Theory and Research Methods

Theory
Theory
Program Transcript
NARRATOR: What is theory, and how does theory relate to the
various methods
of research design? In this video program, Dr. Michael Patton

explores the
answers to these questions.
DR. MICHAEL PATTON: Let's talk about theory, and methods,
and the theory
methods linkage. Theory is one of those words. It's often
intimidating to people.
It's a word that's often misunderstood in the popular culture. To
say that
something's a theory makes it sound like there's no evidence for
it, or people are
just sort of making it up, or it's just a belief system.
But it's an important and central idea in science and in
scholarship. As you
engage in theory, what you're engaging in is a system for
explaining how the
world is the way it is. And so scientists posit theories which
explain how
something has happened, why the world is as it is.
So in biology, evolutionary theory explains that there are a
variety of species and
how those different species came about in adaptation to their
environment. There
are cosmological theories that explain how the universe came
about, or how the
cosmos operate, and planetary theories. Social science theories
explain how
human beings operate.
Sociological theories explain society-- the organizational of
society. Economic
theories explain how wealth is created and distributed in
society. Psychological
theories explain why people behave the way that they do.

And those theories postulate certain kind of factors and
variables as particularly
important. So a theory says these are the things that you ought
to pay attention
to, and here's why you ought to pay attention to them, because
they make a
particular kind of difference in the world. Now, when you're
engaged in research,
you're often testing a theory. A great deal of research consists
of testing a theory
about something.
So for example, the great Swiss educational psychologist,
Piaget, formulated a
theory about how children develop cognitively and morally.
And there is a huge
amount of work going on around the world and cross-culturally
to see if Piaget's
stages of development hold up in different cultures and across
time. That's called
deductive theory and deductive research. It's deductive because
the research is
deduced from or derived from the theory. And you generate a
particular part of
that theory and what it would predict and test it out in the real
world.
So that Piaget formulates and hypothesizes that at a particular
age-- based upon
his study of his own children and European children-- they
would behave in a
particular way and be able to have certain constructs, let's say at
age 2. Well,
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

Theory
let's suppose that you're Nigerian, and you're interested in
whether or not that's
true for your children or Nigerian children. So you use the test
and the measures
that have been developed, and adapt those to another culture,
and test out
whether or not Piaget in theory holds in Nigeria, or in Peru, or

in Japan. That is
deductive theory-- when you're were testing out somebody else's
theory-- an
Adlerian theory, a Skinnerian behavioral theory-- that people
react in a certain
way-- you're involved in deductive theory.
Deductive theory typically uses quantitative methods. It
engages in experiments.
It uses tests and instruments that have been developed to test a
theory. We refer
to ways of measuring concepts that come from theory as
operationalizing theory-
- operationalizing those constructs. We operationalize-- we give
life to-- a
measurement when we decide how to find out what that thing is
in the world by
measuring it, by administering a test, by observing it in some
way.
So deductive theories tend to be quantitative. Deductive tests of
theories tend to
be quantitative because methods have been developed to find
out if that theory is
the true. And that's called theory confirmation. We are trying to
find out if a theory
holds for a new population, for a new situation, because one of
the goals of
science is to generalize across time and space.
That's the highest formulation of science-- a generalization that
holds across
time-- that is, it was true in the 1940s, and it's true in the 1980s,
and it's true in
2010s, and holds across space, which means it holds in Africa,
and it holds in

Latin America, and it holds in Europe, and it holds United
States. That is the holy
grail of science-- to generalize across time and space. So we
study deductive
theory by doing quantitative experiments, and using measures,
and applying
them to new situations that have already been used.
Inductive theory is where we begin, not with the theory, but
with the world. And
we go out, and we see what's going on in a particular place. We
observe it, we
talk to people, we look at what the patterns are that are there.
And that typically involves qualitative inquiry. You're going out
and you're
observing. You're talking to people.
You're not testing a hypothesis, but you're asking a question.
What's going on
here? What are people doing? How do they explain what they're
doing? What are
the common patterns in what they're doing?
And so Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, went to
Samoa, and
interviewed young women-- teenagers-- and developed some of
them as key
informants, and had them tell her stories to look for the patterns
of coming-of-age
in Samoa. And out of that, she developed a theory about how
sexual identity
emerges. That's inductive theory because she didn't begin with
the theory. She
began with the data. She began with the world, and she studied
it.

