Are you struggling to figure out what your theoretical framework is actually supposed to do? Are you treating theory like a requirement to check off rather than a tool that shapes how you understand your research? Hey, co-authors. Theoretical frameworks can feel like one of the most confusing parts of academic research, especially when we treat all theories as though they serve the same purpose.
But theories work differently based on their assumptions and paradigms, and understanding the difference can fundamentally change how you approach your literature review and your study. Let's dive in.
So I mentioned this story before, but whenever I was an undergraduate, I knew that I wanted to be a communication studies professor whenever in my sophomore year I took a communication theory class and just thought that it was the coolest thing ever.
I would take the textbook and go down to the cafeteria and just read all the theories about interpersonal communication, organizational communication, intercultural communication, just all the different theories.
And it really seemed to me as if I had found the answers that I'd been seeking all my life about how and why people do the things that they do. And so as you can imagine whenever I told this to my advisor at the time, she was like, "Well, congratulations and condolences. You're a huge nerd, and you need to be a professor."
So that's what I did. But even as I was going through my master's or my doctoral program, and even, early in my career, I still had this sort of weird relationship with theory. On one hand I loved it. I loved reading about it. I loved thinking about it. I loved talking about it.
On the other hand, I kept getting feedback back on my journal submissions that I wasn't using theory properly, and I didn't really know what the disconnect was. And I think part of that was is that in my master's program, I had gone to a type of program that did primarily quantitative research and what I will consider to be post-positivist or functionalist theory building, so hypothesis testing theory testing and very much sort of a, part of the objective social science approach. But then for my doctoral program, I went to a more interpretive or critical theory program, and theory functions much different in that type of paradigm, ?
It's much more about sensitizing a person than it is about testing hypotheses. And so I think that I kept switching back and forth and not being able to pin down what the function of a theory was, why did I need one, when did I not need one. And so I thought that it might be helpful if you are struggling with theory and about how that might be a part of your dissertation or how that might be a part of a research project for like a journal article, how you're supposed to talk about that, ?
So that's what I wanna talk about today. I wanna talk about what the different types of theories are and then how to utilize theory in a way that shapes how you read and interpret your literature, and ultimately how it affects your entire study, ?
So let's dive in.
Now, before I begin, I will just say that you don't necessarily need to have a theory in any of your research. So if you are doing post-positivist or functionalist types of work, so primarily quantitative, social or natural science approaches to things, you might engage in what's called variable analytic research, which is where you take different variables that based on the literature should have some relationship with one another, and then you test to see what those relationships are, and you don't necessarily have a theory that governs the way that you're testing those relationships.
Similarly, if you're doing qualitative research, you might do what's called grounded theory design, in which case then, again, you would not have a formal theory framing your study. Your starting point there really is just people's experiences, and then from that developing theory on the back end from the thick description of the phenomenon that you're studying.
But if you do need to have a theory, then it's important then for you to understand, well, what kind of theory do you need? What type of work are you doing, and how is that supposed to influence the type of project that you have? So whenever people need a theory and they're not good at using theory, the overarching problem that I normally see
Is that people treat theory as sort of one of two things, either a checkbox that they need to check off. So my advisor, my instructor, a journal, whatever it is, told me that I needed a theory, so I just throw in a theory. They might not even have a dedicated theory section, but they might have cited theory in the course of their literature review, thinking that that is the use of theory.
And then on the other side, what you have is a literature review about the different concepts that you're interested in, and then you cite things from theories to support the things that you're doing in your study, but you're not really using the theory so much as using the theory as evidence for the type of relationships that you are looking for or the types of phenomenon that you are trying to investigate.
The problem with either one of these approaches is that they are not being true to what theory does in either critical or interpretive research or in either positivist or functionalist research. So if you're doing positivist or functionalist research, that is the type of research that is based primarily on the scientific method, that is about hypothesis testing.
You might sometimes have qualitative research that has a social science bent to it that's, , in the realm of positivism or functionalism. But for the most part, most of this work is going to be quantitative in nature, and it's going to be either exploring causal relationships or correlational relationships or group differences or other things that can be, quote-unquote, "objectively measured."
A theory then is a set of constructs that are interrelated with one another, and they serve as a propositional framework for whatever it is that you're going to study. So whenever I have a theory, let's just say uncertainty reduction theory from Berger and Calabrese, they say that in an initial interaction with someone, that you will feel uncertainty about that person because you've never met them before.
That will in turn produce anxiety on your part. You're motivated to reduce that anxiety, and so you will engage in information-seeking behaviors, i.e. small talk, in order to gain information, reduce uncertainty, and reduce anxiety. Each one of those is propositional, It provides a testable proposition for us to look at in a variety of circumstances.
Do people do that whenever they meet each other for the first time in bars? Do they do that the first time they meet each other in the workplace? Do they do that the first time they meet each other at a family gathering, ? So each one of those has this positivist functionalist perspective of generalizability and objectivity.
What's important here is that theories in this case are tested, It has propositions. You test the propositions, and then if it pans out, great, the theory has been proven to be useful in that context. And then if it's not supported, then either there's a boundary condition to that theory, ? It's not good in this circumstance, but it's good in others.
