The first weak point of grounded theory is that the research is difficult to carry out. Nurses and nursing students who lack experience in collecting and evaluating data may have a hard time determining which data are relevant and which are not. For example, in trying to research Maori women's health concerns and ways to improve health care in the Maori community, nurses need to collect data about the Maori culture to be able to create culture-relevant health care. Not knowing the culture, the nurses are not able to anticipate the appropriate questions that should be used while interviewing the Maori women.
Nursing staff's inexperience in data collection resulting from lack of background knowledge and the consequent inability to foresee and ask appropriate questions influences the accuracy of the results obtained by using this method. Nurses studying the way adults deal with AIDS may not be able to arrive at the right conclusions if their knowledge of psychology is not broad enough. Even taking into account the nursing knowledge itself, there is often a wide discrepancy between the individual nurses' knowledge of the subject matter, which may lead to different results.
Grounded theory is marked by several systematic steps that a nurse has to perform in order to arrive at a conclusion. Data collection in the form of oral or written interviews can be time-consuming. Data organization and analysis is also a long process. During the data analysis stage of the research, a nurse has to read through all the data collected from the interviews several times so as not to miss vital points. Also, a nurse whose knowledge of the subject matter is not vast may require more time to arrange and analyze the data than a nurse who is knowledgeable about the subject matter and skillful at using the grounded method. Results obtained using the grounded method are, therefore, dependent to a great degree on the skill and experience of the researcher.