Theory
One form of theory contribution is to observe that something's
going on that
people don't yet have a name for, and to give it a name. When
you name
something, you're engaged in a theoretical act. Theories depend
upon

constructs. They depend upon the identification of key
variables. So a
formulation of a new construct is essentially saying, in all the
blooming, buzzing
confusion of the world, there's this part of the world-- there's
this phenomenon--
that people haven't taken apart yet, and named, and said it's
important.
Unfortunately, men have been beating up on women across
cultures throughout
a great deal of history. But until that phenomenon and its
impact was called the
battered women's syndrome, it didn't have a construct that could
be studied and
could be used in courts to say here's how that phenomenon
occurs, and here is
the impact of that phenomenon on women who've experienced
it. Here's the
psychological impact, here's the physiological impact, here's
why women don't
leave. Understanding the phenomenon of battered women
syndrome came from
inductive theory, from studying women who are battered, from
interviewing them,
from watching their lives, and then naming that, and saying
there's a constellation
of factors here.
There was a student who observed fathers who were deeply
involved in the
parenting of their children, both their male children and their
daughters. And he
studied a set of fathers-- a group of fathers-- who were deeply
engaged in
upbringing of their daughters, were very good fathers, cared

deeply about their
daughters, had arranged their marriage and their parenting so
they shared
parenting responsibilities. And then as their daughters moved
into puberty and
became teenagers, under the cultural cloud of incest and family
sexual abuse,
these very affectionate fathers suddenly didn't know how to
relate to their
teenage daughters, and so they withdrew. They pulled back for
fear that they
would do something inappropriate-- for not knowing how to
engage the sexuality
of their daughters.
What do you call that phenomenon? Well, this person who
studied it gave it the
name reverse incest. Instead of engaging in sexual behavior,
they pulled back for
fear of something that they would do might be misinterpreted as
an incestuous or
an inappropriate behavior, and they didn't know how to behave.
That's the way inductive theory works. And it comes out of
qualitative fieldwork
because we don't even know what we're looking for. We're not
beginning with
constructs. The theory emerges from the data.
So deductive theory tends to be tested with instruments that
have been
developed, and you try it out on some new population, and see
if it holds. That
tends to be quantitative. Qualitative research tends to be aimed
at inductive
theory-- generating new constructs and what things mean to

people.
Theory
There is a very important combination of quantitative and
qualitative, which is
mixed methods, where you use some established instruments,
take probability
and statistical samples to understand something, but also have a

part of that
work that consists of case studies. A common sequence in
research is to do
fieldwork-- qualitative fieldwork-- to turn up something-- let's
say, this idea of
reverse incest that you observe out of looking at a small number
of fathers and
their relationships to their teenage daughters. And then you
wonder how
widespread is that phenomena.
Well, qualitative research tends to involve very small samples
because it's very
intensive interviewing, it's in-depth interviewing, it's case
studies, it's very labor
intensive. And so we do very small case studies through a
sampling process that
is called purposeful sample. Purposeful sampling are cases that
illustrate the
thing you're interested in-- the phenomenon of interest-- you get
cases that
illustrate that phenomenon very well, and you study them in
depth.
But now you've discovered this thing, you want to know how
widespread is it. So
you develop a survey-- fixed questions-- quantitative
instrument-- develop
reliability and validity of that instrument, and now you take a
random sample of
fathers with teenage daughters in a community or in a country
to find out how
many of them have had these feelings, these anxieties. How
many of them have
exhibited these behaviors vis-a-vis their teenage daughters.
That's a quantitative

