00:00: The choice of a theoretical framework is central in your research, as it enables you to do the kind of critical thinking necessary for analysing your research. But what is a theoretical framework? Some scholars have used the analogy of a house to illustrate the purpose of a theoretical framework. From this perspective, a theoretical framework serves as the guide or blueprint on which to support and build your study as it provides the structure to define how you will philosophically, epistemologically, methodologically, and analytically approach your research.
00:47: You as the researcher are the architect who is charged with choosing what you are going to build and how the property will be constructed as you imagine it. Only after a plan for the house has been determined can you begin to start building.
01:03: Another way of thinking about a theoretical framework is as a coat closet or a spotlight, as it allows you to provide a framework through which to organize and connect your data and shed light on observations and data that might be overlooked. As such, your choice of theory will determine the lens that you will use in your research. This is important because any topic can be looked at from different perspectives.
01:32: If we look at, for instance, the case of urban mobility, you can study this from a lot of different perspectives. Traditionally, mobility studies have been dominated by engineers who are interested in the technical aspects of transport and the ways in which transport can be made more efficient. More recently, important contributions have been made to the study of mobility by feminist scholars who look at the ways in which transport meets the needs of the diverse people who use it.
02:07: They foreground notions of access or equity by analysing the needs of women or the ways in which the use of transport is determined by characteristics such as race, age, income, or different physical abilities. Important building blocks in your use of theory are therefore concepts. Sometimes, students may get a little confused between the difference between a theoretical framework and a conceptual framework.
02:37: If we go back to the idea of the theoretical framework as a house, then the concepts are the kind of things that guide you through that house. The concept functions almost as a floor plan of how you work your way through that overarching structure of the house, which is your theoretical framework.
02:58: Put differently, if the theoretical framework represents your lens with which to best view a particular issue, the conceptual framework represents your understanding about how to best explore this issue. So, concepts are not descriptors. They are tools that you use in your research to make sense of the kind of things that you want to look at. The choice of tools that you will use is informed by the choice of your theoretical framework.
03:31: So, if your overall theory is, for instance, feminist theory, then your theory will be guided by a series of concepts. An example is, for instance, the concept of patriarchy. This concept allows you to unpack how systems of domination and oppression work. So, when thinking of the conceptual framework, it is important to think of how concepts guide your research and how they will help you study a particular issue or problem.
04:01: Your theoretical framework is also directly tied to your research methods. Generally, your choice of theory and method informs and reinforces each other and the ways in which it will allow you to pursue knowledge. When they don’t reinforce each other, they may actually end up weakening your work. Look, for instance, at this quadrant. When you are low on theory and also low on method, your research just becomes a report that is very descriptive.
04:36: On the other hand, you can also be very high on method but low on theory. Let’s say that you choose to do a survey to answer certain questions. You go out into the field, you collect a lot of data, you have percentages of how many people responded to this or to that. But if you don’t have a theory to explain what that actually means, what people said, it’s just going to be a descriptive report that explains things without having any relevance or particular insight.
05:10: This is the “so what?” of research. What does your research actually mean? What does it add up to? You need to be able to contextualise the findings of your work, and theory is exactly what allows you to do that. So, summing it up, the choice of your theoretical framework informs not only your concepts and research methods, but it also helps you to actually explain how significant it is – what you found – and whether it confirms or challenges existing theory.