Or it's a bad theory, right? It's not good in any circumstance Whenever you're doing critical or interpretive theories, you are not testing the theory. You're not looking in the data for whether something is there or not. Instead, the interpretive or critical theory is sensitizing you to how something is happening.
So for example, if I want to know about the ways that racism may manifest in the feedback that instructors give to students, and I interview students, and I'm like: " whenever you've gotten feedback from an instructor Have they ever said something to you that's racist? And if so, what did they say?
How did they say that, right? There, I'm already sensitized to the idea that racism might be present, right? I'm, I already know on some level that racism exists. Here, what I'm interested in is the how. How is it communicated? Is it overtly? Is it covertly? Is it insinuated? What are the different strategies in which it's communicated from one person to another?
So this critical interpretive framework is less about is it there or not, and more about the how of something, ?
So the problem is, is that I oftentimes see people who have a post-positivist or functionalist approach, and then they just, they throw a theory out there, and then they don't really test it, and they're like, "Oh, well, it was, you know, it just kind of like helped me think about what it is that I'm doing."
No, that's not what a, a theory is supposed to do if you're doing social science , post-positivist, or functionalist research. You should be testing the theory. The theory should be telling you how to set up your hypothesis, and that hypothesis should be congruent with the theoretical propositions of that theory.
On the other hand, I oftentimes see people who do in interpretive or critical work, and they are like, "Hey, I'm looking for racism, and lo and behold, I found racism." And you're like, "Okay, cool. We already kind of expected to find racism though," ? What's interesting is, and what's important for us, is not does racism exist or not, ?
But instead to think to ourselves in a instance where racism exists, how is racism manifesting and how do we sensitize ourselves to -- all of the dynamics, both overt and covert, that one might use to communicate racism? So whenever you have folks who don't use theory correctly, then that can create a whole host of downstream issues.
It creates methodological problems because you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, I'm interested in the differences between two groups of people. I'm gonna do focus groups, and I'm gonna use this interpretive critical theory."
But, group differences is most likely better investigated by quantitative social science work, ? 'Cause then you can do t-tests, ANOVAs, other types of statistics that allows us to see if there are significant differences between two groups. And if you expect there to be a difference, that might be a proposition of a theory that you could test rather than a critical or interpretive way of just sensitizing yourself to it.
So it can create methodological issues. It can also create issues in your findings, ? So once you get to your findings, what I find is that people who are confused about the role of theory in their papers, they oftentimes introduce all sorts of theories on the back end that aren't present in the literature review because they found out a whole bunch of things that they weren't expecting, and so now I have, I've gotta pick a whole bunch of other theories that might be helpful.
Well, from a positivist or a functionalist perspective, if you found that other theories were better explanations, you probably should have just tested those theories in the first place. And if it's interpretive or critical, then your initial framework should just be sensitizing you to things.
So it's not really important that other theories might also offer insights necessarily. If the framework that you've offered sensitized you to the things that are in your data, then that's good enough, so you don't need to go back to the theory well.
All this is to say, as you're thinking about the differences in these two types of theories and the two types of ways that your project might manifest, it's important - to have a firm grasp as to what type of scholarship that you're doing and from there then what type of theory is needed for the project that you're doing.
So what are some specific ways that I see this manifest? So whenever I'm reading someone's literature review, and specifically the theory subsection of their literature review, There's usually three red flags that I see in people's work whenever they're not using theory correctly.
The first is what I would consider to be a lack of conceptual literacy. And what I mean by that is that in the writing that the author knew that theories existed, they recognized that theories were applicable to their study, but they didn't really know how to use the whole theory or even a, a testable or sensitizing part of that theory.
But instead, they either reviewed the entire theory, even though they didn't need the entire theory, or you see that they don't have a theory section at all, but theory just appears in little bits and bobs all throughout the literature review, and there's all sorts of theories in it. So it's not just one theory, it's a lot of different theories.
Both of these are signals to me that a person does not really understand the use of theory. To me, either a theory is testable, right? It's something that you're using to guide what your hypothesis or in some rare cases, a research question that is testable might be, or it is a sensitizing framework that helps us make sense of the phenomenon under investigation that you are trying to generate a nuanced portrait of through your interpretive or critical work.
But whenever you have a theory section That doesn't really show the reader what in that theory it is that's useful for you, but instead you're just sort of recounting what the theory is, or if you're just kind of having bits and bobs of different theories appear willy-nilly in your literature review, those things are not adding to your credibility.
It makes it seem as if you've read a whole bunch of stuff and you're trying to make sense of it through your writing rather than you having a command of the theory and how it specifically is aiding you in your investigation.
The second thing that I oftentimes see is that authors misunderstand the role of theory within their literature review. And what I mean by this is that, we've talked about how to write a paragraph and how a paragraph starts off with a declarative sentence, usually some sort of claim or assertion, and the rest of the paragraph then is the evidence and your analysis that supports that paragraph.
Oftentimes, what I find is that a person will cite a component of a theory as if it is a study. And what I mean by that is in a study, if someone finds something, whether it's the support for a hypothesis or not, or whether it's the nuanced portrait of someone's lived experience through a qualitative report, that's something that we know now that we didn't know before.
