representation
Controversy over affirmative action and race-based public policies
Colorblind ideology/racism and modern racisms
Multiculturalism
Liberal individualism
Neoliberalism
Neoconservatism
White guilt as popular culture concept
White guilt and White shame as psychosocial/academic concepts
Temporal Elements
History of U.S. racism

Contemporary U.S. racism
Academic calendar
Individual lifespans
Early adult developmental trajectory and identity enactment
Major Issues/Debates (Usually Contested)

Meanings/consequences of race and dimensions of difference (individual and collective)
Melting pot versus salad versus separatist ideologies
Individual and collective feelings of guilt and responsibility for racism
Whiteness as differentially experienced according to gender and sexuality (and other dimensions
of difference, especially class, religion, ability) [Intersectionality]
Race matters (i.e., anti-colorblind racial ideology, racial consciousness)
Nonhuman Elements/Actants
Particular course syllabi
Contemporary accounts/histories of racial politics
The University and its surrounding community
Communities away from campus (“home”)
Skin color – racial phenotype
Sexual orientation identities
Gender identities
Implicated/Silent Actors/Actants
Friends and families of students
Communities of practice and identity-based groups
Psychological and psychosocial constructs (e.g. collective guilt, shame, guilt, collective self-
esteem, social dominance orientation, racial/gender/sexuality identity salience and
valence, White guilt, White shame, perception of racism in TV)
Institutional racism, heterosexism and sexism
Politics of televisual raced, gendered and sexualized representation
Social desirability
Temporal Events in Situation

Survey administration
Interview(s)
2008 Presidential Election
Discursive Constructions of Nonhuman Actants

Concepts of race, gender, sexuality and other dimensions of difference
Constructions of feminism, anti-racism, racism, progressive and conservative politics
Individualism versus collectivism
Neoliberal ideology
Dominant televisual culture
Popular conceptions of guilt, shame, privilege (both individual and collective)
Imus scandal
Hurricane Katrina
Multicultural television
African American “homophobia”
New Orleans
Sociocultural/Symbolic Elements
Signifiers of race, gender, sexuality (and other dimensions of difference)
Popular mass culture, particular entertainment and television culture
Popular news/journalism
Campus culture – representations of “diversity” and “multiculturalism”
Spatial Elements
Local variations of background (who/where you live)
Regional backgrounds (where you come from)
Access to television and other forms of mass-media
Related Discourses (Historical, Narrative, and/or Visual)

Postracial America
Affirmative action
Post-feminism
Post-gay discourse
Note. Clarke et al. (2018) suggest, when necessary, to add a category for “Other Kinds of
Elements” as found in the situation. For more examples, see
http://clarkessituationalanalysis.blogspot.com.
Running head: SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS 49
Figure 2
Situational Map (Messy) with Relational Mapping, White Racial Affect Project (WRAP)
Note. The lines, which are added during relational mapping, specify empirically observed relationships between elements in the
situation. Each of these lines would constitute at least a single memo’s worth of writing and analysis.
Figure 3
Positional Maps, White Racial Affect Project (WRAP)
Note. Each map represents media coverage of: Anderson Cooper’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina (2005); Isaiah Washington’s firing
from series Grey’s Anatomy (2007); Don Imus’s insulting the Rutgers University women’s basketball team (2007).
Figure 4
Social Worlds/Arenas Map, White Racial Affect Project (WRAP)
Note. This map integrates data from across all the qualitative components in the WRAP, including critical discourse analysis of media
coverage of Hurricane Katrina and interviews with White college students about their political attitudes. P=Participant.
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The Shape of Knowledge: Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology

Article in Journal of Counseling Psychology · June 2020

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The Shape of Knowledge:

Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology Research

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Patrick R. Grzanka, Department of Psychology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patrick R. Grzanka, The

University of Tennessee, Department of Psychology, 1404 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996.

extension of constructivist grounded theory developed by Charmaz and others, Clarke’s

epistemological and methodological underpinnings in detail, with a focus on SA as a critical,

structural analysis. Each primary mapping procedure—situational, positional, and social

deepening consideration of intersectionality, cultivating alternative epistemologies beyond post-

positivism, and invigorating qualitative research on counseling and psychotherapy.

Keywords: qualitative methods, grounded theory, research methodology, situational analysis,

Public Significance Statement: This paper explores situational analysis, an approach to

three mapping procedures: situational, positional, and social worlds/arenas maps.

The Shape of Knowledge:

Situational Analysis in Counseling Psychology Research

In 2009, just as I was finishing my interdisciplinary, mixed-method dissertation, I found

of methodological innovation in GT. Situational analysis is what Clarke (2005) termed a

primary modes of analysis linked by a commitment to exposing the invisible-but-meaningful in

Cannella, 2013), situational analysis represents an exciting methodological opportunity for

counseling psychologists and critical researchers across the discipline.

methodological and transformative potential of research, teaching, practice, and advocacy. My

Situating Situational Analysis

Grounding Grounded Theory

ideas: theory grounded in the data.

Kathy Charmaz (2014), for example, developed a version—“constructivist” GT—that further

extended the social constructionist undercurrent of GT and embraced an expressly political

characterizes GT’s use in in counseling psychology (Levitt et al., 2017b).

on multicultural counseling competence (Pope-Davis et al., 2002); acculturation experiences of

particularly research on members of socially marginalized, stigmatized, or

systematically/historically under-represented groups and work that purports to take a critical

Just as no method is imbued with magical properties (Grzanka, 2016), it is important to

analytic prescriptions of Glaserian and “classical” approaches (Charmaz, 2014), including

scientism that undermines the potential for GT to actually ground theory-generation in

Even as counseling psychologists have largely embraced constructionist strands of GT

Harding (1987) distinguished methods from methodology by specifying methodology as the

recalcitrancies motivate situational analysis as a complementary analytic package or extension of

point typology to suggest traditional GT (pp. 11-18):

1. Lacks reflexivity, particular in terms of interrogating the co-constitutive dynamic

world; fails to understand research as a process of representation that is always

2. Oversimplifies complex dynamics in the interest of conceptual parsimony and

if not directly comparable to more primarily reductionist qualitative approaches (e.g.,

content analysis) and quantitative methods.

3. Reduces social processes so as to emphasize singular explanatory dynamics rather

than overlapping, multifarious, and even contradictory processes in a given situation;

interactive and plural.

4. Interprets variation in data as “negative” cases or inexplicable, whereby coding

practices privileges consistency rather than diversity; reproduces quantitative

tendencies to identify and eliminate “outliers” in the data.

5. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly purports to “discover” (a la Glaser) the singular

Truth or achieve a methodological and epistemic purity; positions impersonality and

stability of data as desirable, rather than as reflective of a normative investment in

scientism and positivism.

fundamentally flawed; likewise, I am not suggesting that counseling psychologists have

generally misapplied or misused GT. Nevertheless, Clarke’s framing of these problems as

reinvigorating GT with critical self-reflexivity, a hallmark of feminist and social justice-oriented