Theoretical Frameworks, Part 1: What's It All For?

Several years ago, I co-wrote a qualitative analysis of the open-ended survey responses from a study of peer leaders. Most of the articles published in the target journal included a “theoretical framework,” and my co-author suggested that we include one in our manuscript. So, I looked at a few models and wrote a longish paragraph about the theory that guided my approach to data analysis. But it felt odd, and I wasn’t sure what I was doing or why.

The funny thing is that when I went back to the published article to pull out the theoretical framework, it wasn’t there. Then I remembered that the reviewers had had questions about it, and I cut it during the revise and resubmit process.

Conventional wisdom suggests that authors need to ground their research studies in theory and that inadequate theorizing is a common reason that journal manuscripts are rejected. At the same time, we can’t just shove a paragraph about theory into our manuscript (as I tried to do) and call it good. The theory needs to feel organic to the larger manuscript. Ideally, it has shaped the entire research process and isn’t coming in at the drafting stage as an afterthought. So, it would seem that my first attempt at a theoretical framework was a bust.

Last year, I spent a good bit of time diving into the practical guidance about developing theoretical frameworks. I’ve also learned a lot more about their structure, as I have encountered them in my editing work. As such, I want to share some of what I have learned in a pair of blog posts. In this first post, I’ll spend a little time talking about what the theoretical framework is and the purposes it serves. I’ll also offer insights into where they fit into a journal manuscript and thoughts on their typical length.

Where do we begin?

The theoretical framework begins with theory, but what do we mean by that? When we look at definitions of theory, a common thread is the notion of ideas or propositions that are organized in relation to one another. That organization is designed to describe, explain, or make predictions. A second commonality is that theories tend to be field-specific, though researchers can and do apply theories from other fields to questions arising in their disciplines.

Theories have also been subjected to testing and verification and, as such, are grounded in empirical data. While they may be field-specific, they tend to be general enough to have explanatory power across multiple contexts.

How does theory become a framework?

In my research on theoretical frameworks, I found a helpful article by Peter Adams and Stephen Buetow (2014) describing the sources of theory. We might think about these as the building blocks of a theoretical framework.

First, Adams and Buetow identified two zones of theory: content antecedents and method antecedents. Content antecedents are “prior efforts at theory development” (p. 97) that relate to the central idea of a research study and might inform the context or suggest the need for our study. The second zone is method antecedents, which include theories that shape our assumptions about the accepted approaches to a particular type of inquiry. Adams and Buetow identified a third zone of theory, which they called the emergent zone. They suggest that within this space, “the input of prior ideas… and approaches to enquiry… mix, interact, and coalesce into new perspectives” (p. 98). It’s within this zone that they position theoretical concepts, which are the result of “paring down and simplifying” constructs taken from a range of theoretical antecedents. I’m suggesting that the theoretical framework occupies this emergent zone: it’s the space in which what we know about the context surrounding a specific research problem intersects with possible approaches for exploring that problem.

What purpose does a theoretical framework serve?

The theoretical framework informs our research questions, our approaches to solving those questions, and our strategies for analyzing and interpreting data. Significantly, it may also help us shed light on observations or data we might have overlooked.

This understanding of the theoretical framework aligns neatly with quantitative research studies—in helping us identify theoretical constructs for hypothesis testing, appropriate methods for testing those constructs, interpretive lenses for data analysis, and to situate our findings in the related literature.

Because qualitative research tends to be inductive rather than deductive and because some qualitative methods are specifically designed to generate theory, we might wonder whether and how a theoretical framework works for a qualitative study. In a 2018 article, Christopher Collins and Carrie Stockton described the central role of theory in qualitative research, suggesting that it can help focus and organize the study, expose or obstruct meaning, connect the research to existing scholarship, and identify strengths and weaknesses in existing theory. Perhaps most importantly, Collins and Stockton suggested that the theoretical framework creates the possibility of transferability to other settings where “a highly contextualized case” may appear to have little relevance beyond that context (p. 6).

Where does the theoretical framework go?

In many cases, the theoretical framework will follow the statement of purpose or research questions and precede the method section. Other placements are possible, of course. For example, the theoretical framework might appear earlier in the introductory portion of the manuscript if the author needs to build the case for exploring a specific problem. When the case for a problem has already been well established in the literature, the theoretical framework might support the problem statement. Alternately, the “problem statement [may flow] from the framework, which then helps to gradually refine and narrow the topic to an identifiable gap” or research question (Rocco & Plakhotnik, 2011, p. 167)

How long should it be?

I evaluated the treatment of the theoretical framework in more than two dozen recently published higher education research manuscripts. Of the 28 manuscripts I reviewed, 8 didn’t have an explicit theoretical framework. In those cases, a discussion of relevant theory may have been embedded in the literature review. The remaining manuscripts averaged 6,700 words (not including references or abstracts), with qualitative manuscripts being slightly longer. The theoretical frameworks were 456 words on average, or about 7% of the total word count. If you want to think about this in manuscript pages, a good target for a theoretical framework might be 1 ½ to 2 pages.

This discussion offers a cursory overview of theoretical frameworks. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out the online course, Using Theory to Frame the Research Study.

In the next post, I’ll talk a bit about creating and evaluating a theoretical framework.

References

Adams, P. J., & Buetow, S. (2014). The place of theory in assembling the central argument for a thesis or dissertation. Theory & Psychology, 24(1), 93-110. doi: 10.1177/0959354313517523

Collins, C. S., & Stockton, C. M. (2018). The central role of theory in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406918797475

Rocco, T. S., & Plakhotnik, M. S. (2011). Increasing the odds of publishing a qualitative manuscript. In T. S. Rocco, T. Hatcher, & Associates, The handbook of scholarly writing and publishing (pp. 161-178). Jossey-Bass.