But theories are not themselves things that we know. They are either propositions that we test or they are things that sensitize us to something that we want to know about. They in and of themselves are not evidence. So whenever I say, for example, with the theory of uncertainty reduction theory, that a person who meets someone for the first time will feel uncertainty and therefore feel anxiety, that's a proposition.
That's not evidence. But oftentimes what I would see is a person taking that statement and using that in support of an assertion in a paragraph. But that's not appropriate because that's a proposition that's not itself evidence. If on the other hand you said, " Here's what the theory says," person who meets someone for the first time feels uncertainty and therefore feels anxiety, and then you said after that, " And in this study, they found that to be true."
then you cite the study because it is now knowledge that we have that that proposition was confirmed in the study in this context. But the proposition itself is not evidence. The third thing is that people get overwhelmed with choices, and as a result, they try to fit in two, three, four different theories into their l-literature review.
Folks, that is not the way that theory should proceed. It is very rare that you would ever have more than one theory in your literature review. There are times whenever it's appropriate to have two theories, and that might happen because in a positivist or functionalist paper, you might have competing theories about the same phenomenon, and so you're testing a proposition from each of those theories to see which one provides better predictions or better ex-explanations.
and there are times in interpretive or critical work where you're going to try to glom two theories together. So maybe you have something and it'll be like, " This is a critical theory of education," and then someone will come along and say, " Okay, cool, but I don't think that you're doing enough about race, and so here's a critical race theory about education." And another person comes along and they're like, "Cool, you're not doing enough about gender, so it's a critical feminist theory of education."
All that is to say, sometimes you'll find that different theories get kind of glommed together like that. But for the most part, whenever you're using a theory either to test or you're using a theory to sensitize you to something, one theory is sufficient. If you're having to go to the well for two, three, four theories, then that means either you're probably being redundant, that those theories overlap themselves, and the nuance of the differences among them are so slight that as to be not really important.
Or those differences are large enough to be important, in which case, perhaps what you have there is a data set that's large enough to warrant two or more projects, and you would have one data set, but that you looked at from, in project one, this theory, and in project two, this other theory. So that way, the you can see how the theories are guiding you to have different interpretations of the data. Now, I will say real quick, a lot of people that I say this to, they're like, "Well, what about salami slicing? What about, , like using the same data set for multiple projects?
Isn't that a problem?" It can be a problem, but I think one way that you can avoid this is if you have a data set,
And through the use of two different theories, create two different projects of which none of the data is shared across the two projects, I think that's completely fine and warranted. If, on the other hand, you have two projects, two theories, and a lot of the same data appears in both of those pieces, okay, well, that's less defensible, ?
That feels like the level of nuance that you are parsing in those two projects is probably not enough to really carry or warrant two publications, and that is a problem, ? But all that is to say, in most of your projects, one theory is gonna probably carry the day for you, maybe two if you're doing something else, but for the most part, stick with one theory.
So if you're using theory in your project, and again, you don't have to. Plenty of projects do not have a theory to them. But if you do have a theory, what are some ways that you can use it correctly?
So first off, you start off with your research question or your hypothesis. Okay? So you should make your general research topic into a formal research question or hypothesis. So if i'm interested in romantic relationships and the process of a couple Going from a casual relationship to a more serious relationship, so the process by which one does that. So that's my general research topic. Then I'm gonna go back into the literature and try to find is there research out there that looks at a similar dynamic, and if so, have they used a theory?
Or I might just go to a theory book or a theory encyclopedia or handbook and see if there might be some theories there that I think that might be a good place to start. So then I go through there and I'm like, "Oh, well, it seems like whenever people are going through this process, from going from a casual to a more serious relationship, they encounter a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress about the state of their relationship.
Well, hey, look at this. There is a framework called Relational Turbulence Model, and it is exactly about how people manage turbulence and anxiety as they go through different stages of their relationship." So cool. Now I can go back and revise my research question or my hypothesis, making sure that I use the language of the theory that I'm either testing or that I'm gonna be sensitized to.
So now I'm not just interested in people going from a casual to a serious relationship. Now I'm interested in this particular set of variables, and I'm gonna test those in this process, or I'm sensitized to this particular dynamic in the process of people going from casual to serious.
But that needs to be reflected now in my research question and my hypothesis, so that way it's consistent with my theoretical framework. Ultimately, a good theory helps you see the patterns or the tensions and contradictions in the literature. Either it's about a testable hypothesis, and you look through the literature and you see that there is support for the type of hypothesis that you have, or there's mixed support, in which case you might need to have a research question instead, or there's no support because there's very little or no research on the particular dynamic that you're looking at.
In which case, you might offer a research question rather than a hypothesis. Or if you're doing a more sensitizing framework, you look at that and you see, "Oh, look, here are the things that we know happens in a relationship as it progresses through these different stages." But this particular process, we don't have a taxonomy of the types of strategies that people use whenever they're negotiating this process of going from one level to the next in their relationship.
Now, whenever you're looking at the literature, you can start to see where things have been addressed and not, and now sensitize yourself to the dynamics that haven't been, which now form your research question and purpose
The second thing that you do is that you should be using your theory as a filter, both for the literature that you are looking at and for your findings. And what I mean by that is that in your literature, the stuff that you should be looking at first should be literature that uses the theory in similar areas, ?
