A Pragmatic Definition of the Concept of Theoretical Saturation

In this article I critically discuss the concept of theoretic saturation, first presented by Glaser and Strauss in their classic book The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Over my almost two-decade career of using, researching, and publishing on qualitative methods, I have lost count of the number of qualitative researchers that have defined saturation as an instance where “no new information” emerges from data analysis. I argue that such a...