Grounded theory (GT), a widespread qualitative research methodology, has been introduced to generate a theory from data that is gathered from one discipline. However, in many studies, we are required to involve multiple disciplines and generate a theory that explains a multidisciplinary phenomenon and incorporate combined concepts. The combined concept is either a generalized concept from one of the disciplines or a new abstract concept that can satisfy the properties of multiple disciplines. The GT coding phases are not able to extract these combined concepts. In this paper, an extended GT has been proposed. The proposed method can operate over multiple disciplines and extract their corresponding combined concepts. The proposed extended grounded theory (EGT) uses ontology matching and merging methods to merge the extracted concepts and proposes two new coding phases; namely “Description” and “Combination” phases. These phases overcome the challenge of describing combined concepts, the large number of concept dependencies, and the propagation of the description changes from one concept to other concepts. As a use case, the proposed methodology has been implemented over two disciplines of “Web Security” and “Computation over Encrypted Data” and resulted in the unified theory of “Developing Secure Web Applications over Encrypted Data.” This unified theory includes combined concepts such as Web Access Control over encrypted data and Operation of middle-boxes over encrypted data. In addition, EGT has been able to discover new combined concepts that were undefined previously in each of the two disciplines (e.g. XSS prevention with searchable encryption). As a second case study, EGT has been implemented over two disciplines of “Healthcare” and “Data Science” to generate a unified theory that explains the multidisciplinary phenomenon of “Privacy Preservation of Cloud based Health Data”. In addition to a unified theory, EGT generates a conceptual framework of the combined and new concepts that can be used for requirement elicitation and analysis. Furthermore, the researcher can use the concepts’ relationships to suggest a set of best-fit solutions to the elicited requirements.

中文翻译：

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扩展的扎根理论：结合多个学科的方法

引入了扎根理论（GT），这是一种广泛的定性研究方法，可以从一个学科收集的数据中生成理论。但是，在许多研究中，我们需要涉及多个学科，并产生一种解释多学科现象并结合组合概念的理论。组合概念可以是一个学科中的广义概念，也可以是可以满足多个学科性质的新抽象概念。该GT编码阶段是不能够提取这些组合的概念。在本文中，提出了扩展的GT。所提出的方法可以在多个学科上运行并提取它们相应的组合概念。提出的扩展基础理论（EGT）使用本体匹配和合并方法来合并提取的概念，并提出了两个新的编码阶段。即“描述”和“组合”阶段。这些阶段克服了描述组合概念的挑战，大量概念依赖性，以及描述的传播从一个概念变为其他概念。作为一个用例，所提出的方法已在“ Web安全”和“基于加密数据的计算”两个学科上实施，并形成了“基于加密数据开发安全Web应用程序”的统一理论。这种统一的理论，包括组合的概念，如Web访问控制加密数据和中间操作-通过加密的数据盒。此外，EGT能够发现两个学科中每个学科以前都未定义的新组合概念（例如，带有可搜索加密的XSS防护）。作为第二个案例研究，EGT已在“医疗保健”和“数据科学”两个学科上实施，以产生一个统一的理论，解释了“基于云的健康数据的隐私保护”的多学科现象。除统一理论外，EGT还生成了组合概念和新概念的概念框架，可用于需求启发和分析。此外，研究人员可以使用概念之间的关系为提出的需求提出一套最合适的解决方案。