Obviously, literature that's not theory-based, but that is a part of the thing that you are looking at is something that you would want to a-address as well. But it's particularly nice whenever you have a set of articles that uses a similar theoretical framework, because then you are adding to the specificity of that conversation, and it allows you then to know exactly what has and has not been addressed through this theory and how you're going to be adding on to that.
It's also a way for you to filter out your results, right, and your findings. Now this is a, a little bit easier for people who are doing quantitative research because once you have your hypothesis and you test that, hypothesis is either supported or not, and there you go. That's kind of your filter.
But especially for qualitative scholars, I can't tell you how many times I've reviewed work or worked with clients and they're like, "Oh man, look at all the cool things, all the themes that I found in my data." And that might be true, except a lot of those themes are not the phenomenon that theory is asking a person to pay attention to.
So just because you generate a theme and that theme is something that is, widely accepted by your participants does not necessarily mean that just because they said it a lot, that it rises to the level of being a finding if that finding doesn't address the dynamic that you should be sensitized to through your theoretical framework.
And so a theory can really help, especially qualitative researchers remember to themselves, just because it's important to my participants doesn't necessarily mean it's important for this particular project. maybe it's important for a different research project. Maybe it's important, and it will never make its way into a project because it's not really of importance to us as an academic community.
But what's most important is that whenever you're looking through your findings, that you're really doing the work of making sure that they're consistent with your theoretical framework. The third thing that a theory can help you do is it helps shape the organizational framework of your literature review and your findings.
So in your literature review, you usually have one of two ways that a theory can be introduced. So the first way is you have the introduction to the article, usually four or five paragraphs setting up the problem and the reason and justification for the study.
Then you get to your literature review, and usually then your theory should be the first thing that comes in your literature review, because even if you have successive constructs, variables, or ideas that you need to address, you will want the reader to read those things through the lens of your framework for the rest of the work that you're doing in your literature review
The second way that you see it is that the theory, especially in interpretive or critical work, the theory itself becomes most, if not all of the literature review. Because again, we're not testing the relationships among various variables in this type of research. Instead, we are being sensitized to whatever it is the dynamic is.
So if I have a theory critical feminist approaches to higher education, then I don't need to have a whole bunch of successive variables or constructs because the framework itself has sensitized me to most likely the dynamics of gender and power as they manifest in higher educational spaces.
So that framework has sensitized me to those things, provided me a research question, and now it helps me go into my findings. So you might have a theory that has successive constructs or variables after it.
You might not, right? In either case, though, the theory is the thing that's framing your literature review
In regards to your findings then, one of the components of your findings, if you're using a theory, should be about how your findings support, don't support, or were enhanced by or are enhancing the theory. So what I mean by that is it's either supported or it's not, Especially if you're doing positivist or functionalist work.
So did you find the thing that you were supposed to find? Was your hypothesis found to be supported based on what the theory's propositions were? And then if you're using a critical or interpretive framework, then it's how was your research into this phenomenon enhanced?
how were you sensitized to its dynamics? And then for both types, how are your findings enhancing or building on the theories that you used? So if you found support for your theory, what does that mean for us? If you didn't find support for the theory, what does that mean for us?
If it sensitized you to a dynamic, what does that mean for us? , what are the theoretical implications of your work? So in this case, the use of theory is meant for you to also develop theory.
Overall, what I would say is whether you're using positivist or functionalist theory or you're using interpretive critical theory or maybe you call those things something different in your particular field or whatever.
But whether you're using one of those two overarching frameworks for your theories, it's important for you to know what the theory is supposed to do and how it is that you're supposed to integrate that into your study. I think that a good theory helps clarify the organization of your project, and also helps highlight the most important and salient findings of your study.
And as a result, it helps a reader make better sense of the new knowledge that you've created, and thus makes it easier for them to incorporate it into their own work, which means it's easier for them to cite it whenever they go out and do their research.
So to me, theory-based research is preferable to non-theory-based research because it helps clarify who your audience is and the community of scholars that you're contributing to. That's not to say that research without theory is bad or that we shouldn't cite it or anything like that.
But what I am saying is from a writer's point of view, that level of specificity of having a theory and using it well can be the difference between a scholar not reading and citing your work and reading and citing your work. And obviously, we all want the latter, right?
We want our work to matter. We want it to have impact. We want it to be read and cited and shared . And so having a well-written theoretical framework for your entire study is an incredibly powerful way of doing that. Okay? So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks.
As always, I appreciate you listening. If you haven't gotten a chance, hop on over to the website. Let me know what you think about it. Some of you have already given me some feedback on it, and I really appreciate it. As you might imagine, website design is, not my area of expertise and so I'm kinda learning a lot of this on the fly.
And so if you see something, you're just like, "Ooh, man, that does not look good," then by all means let me know so I can try to fix it. As we're going forward with the semester, if you're interested in learning more about my coaching services, or maybe you want me to do a workshop with your students or with your faculty, let me know.
My contact description's in the podcast information there. I love working with people so that way they can get their ideas out there. I think so many people have so many good ideas and it just brings me joy to be a part of the process to help them get those ideas out there to people who are gonna read it and love it and cite it in their own work. Okay? So, thank you so much, and I will see you in next week's episode.
