Situational Analysis: mapping the situation, not just the process

The founding move is to make the situation the unit of analysis rather than the process. Everything that conditions the situation is in the analysis, and Clarke is deliberately expansive about what counts: human actors, but also organisations, technologies, material objects, spatial arrangements, discourses, symbols, historical elements and the things that constrain without anyone choosing them.

Three consequences follow. Nonhuman elements are analysed as consequential, not as background — the form, the ward layout, the regulation and the software are actors in the situation. Difference and contradiction are preserved, since the goal is not a single explanatory story. And discourse is analysed alongside interview data, because what can be said in a situation is part of what constitutes it.

The other significant break is with the search for a core category. Situational analysis produces maps rather than a central process, and a study that ends up with one dominant explanation has probably reverted to conventional grounded theory.

Adele Clarke, a student of Anselm Strauss, set out the approach in Situational Analyses: Grounded Theory Mapping After the Postmodern Turn in Symbolic Interaction, and at book length in Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Interpretive Turn — whose opening chapter states the argument most directly.

The target was grounded theory's tendency toward a single, coherent, decontextualised account — which Clarke read as a residue of positivism sitting awkwardly inside an interpretivist method. Her response was to keep grounded theory's empirical discipline and abandon its search for the one story.

The method has a substantial applied literature; a critical assessment appears in this review in Organizational Research Methods, and the practical guidance on the social-worlds map is set out in Doing Social Worlds/Arenas Maps.

A study of why an antimicrobial stewardship programme worked in one hospital and stalled in another used interviews, observation, policy documents and the programme's own audit reports.

The messy situational map included the obvious human actors — prescribers, pharmacists, microbiologists, managers — and, once pushed, a set of nonhuman ones that turned out to matter more: the electronic prescribing system's default duration field, the ward round timetable, the 48-hour review sticker, the national target, and the physical distance between the pharmacy and the acute medical unit. Relational analysis linked the default duration field to prescriber behaviour more strongly than any human relationship in the map.

The social worlds map identified four worlds with incompatible non-negotiables: microbiology (resistance ecology, population-level), acute medicine (this patient, tonight), pharmacy (the audit and the formulary), and hospital management (the national target). The arena where they met was the weekly stewardship meeting, which acute medicine attended least because it clashed with the post-take round — a scheduling fact with structural consequences.

The positional map used axes of "clinical autonomy" and "acceptance of population-level responsibility". Positions clustered in three regions, and one quadrant was empty: nobody in the data took the position that population-level responsibility should override individual clinical judgement in an acute presentation, even though it is a coherent position and is arguably what the national target implies. That silence was the study's most interesting finding, and only the positional map made it visible.

• Only mapping people. The nonhuman elements are the point of departure from conventional grounded theory. A situational map listing only actors has not used the method.
• Mapping people on positional maps. Positions are the unit. Plotting participants collapses the map into a typology of persons.
• Ignoring the empty spaces. What is absent from the messy map and unoccupied on the positional map is where the analysis is.
• Skipping relational analysis. Without the element-by-element pass, the situational map is a list.
• Reverting to a core category. Producing one central explanatory story means the method's founding critique has been abandoned.
• Maps as illustration. The maps are analytic devices used during analysis, not figures generated afterwards to decorate a paper.
• Interview data only. Situational analysis expects discourse materials — documents, media, policy, visual materials — alongside interviews.

Situational analysis is assessed on the range of what was brought into the situation and on what the analysis did with silence. A strong study shows nonhuman and discursive elements analysed as consequential, several data types beyond interviews, explicit attention to absent actors and unoccupied positions, and preserved contradiction rather than a resolved account.

It also requires visible reflexivity about the analyst's own position in the situation, since Clarke's framing makes the researcher one of the elements rather than an observer outside it.

A weak study is easy to spot: three maps presented as figures, all populated exclusively with people and organisations, and a discussion section that reads like standard grounded theory.

The maps can expand without limit. Everything conditions the situation in some sense, and the method offers less guidance than it should on where to stop; studies routinely produce situational maps that are exhaustive and unusable.

It is also demanding in data. Doing it properly requires discourse materials as well as interviews, which is more collection than many projects have budget for, and a thin situational analysis is worse than a competent grounded theory.

Its outputs are harder to communicate. A core category can be stated in a sentence; a situational analysis cannot, which makes it a difficult method to report in journals with tight word limits or to commissioners who want a headline. And the theoretical apparatus is heavy — the method assumes familiarity with symbolic interactionism and Foucauldian discourse analysis that many applied researchers do not have.

Constructivist grounded theory shares the interpretivist commitment but retains the search for a central analytic story.

Straussian grounded theory is the direct ancestor; situational analysis keeps its coding discipline and rejects its coding paradigm.

Critical discourse analysis covers the discursive half of the situation with more linguistic precision and less attention to material and organisational elements.

Institutional ethnography shares the interest in how texts and structures coordinate action, approached from the standpoint of people rather than from the situation as a whole.

The mapping is a thinking activity done on large sheets of paper, and it should stay that way — the value of the messy map comes partly from the physical act of laying everything out at once.

What benefits from tooling is the corpus underneath. Situational analysis works across interviews, field notes, policy documents, media and visual materials, and the elements on a map need to trace back to the material that put them there. Retrieving everything bearing on one element across four data types is what makes relational analysis grounded rather than speculative. Evidano supports situational analysis as a named methodology on the corpus side, handling documents and transcripts together; the maps are yours to draw.