I have examined or tutored some 500 bachelors theses and some 100 masters theses at several Swedish universities.

Over the past 20 years Swedish secondary school graduates has become less and less apt in mathematics, Mullis, et al. (2009). Due to this development university students mostly chose to make qualitative studies, irrespective if this is the best choice to study the research question on not. Most of them don’t even make good qualitative studies. After analysis of the requirements of what is needed, Prahalad’s (2006) ‘sandbox of innovation’, I have developed an abductive method for analysing qualitative data to help the students to get good use of their empirical material, a well-grounded theory, in contrast to the inherent deductive nature of grounded theory. It is suitable for studies based on interviews, focus groups and observations.

As the dataset grows, the method becomes cumbersome, which I don not consider is a big problem, as big qualitative datasets would preferably be analysed by non-parametric statistics, rather than the iterative interpreting qualitative method I suggest here. The method has so far been used to advantage by students in some 15 bachelor and master theses. I also discuss the limitations of the method.