But theories work differently based on their assumptions and paradigms, and understanding the difference can fundamentally change how you approach your literature review and your study. Let's dive in.
So I mentioned this story before, but whenever I was an undergraduate, I knew that I wanted to be a communication studies professor whenever in my sophomore year I took a communication theory class and just thought that it was the coolest thing ever.
I would take the textbook and go down to the cafeteria and just read all the theories about interpersonal communication, organizational communication, intercultural communication, just all the different theories.
And it really seemed to me as if I had found the answers that I'd been seeking all my life about how and why people do the things that they do. And so as you can imagine whenever I told this to my advisor at the time, she was like, "Well, congratulations and condolences. You're a huge nerd, and you need to be a professor."
So that's what I did. But even as I was going through my master's or my doctoral program, and even, early in my career, I still had this sort of weird relationship with theory. On one hand I loved it. I loved reading about it. I loved thinking about it. I loved talking about it.
On the other hand, I kept getting feedback back on my journal submissions that I wasn't using theory properly, and I didn't really know what the disconnect was. And I think part of that was is that in my master's program, I had gone to a type of program that did primarily quantitative research and what I will consider to be post-positivist or functionalist theory building, so hypothesis testing theory testing and very much sort of a, part of the objective social science approach. But then for my doctoral program, I went to a more interpretive or critical theory program, and theory functions much different in that type of paradigm, ?
It's much more about sensitizing a person than it is about testing hypotheses. And so I think that I kept switching back and forth and not being able to pin down what the function of a theory was, why did I need one, when did I not need one. And so I thought that it might be helpful if you are struggling with theory and about how that might be a part of your dissertation or how that might be a part of a research project for like a journal article, how you're supposed to talk about that, ?
So that's what I wanna talk about today. I wanna talk about what the different types of theories are and then how to utilize theory in a way that shapes how you read and interpret your literature, and ultimately how it affects your entire study, ?
So let's dive in.
Now, before I begin, I will just say that you don't necessarily need to have a theory in any of your research. So if you are doing post-positivist or functionalist types of work, so primarily quantitative, social or natural science approaches to things, you might engage in what's called variable analytic research, which is where you take different variables that based on the literature should have some relationship with one another, and then you test to see what those relationships are, and you don't necessarily have a theory that governs the way that you're testing those relationships.
Similarly, if you're doing qualitative research, you might do what's called grounded theory design, in which case then, again, you would not have a formal theory framing your study. Your starting point there really is just people's experiences, and then from that developing theory on the back end from the thick description of the phenomenon that you're studying.
But if you do need to have a theory, then it's important then for you to understand, well, what kind of theory do you need? What type of work are you doing, and how is that supposed to influence the type of project that you have? So whenever people need a theory and they're not good at using theory, the overarching problem that I normally see
Is that people treat theory as sort of one of two things, either a checkbox that they need to check off. So my advisor, my instructor, a journal, whatever it is, told me that I needed a theory, so I just throw in a theory. They might not even have a dedicated theory section, but they might have cited theory in the course of their literature review, thinking that that is the use of theory.
And then on the other side, what you have is a literature review about the different concepts that you're interested in, and then you cite things from theories to support the things that you're doing in your study, but you're not really using the theory so much as using the theory as evidence for the type of relationships that you are looking for or the types of phenomenon that you are trying to investigate.
The problem with either one of these approaches is that they are not being true to what theory does in either critical or interpretive research or in either positivist or functionalist research. So if you're doing positivist or functionalist research, that is the type of research that is based primarily on the scientific method, that is about hypothesis testing.
You might sometimes have qualitative research that has a social science bent to it that's, , in the realm of positivism or functionalism. But for the most part, most of this work is going to be quantitative in nature, and it's going to be either exploring causal relationships or correlational relationships or group differences or other things that can be, quote-unquote, "objectively measured."
A theory then is a set of constructs that are interrelated with one another, and they serve as a propositional framework for whatever it is that you're going to study. So whenever I have a theory, let's just say uncertainty reduction theory from Berger and Calabrese, they say that in an initial interaction with someone, that you will feel uncertainty about that person because you've never met them before.
That will in turn produce anxiety on your part. You're motivated to reduce that anxiety, and so you will engage in information-seeking behaviors, i.e. small talk, in order to gain information, reduce uncertainty, and reduce anxiety. Each one of those is propositional, It provides a testable proposition for us to look at in a variety of circumstances.
Do people do that whenever they meet each other for the first time in bars? Do they do that the first time they meet each other in the workplace? Do they do that the first time they meet each other at a family gathering, ? So each one of those has this positivist functionalist perspective of generalizability and objectivity.
What's important here is that theories in this case are tested, It has propositions. You test the propositions, and then if it pans out, great, the theory has been proven to be useful in that context. And then if it's not supported, then either there's a boundary condition to that theory, ? It's not good in this circumstance, but it's good in others.
Or it's a bad theory, right? It's not good in any circumstance Whenever you're doing critical or interpretive theories, you are not testing the theory. You're not looking in the data for whether something is there or not. Instead, the interpretive or critical theory is sensitizing you to how something is happening.
