Theoretical Framework in Research Design
Once you have determined the type of your research, it is imperative that you establish the underlying context for the choice of a particular approach in conducting such research.
Suppose your research topic is on crimes in school, and you hypothesise your research as ‘Research to study the reasons for high crime rates in a co-education school and a single-sex school’. This study can be categorised as causal research.
As a next step, you will need to define its theoretical framework, as it can be researched from the lens of legal, sociological, psychological and other fields of study. It is, therefore, crucial to let your readers know the perspective from which you plan to examine your research study.
In the next video, you will hear from Chris about the nuances of the theoretical frameworks.
Theoretical frameworks offer a unique point of view or lens through which to investigate a subject. There are different perspectives that can define concepts and explain phenomena, including psychological theories, social theories, organisational theories and economic theories. In the theoretical framework, you explain the theories that support your research, demonstrating that your work is based on well-established concepts.
In short, a theoretical framework provides a context to the research study and helps with understanding the assumptions behind the causal mechanisms. For example, in economics, wealth inequality is explained differently within classical economics and the Keynesian economics framework.
You also learnt about the rational actor theory, which stems from the idea that individuals will always make rational, cautious and logical decisions. For example, an individual choosing a product costing $5 over an identical product costing $10 is a rational actor by definition.
Theories help to suggest explanatory or independent variables for the dependent variable. In the restaurant example in the video, you saw how knowing the type of restaurant (serving in-house lunch, in-house dinner or through delivery) helps you map the audience or customers that you will have to target. Therefore, when you are in the food delivery business, your theoretical framework should provide context on the restaurants in the food delivery business only and the explicit assumptions behind their operations.
Moving ahead, in the next video, Chris will explain the features of a theoretical framework.
In this video, you learnt about the features of crafting your theoretical framework. These include the following:
- Falsifiable: Theories can be proved false if they are contradicted with observations that are equally and logically possible. For example, the sun rising in the east is a scientifically proven fact and does not have any contradiction.
- Parsimonious: Theories should provide the simplest possible explanation for a phenomenon. For example, if you had a dog and you heard a dog bark, then it is easy to assume that it was your dog that you heard barking and not some other dog that had sneaked into your home.
- Testable: It should be possible to test theories. For example, the theory "Goldfish make better pets than guinea pigs" is impossible to test, as there is no agreed-upon definition of a ‘better pet’.
- Internally consistent: Theories should not contradict their own premise. For example, if a respondent expresses agreement with the statement ‘I have enjoyed eating chocolates in the past’ and later expresses agreement with the statement ‘I hate chocolates’, then it signifies an internally inconsistent test.