Compare methods

	Cultural Models Analysis	Grounded Theory
Field	Anthropology	Qualitative Research
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1967
Originator	Cognitive anthropology of cultural models (Quinn, Holland, D'Andrade, Strauss)	Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss
Type	Discourse-analytic method for reconstructing shared tacit cognitive schemas	Method
Seminal source	Quinn, N. (Ed.) (2005). Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 9781403969132	Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine.
Aliases	Cultural Schema Analysis, Cultural Models Theory, Schema-Based Discourse Analysis, Finding Culture in Talk	GT, Grounded Theory Approach
Related	4	3
Summary	Cultural models analysis is a discourse-analytic method for reconstructing the shared, largely tacit cognitive schemas — the cultural models — that organize how members of a group understand a domain such as marriage, success, or illness. Rather than asking people to state their models directly (they usually cannot), the analyst examines what speakers say spontaneously: the key words they reach for, the metaphors they reason with, and the assumptions their arguments take for granted. Recurring patterns across many speakers' talk are taken as traces of an underlying schema that the talk presupposes but never fully spells out.	Grounded Theory (GT) is a systematic qualitative research methodology in which theory emerges directly from data through iterative analysis, rather than being imposed before data collection. Developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in 1967, GT prioritizes generating explanatory frameworks grounded in evidence.