So for example, if I want to know about the ways that racism may manifest in the feedback that instructors give to students, and I interview students, and I'm like: " whenever you've gotten feedback from an instructor Have they ever said something to you that's racist? And if so, what did they say?
How did they say that, right? There, I'm already sensitized to the idea that racism might be present, right? I'm, I already know on some level that racism exists. Here, what I'm interested in is the how. How is it communicated? Is it overtly? Is it covertly? Is it insinuated? What are the different strategies in which it's communicated from one person to another?
So this critical interpretive framework is less about is it there or not, and more about the how of something, ?
So the problem is, is that I oftentimes see people who have a post-positivist or functionalist approach, and then they just, they throw a theory out there, and then they don't really test it, and they're like, "Oh, well, it was, you know, it just kind of like helped me think about what it is that I'm doing."
No, that's not what a, a theory is supposed to do if you're doing social science , post-positivist, or functionalist research. You should be testing the theory. The theory should be telling you how to set up your hypothesis, and that hypothesis should be congruent with the theoretical propositions of that theory.
On the other hand, I oftentimes see people who do in interpretive or critical work, and they are like, "Hey, I'm looking for racism, and lo and behold, I found racism." And you're like, "Okay, cool. We already kind of expected to find racism though," ? What's interesting is, and what's important for us, is not does racism exist or not, ?
But instead to think to ourselves in a instance where racism exists, how is racism manifesting and how do we sensitize ourselves to -- all of the dynamics, both overt and covert, that one might use to communicate racism? So whenever you have folks who don't use theory correctly, then that can create a whole host of downstream issues.
It creates methodological problems because you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, I'm interested in the differences between two groups of people. I'm gonna do focus groups, and I'm gonna use this interpretive critical theory."
But, group differences is most likely better investigated by quantitative social science work, ? 'Cause then you can do t-tests, ANOVAs, other types of statistics that allows us to see if there are significant differences between two groups. And if you expect there to be a difference, that might be a proposition of a theory that you could test rather than a critical or interpretive way of just sensitizing yourself to it.
So it can create methodological issues. It can also create issues in your findings, ? So once you get to your findings, what I find is that people who are confused about the role of theory in their papers, they oftentimes introduce all sorts of theories on the back end that aren't present in the literature review because they found out a whole bunch of things that they weren't expecting, and so now I have, I've gotta pick a whole bunch of other theories that might be helpful.
Well, from a positivist or a functionalist perspective, if you found that other theories were better explanations, you probably should have just tested those theories in the first place. And if it's interpretive or critical, then your initial framework should just be sensitizing you to things.
So it's not really important that other theories might also offer insights necessarily. If the framework that you've offered sensitized you to the things that are in your data, then that's good enough, so you don't need to go back to the theory well.
All this is to say, as you're thinking about the differences in these two types of theories and the two types of ways that your project might manifest, it's important - to have a firm grasp as to what type of scholarship that you're doing and from there then what type of theory is needed for the project that you're doing.
So what are some specific ways that I see this manifest? So whenever I'm reading someone's literature review, and specifically the theory subsection of their literature review, There's usually three red flags that I see in people's work whenever they're not using theory correctly.
The first is what I would consider to be a lack of conceptual literacy. And what I mean by that is that in the writing that the author knew that theories existed, they recognized that theories were applicable to their study, but they didn't really know how to use the whole theory or even a, a testable or sensitizing part of that theory.
But instead, they either reviewed the entire theory, even though they didn't need the entire theory, or you see that they don't have a theory section at all, but theory just appears in little bits and bobs all throughout the literature review, and there's all sorts of theories in it. So it's not just one theory, it's a lot of different theories.
Both of these are signals to me that a person does not really understand the use of theory. To me, either a theory is testable, right? It's something that you're using to guide what your hypothesis or in some rare cases, a research question that is testable might be, or it is a sensitizing framework that helps us make sense of the phenomenon under investigation that you are trying to generate a nuanced portrait of through your interpretive or critical work.
But whenever you have a theory section That doesn't really show the reader what in that theory it is that's useful for you, but instead you're just sort of recounting what the theory is, or if you're just kind of having bits and bobs of different theories appear willy-nilly in your literature review, those things are not adding to your credibility.
It makes it seem as if you've read a whole bunch of stuff and you're trying to make sense of it through your writing rather than you having a command of the theory and how it specifically is aiding you in your investigation.
The second thing that I oftentimes see is that authors misunderstand the role of theory within their literature review. And what I mean by this is that, we've talked about how to write a paragraph and how a paragraph starts off with a declarative sentence, usually some sort of claim or assertion, and the rest of the paragraph then is the evidence and your analysis that supports that paragraph.
Oftentimes, what I find is that a person will cite a component of a theory as if it is a study. And what I mean by that is in a study, if someone finds something, whether it's the support for a hypothesis or not, or whether it's the nuanced portrait of someone's lived experience through a qualitative report, that's something that we know now that we didn't know before.
But theories are not themselves things that we know. They are either propositions that we test or they are things that sensitize us to something that we want to know about. They in and of themselves are not evidence. So whenever I say, for example, with the theory of uncertainty reduction theory, that a person who meets someone for the first time will feel uncertainty and therefore feel anxiety, that's a proposition.
