Anselm Strauss

Anselm Strauss was an American sociologist, born in 1916, who spent nearly three decades on the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, chairing its Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 1960 to 1987. With Barney Glaser he developed grounded theory, a method of building theory inductively from systematically collected and analyzed qualitative data rather than testing a theory determined in advance, set out in their jointly authored 1967 book The Discovery of Grounded Theory; the method has since been widely adopted across sociology, nursing, education and social work. Strauss was also a prominent medical sociologist whose research on chronic illness and dying, including the 1965 book Awareness of Dying with Glaser, helped establish the sociological study of death and the healthcare encounter. He died in 1996.