inquiry in order to generalize to a larger population.
With that, you use probability sampling or statistical sampling
where you take
stratified random samples. Because the reason that you have
that kind of
quantitative statistical probability sampling is to generalize
from your sample to
the larger population. With purposeful samples-- small
qualitative case studies--
you're trying to understand a phenomenon in depth and detail.
With quantitative samplings, you're trying to generalize, which
gets you closer
than to deductive theory. With mixed methods, you're
combining. So you may
begin with a qualitative study to understand something, develop
an instrument,
then, that you can use quantitatively with a random sample to
see how
widespread it is, and close off that cycle by returning to some
of those qualitative
responses-- interviewing people to find out what they meant by
their responses
on the survey. And to put those survey responses back in
context-- back in the
larger context of their larger lives, the other things that they do.
So one mixed method sequence, and certainly not the only one,
is to begin
qualitative-- to develop a phenomenon. Develop some
hypotheses about that
phenomenon out of the qualitative work that you then test
quantitatively, and then
add a qualitative component to bring deeper and richer context
and examples to

those quantitative responses. That's not often something you
would do in a single
study, that's a sequence of inquiry over a period of time, often
by a number of
different practitioners.
Theory
When you're then engaged in combinations of research, you're

often involved in
using different strengths of these research in what we call a
process of
triangulation. Triangulation is using multiple methods to find
out if the findings are
consistent across those methods. Are the testing results that
come from
quantitative results consistent with an understandable by the
qualitative results.
The combination of methods often gives us different insights
into something.
So let's say that we're interested in how people come to read,
and in the
phenomenon of reading, the psychology of reading. Well, we
want to know how
much people are able to read, at what level they're able to read.
For that, you're
going to give a reading test. Tests are designed to determine
how much of
something occurs. Is it more, or is it less? Is the reading level
higher or lower?
Many of you may have had the Myers-Briggs personality
inventory. And it tells
you how much you're an extrovert or an introvert. How much
you are on a
particular scale, and what your Myers-Briggs personality type
is. Those are
quantitative forms of inquiry.
So we give someone a reading test, and we find out how much
they can read.
But we also want to know what reading means in their life.
That's a qualitative
question. That requires qualitative inquiry.

We have to talk to them. What did your parents read? What kind
of reading
environment did you grow up in? What do you like to read?
How do you choose
what you read? Where does reading fit in to your life?
Those are qualitative forms of inquiry. We put together how
much somebody can
read with what reading means to them, and we have a fuller
picture through
mixed methods of the nature of the phenomenon of reading--
both the
quantitative side-- the amount of it that goes on with a
particular person or group
of people-- and its meanings. What quantitative methods are
particularly good
for, then, is those things that are on some scale-- that the scale
is derived from a
theoretical construct where we want to know if people have
more or less of that--
more or less intelligence, more or less of a personality type,
more or less of a
skill. And we can measure that quantitatively.
Qualitative inquiry focuses on what things mean to people.
Qualitative inquiry's
about meanings, about their experience of the world. Mixed
methods, then,
combine the question of how much of something's happening
with what it means
to get a full and rich multidimensional picture of that
phenomenon.
Deductive theory is a source of quantitative inquiry to confirm
whether or not that

theoretical hypothesis is true in a new setting and for a new
group of people.
Inductive theory opens us up to discover things that we haven't
yet understood
because people haven't paid attention to them. And mixed
methods combines
Theory

these two approaches so that we both engage in testing some
propositions that
are already out there and opening ourselves up to discovering
what they mean in
some new ways. And a great deal of the cutting edge research
these days is
combining both quantitative approaches and qualitative
approaches, and
therefore trying to build upon the strengths of both a deductive
approach to
theory and the openness that comes with an inductive approach
to theory.
NARRATOR: Dr. Patton continues his discussion of theory by
clearly
distinguishing the use of theory in both quantitative and
qualitative research
approaches.
DR. MICHAEL PATTON: Deductive and inductive theories
describe overall
theoretical approaches to making contributions to knowledge.
At a more specific
level, within any particular inquiry there are theories about how
the world works
that guide those-- Skinnerian theory, Freudian theory, Marxian
theory, Weberian
theory-- that are about the content of a particular inquiry. But
there are also
theoretical frameworks about how to study the world, and those
derive from
different epistemologies, different nature of knowledge itself,
that come from
philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge.

