  Grounded Theory (GT), a sociological research method designed to study social
phenomena, is increasingly being applied to investigate human-centric and
social aspects of software engineering. Despite its strong potential, GT
remains a largely misunderstood, misused, and poorly presented and evaluated
method in software engineering. Inevitably, software engineering researchers
attempt to adapt traditional GT to suit their unique socio-technical contexts
but without philosophical rationales or methodological justification. At the
heart of these challenges lies the misalignment of GT's traditional social
sciences approach to studying what is an inherently and inextricably
socio-technical discipline and the absence of clear methodological guidelines
to bridge the gap. Motivated by the needs of the software engineering research
community and an acknowledgement of the misalignment of the traditional GT
methods to studying an increasingly socio-technical world, this paper outlines
the Socio-Technical Grounded Theory (STGT) method, a variant of the traditional
GT methods. With its unique socio-technical lens, STGT presents philosophical
and methodological guidance for studying socio-technical phenomena and theory
development in software engineering and related disciplines.