That's not evidence. But oftentimes what I would see is a person taking that statement and using that in support of an assertion in a paragraph. But that's not appropriate because that's a proposition that's not itself evidence. If on the other hand you said, " Here's what the theory says," person who meets someone for the first time feels uncertainty and therefore feels anxiety, and then you said after that, " And in this study, they found that to be true."
then you cite the study because it is now knowledge that we have that that proposition was confirmed in the study in this context. But the proposition itself is not evidence. The third thing is that people get overwhelmed with choices, and as a result, they try to fit in two, three, four different theories into their l-literature review.
Folks, that is not the way that theory should proceed. It is very rare that you would ever have more than one theory in your literature review. There are times whenever it's appropriate to have two theories, and that might happen because in a positivist or functionalist paper, you might have competing theories about the same phenomenon, and so you're testing a proposition from each of those theories to see which one provides better predictions or better ex-explanations.
and there are times in interpretive or critical work where you're going to try to glom two theories together. So maybe you have something and it'll be like, " This is a critical theory of education," and then someone will come along and say, " Okay, cool, but I don't think that you're doing enough about race, and so here's a critical race theory about education." And another person comes along and they're like, "Cool, you're not doing enough about gender, so it's a critical feminist theory of education."
All that is to say, sometimes you'll find that different theories get kind of glommed together like that. But for the most part, whenever you're using a theory either to test or you're using a theory to sensitize you to something, one theory is sufficient. If you're having to go to the well for two, three, four theories, then that means either you're probably being redundant, that those theories overlap themselves, and the nuance of the differences among them are so slight that as to be not really important.
Or those differences are large enough to be important, in which case, perhaps what you have there is a data set that's large enough to warrant two or more projects, and you would have one data set, but that you looked at from, in project one, this theory, and in project two, this other theory. So that way, the you can see how the theories are guiding you to have different interpretations of the data. Now, I will say real quick, a lot of people that I say this to, they're like, "Well, what about salami slicing? What about, , like using the same data set for multiple projects?
Isn't that a problem?" It can be a problem, but I think one way that you can avoid this is if you have a data set,
And through the use of two different theories, create two different projects of which none of the data is shared across the two projects, I think that's completely fine and warranted. If, on the other hand, you have two projects, two theories, and a lot of the same data appears in both of those pieces, okay, well, that's less defensible, ?
That feels like the level of nuance that you are parsing in those two projects is probably not enough to really carry or warrant two publications, and that is a problem, ? But all that is to say, in most of your projects, one theory is gonna probably carry the day for you, maybe two if you're doing something else, but for the most part, stick with one theory.
So if you're using theory in your project, and again, you don't have to. Plenty of projects do not have a theory to them. But if you do have a theory, what are some ways that you can use it correctly?
So first off, you start off with your research question or your hypothesis. Okay? So you should make your general research topic into a formal research question or hypothesis. So if i'm interested in romantic relationships and the process of a couple Going from a casual relationship to a more serious relationship, so the process by which one does that. So that's my general research topic. Then I'm gonna go back into the literature and try to find is there research out there that looks at a similar dynamic, and if so, have they used a theory?
Or I might just go to a theory book or a theory encyclopedia or handbook and see if there might be some theories there that I think that might be a good place to start. So then I go through there and I'm like, "Oh, well, it seems like whenever people are going through this process, from going from a casual to a more serious relationship, they encounter a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress about the state of their relationship.
Well, hey, look at this. There is a framework called Relational Turbulence Model, and it is exactly about how people manage turbulence and anxiety as they go through different stages of their relationship." So cool. Now I can go back and revise my research question or my hypothesis, making sure that I use the language of the theory that I'm either testing or that I'm gonna be sensitized to.
So now I'm not just interested in people going from a casual to a serious relationship. Now I'm interested in this particular set of variables, and I'm gonna test those in this process, or I'm sensitized to this particular dynamic in the process of people going from casual to serious.
But that needs to be reflected now in my research question and my hypothesis, so that way it's consistent with my theoretical framework. Ultimately, a good theory helps you see the patterns or the tensions and contradictions in the literature. Either it's about a testable hypothesis, and you look through the literature and you see that there is support for the type of hypothesis that you have, or there's mixed support, in which case you might need to have a research question instead, or there's no support because there's very little or no research on the particular dynamic that you're looking at.
In which case, you might offer a research question rather than a hypothesis. Or if you're doing a more sensitizing framework, you look at that and you see, "Oh, look, here are the things that we know happens in a relationship as it progresses through these different stages." But this particular process, we don't have a taxonomy of the types of strategies that people use whenever they're negotiating this process of going from one level to the next in their relationship.
Now, whenever you're looking at the literature, you can start to see where things have been addressed and not, and now sensitize yourself to the dynamics that haven't been, which now form your research question and purpose
The second thing that you do is that you should be using your theory as a filter, both for the literature that you are looking at and for your findings. And what I mean by that is that in your literature, the stuff that you should be looking at first should be literature that uses the theory in similar areas, ?