And as you're engaged in this journey, you may be called upon
to identify what
theoretical tradition your particular inquiry falls in. Much
quantitative experimental
research is derived from a tradition of positivism, which states
that the way that
you know the world is to be able to concretely observe the
world-- that only those
things you can see-- that exist in the senses-- with the senses
are real-- and that
if you can't see it, taste it, smell it, touch it, if you can't
measure it, it doesn't exist.
That's a particular epistemology, and it's represented by various
forms of
positivist theory.
In contrast to that is a theoretical framework that
epistemologically is called
phenomenology, which says that human beings know the world
through their
experience. And so that theoretical framework directs you to
study the world
through the way people attach meaning to the world. And that
becomes the
theoretical framework to guide a particular inquiry.
Phenomenology-- and there
are actually divisions within phenomenology-- guide you in how
to engage in the
inquiry itself.
Hermeneutics is another area where the theoretical frame of
hermeneutics is a
way of making sense of what people have written by placing
what they have
written in a larger societal context. If you're doing a
hermeneutical study of the

Bible, then you don't just look at those words, you look at the
social and cultural
context within which the Bible was written. If you're looking at
a policy statement
that comes from a political administration, you don't just look at
that policy
statement without knowing the political, social, and cultural
context. That's a form
of inquiry-- a qualitative inquiry-- that is well-developed within
the philosophy and
the theory of hermeneutics, and it tells you and guides you in
how you do that.

Theory
Ethnography is a theoretical framework about how to study
culture.
Autoethnography is a relatively new theoretical framework
about how you study
your own culture. Most ethnography involved European people
going into Africa,
and indigenous cultures in Latin America, and in Asia, and
studying those. But
increasingly, people of European descent and Americans are
studying their own
culture and using their own experience as a part of that. Well,
that theoretical
framework is called autoethnography.
Like autobiography, which is a study of your own life,
autoethnography is a study
of your own culture, and it provides you guidance with how to
do that. So one
form of theoretical inquiry in the varieties of theory is to look
at the subject matter
theory that you're looking at-- behavioral psychology, rational
motive psychology,
Adlerian psychology, Freudian psychology, Durkheimian
sociology. The other
form of theory is about epistemological theories--
phenomenology, positivism,
hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, grounded theory-- these
are ways of
inquiring into the world, and they're important for you to know,
as well, because
you will position yourself within those traditions.

Theory
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Administrative Theory & Praxis / June 2013, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp.
308–313.
© 2013 Public Administration Theory Network. All rights
reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com
ISSN 1084–1806 (print)/1949–0461 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/ATP1084-1806350208
Intellectual Paradigms in Public Administration
Why So Many and How to Bridge Them?

Jiahuan Lu
University of Maryland
Administrative ideas, like the practices themselves, . . . seem to
be in
a perpetual whirl without much continuity, history, or
consistency.
—Stillman, 1991, p. 71
The notion of paradigm has become ubiquitous since its
inception by Thomas
Kuhn as a way to understand the history of science. Paradigms,
Kuhn writes,
are “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a
time provide
model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”
(1970b, p. viii).
Within a specific paradigm, Gutting further explains, there is
“an acceptance
that is so strong it eliminates the need for further discussion of
foundational
questions about the subject-matter and methodology of the
disciplined and
enables the discipline to devote most of its energy to puzzle-
solving” (1980, p.
13). The history of scientific development, according to Kuhn,
is thus largely
characterized by a succession of different paradigms, or
paradigm shifts.
Actually, Kuhn used the concept of paradigm mostly within the
domain
of natural sciences and was hesitant to expand it to the social
sciences, which
he believed were characterized by a “tradition of claims,

counterclaims, and
debates over fundamentals” (1970a, p. 6). Indeed, in most social
sciences,
paradigm shift is rare. Rather more frequent is “paradigm
parallel,” the
coexistence of several competing paradigms. Public
administration is no
exception.1 After the collapse of the orthodoxy, a consensus on
big questions
in public administration has never been achieved (e.g., Box,
1992; Waldo,
1968; White, 1986), such as what public administration is, how
to acquire
knowledge, what type of knowledge (scientific or interpretative)
to pursue, and
the relationships between public administration and other
disciplines, such as
political science and business management. As a result,
competing paradigms
have emerged to provide their own answers about the nature and
assumptions
of public administration, with no one of them ever able to
dominate. Henry
(2010) argues that public administration theory has, since its
inception, gone
through a succession of six paradigms: the
politics/administration dichotomy
(1900–1926), principles of public administration (1927–1937),
public adminis-
tration as political science (1950–1970), public administration
as management
(1950–1970), public administration as public administration
(1970–present),
308

Lu 309
forum
and governance (1990–present). Frederickson and Smith also
delineate the
pluralism in public administration theory, which might include
theories of
political control of bureaucracy, theories of bureaucratic
politics, theories of
public management, rational choice theory, theories of
governance, and so
on. They admit that “no theory standing alone is capable of
accounting for
the complexity of the field” (2003, p. 4).
Why does the public administration field already have so many
paradigms
in spite of the short history since its self-consciousness? This is
actually an
intellectual product of the political heritage (Durant, 2010). In
Federalist No.
51, James Madison argued that the fundamental way to ensure
the appropri-
ate use of public power was a separation of power into different
government
branches that would allow checks and balances between them.
This antistatism
tradition later became the prologue of what Edward Corwin
(1940) called
“an invitation to struggle” among the three branches of
government. Through
“tides of reform” (Light, 1998), there has been an enduring
struggle over

how to divide power within the government system. This
unending conflict is
also reflected within the administration system. As Kettl
argues, “the public
administration system reflects broad constellations of power,
and as power
has become more diffuse, so, too, have the administrative
interconnections”
(1996, p. 16).
As early as the 1950s, Kaufman (1956) found that the rapid
growth of
public administration since its self-consciousness had exhibited
the pursuit of
three competing values: representativeness, neutral competence,
and executive
leadership. “The story [of public administration],” wrote
Kaufman, “is thus
one of a changing balance among the values, not of total
displacement” (p.
1067). Kettl (2002) further suggests that the study and the
practice of public
administration have to be differentiated in order to respond to
four conflict-
ing American political traditions, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian,
Wilsonian, and
Madisonian. Each political philosophy prescribes its own
distinct adminis-
trative ideas, values, and rationales, together making the gaps
between them
hard to bridge.
Stillman (1991), holding a historical institutionalism
perspective, describes
how the “stateless” origin of the American public
administration system gave

rise to the fragmentation in public administration theory. At the
founding of
the United States, a systematic design of public administration
was absent.
Because of this, American public administration building was
actually an in-
cremental “chinking-in” process, pragmatically bringing in
various temporary
administrative solutions to solve challenges, but none in a
systematic way.
Taken together, these temporary and sometimes competing
administrative
components constituted the American public administration
system. This
temporary and inconsistent nature, on the one hand, enabled the
administra-
tive system to adapt to external demands, but on the other hand,
“created an
administrative state and a bureaucratic administrative model
without a single
310 AdminisTrATive Theory & PrAxis v voL. 35, no. 2
forum
overarching model or well-structured paradigm” (p. 56).
Reflected in theory
development, this paradox “added a high degree of ambiguity to
public admin-
istration theory and opened the topic to enormous opportunities
for continual
interpretations and reinterpretations” (p. 37).
In combining these arguments, it is reasonable to admit that the

differen-
tiation in public administration theory and the rise of
multiparadigms were
inevitable. But how would the multiparadigm nature of
contemporary public
administration literature affect the advancement of public
administration
knowledge? Ostrom (1973) argues that the multiparadigm
characteristic of the
public administration field, the proliferation of competing
theories, perspec-
tives, and research methods, blurs its identity as a unified
discipline and finally
leads to an intellectual crisis. “The loss of theoretical
hegemony,” Frederickson
and Smith note, “gave public administration an identity crisis
and made it
vulnerable to colonization from other disciplines” (2003, p.
246).
Given the perils, how are we to promote the future development
of our
knowledge of public administration? Three paths have been
proposed. The first
one emphasizes the necessarity of forming a dominant paradigm
in scientific
advancement. According to Cole, “accumulation of knowledge
can occur …
only when scientists are committed to a paradigm and take it as
the starting
point for additional research that progress can be made. Without
agreement on
fundamentals, scientists will not be able to build on the work of
others and will
spend all their time debating assumptions and first principles”
(1983, p. 135).