Obviously, literature that's not theory-based, but that is a part of the thing that you are looking at is something that you would want to a-address as well. But it's particularly nice whenever you have a set of articles that uses a similar theoretical framework, because then you are adding to the specificity of that conversation, and it allows you then to know exactly what has and has not been addressed through this theory and how you're going to be adding on to that.
It's also a way for you to filter out your results, right, and your findings. Now this is a, a little bit easier for people who are doing quantitative research because once you have your hypothesis and you test that, hypothesis is either supported or not, and there you go. That's kind of your filter.
But especially for qualitative scholars, I can't tell you how many times I've reviewed work or worked with clients and they're like, "Oh man, look at all the cool things, all the themes that I found in my data." And that might be true, except a lot of those themes are not the phenomenon that theory is asking a person to pay attention to.
So just because you generate a theme and that theme is something that is, widely accepted by your participants does not necessarily mean that just because they said it a lot, that it rises to the level of being a finding if that finding doesn't address the dynamic that you should be sensitized to through your theoretical framework.
And so a theory can really help, especially qualitative researchers remember to themselves, just because it's important to my participants doesn't necessarily mean it's important for this particular project. maybe it's important for a different research project. Maybe it's important, and it will never make its way into a project because it's not really of importance to us as an academic community.
But what's most important is that whenever you're looking through your findings, that you're really doing the work of making sure that they're consistent with your theoretical framework. The third thing that a theory can help you do is it helps shape the organizational framework of your literature review and your findings.
So in your literature review, you usually have one of two ways that a theory can be introduced. So the first way is you have the introduction to the article, usually four or five paragraphs setting up the problem and the reason and justification for the study.
Then you get to your literature review, and usually then your theory should be the first thing that comes in your literature review, because even if you have successive constructs, variables, or ideas that you need to address, you will want the reader to read those things through the lens of your framework for the rest of the work that you're doing in your literature review
The second way that you see it is that the theory, especially in interpretive or critical work, the theory itself becomes most, if not all of the literature review. Because again, we're not testing the relationships among various variables in this type of research. Instead, we are being sensitized to whatever it is the dynamic is.
So if I have a theory critical feminist approaches to higher education, then I don't need to have a whole bunch of successive variables or constructs because the framework itself has sensitized me to most likely the dynamics of gender and power as they manifest in higher educational spaces.
So that framework has sensitized me to those things, provided me a research question, and now it helps me go into my findings. So you might have a theory that has successive constructs or variables after it.
You might not, right? In either case, though, the theory is the thing that's framing your literature review
In regards to your findings then, one of the components of your findings, if you're using a theory, should be about how your findings support, don't support, or were enhanced by or are enhancing the theory. So what I mean by that is it's either supported or it's not, Especially if you're doing positivist or functionalist work.
So did you find the thing that you were supposed to find? Was your hypothesis found to be supported based on what the theory's propositions were? And then if you're using a critical or interpretive framework, then it's how was your research into this phenomenon enhanced?
how were you sensitized to its dynamics? And then for both types, how are your findings enhancing or building on the theories that you used? So if you found support for your theory, what does that mean for us? If you didn't find support for the theory, what does that mean for us?
If it sensitized you to a dynamic, what does that mean for us? , what are the theoretical implications of your work? So in this case, the use of theory is meant for you to also develop theory.
Overall, what I would say is whether you're using positivist or functionalist theory or you're using interpretive critical theory or maybe you call those things something different in your particular field or whatever.
But whether you're using one of those two overarching frameworks for your theories, it's important for you to know what the theory is supposed to do and how it is that you're supposed to integrate that into your study. I think that a good theory helps clarify the organization of your project, and also helps highlight the most important and salient findings of your study.
And as a result, it helps a reader make better sense of the new knowledge that you've created, and thus makes it easier for them to incorporate it into their own work, which means it's easier for them to cite it whenever they go out and do their research.
So to me, theory-based research is preferable to non-theory-based research because it helps clarify who your audience is and the community of scholars that you're contributing to. That's not to say that research without theory is bad or that we shouldn't cite it or anything like that.
But what I am saying is from a writer's point of view, that level of specificity of having a theory and using it well can be the difference between a scholar not reading and citing your work and reading and citing your work. And obviously, we all want the latter, right?
We want our work to matter. We want it to have impact. We want it to be read and cited and shared . And so having a well-written theoretical framework for your entire study is an incredibly powerful way of doing that. Okay? So I think that's gonna about wrap it up for me, folks.
As always, I appreciate you listening. If you haven't gotten a chance, hop on over to the website. Let me know what you think about it. Some of you have already given me some feedback on it, and I really appreciate it. As you might imagine, website design is, not my area of expertise and so I'm kinda learning a lot of this on the fly.
And so if you see something, you're just like, "Ooh, man, that does not look good," then by all means let me know so I can try to fix it. As we're going forward with the semester, if you're interested in learning more about my coaching services, or maybe you want me to do a workshop with your students or with your faculty, let me know.
My contact description's in the podcast information there. I love working with people so that way they can get their ideas out there. I think so many people have so many good ideas and it just brings me joy to be a part of the process to help them get those ideas out there to people who are gonna read it and love it and cite it in their own work. Okay? So, thank you so much, and I will see you in next week's episode.