Pfeffer (1993) emphasizes the formation of a dominant
paradigm as a critical
prerequisite to scientific advancement. He argues that
competing paradigms
in a field obstruct the scientific development of the field, as
demonstrated by
longer time to publication, higher journal rejection rates, fewer
cross-citations
among fields, fewer collaborations among scholars, and so on.
Building on
these observations, Pfeffer further calls on the scholars who
control the field
to develop a set of standards and then maintain theoretical and
methodological
conformity. In this way, an agreement about the fundamental
problems in a
specific field and the way to solve them could be achieved.
Quite different from Pfeffer’s claim for developing one
dominant para-
digm, Qiu, Donaldson, and Luo (2012) argue that in social
science research,
a more feasible way might be to start advancing theory by
working within
one established paradigm, “paradigm persistence.” They also
develop a route
of paradigm persistence, from paradigm continuity, paradigm
elaboration,
to paradigm extension, each implying a different level of theory
develop-
ment under one paradigm. At the beginning, paradigm
continuity refines and
synthesizes existing theories. Paradigm elaboration then digs
deeper into the
core of those theories, develops variants, and makes them more
complex. At

the highest paradigm-extension stage, researchers extend the
paradigm to
different contexts and develop new theories.
A third approach goes beyond the discussion of the necessarity
and pos-
Lu 311
forum
sibility of having one dominant paradigm. It holds a pluralistic,
metaparadigm
perspective that simultaneously considers sets of theoretical
lenses under
different paradigms. This metaparadigm view, according to
Gioia and Pitre,
“is not a demand for integration of theories or resolution of
disagreements or
paradoxes that inevitably emerge from theoretical comparison,”
but “an attempt
to account for many representations related to an area of study
by linking
theories through their common transition zones” and “constitute
a multidimen-
sional representation of the topic area” (1990, p. 596).
Therefore, it actually
follows a replication logic: If a certain knowledge on public
administration is
supported by a number of theories and paradigms, we have more
confidence
in the robustness of such understanding. Putting together, by
“triangulating”
across theories and paradigms, a comprehensive understanding

of public
administration activities could be embraced with more
confidence. Indeed,
in view of the multiparadigm nature of contemporary public
administration
literature, I argue this approach might be more preferred.
More than 50 years ago, Frederick Mosher examined the status
of public
administration research and expressed his anxiety that “the field
has not
channeled its research efforts; its scope of interest seems
unlimited; it has not
developed a rigorous methodology; it has been pretty blasé
about definitions;
it has not agreed on any paradigms or theorems or theoretical
systems” (1956,
p. 176). If Mosher were alive today, he would find that his
observation still
troubles contemporary public administration research.
Nowadays, few fields
in the social sciences could be messier than public
administration. However,
at the same time, few fields could be more exciting than public
administration
in serving the public interest and democratic governance. It is
the mission of
public administration students of the present generation to
develop a unified
and beautiful understanding of public administration.
Note
1. In my judgment, there are two kinds of paradigms in public
administration,
theoretical paradigms and research (methodological) paradigms.

Theoretical para-
digms, which I refer to as “intellectual paradigms,” are the
focus of this article.
RefeReNces
Box, R.C. (1992). An examination of the debate over research in
public
administration. Public Administration review, 52(1), 62–69.
Cole, S. (1983). The hierarchy of the sciences? American
Journal of
sociology, 89, 111–139.
Corwin, E.S. (1940). The president: office and powers. New
York: New
York University Press.
Durant, R.F. (2010). A heritage made our own. In R.F. Durant
(Ed.), The
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oxford handbook of American bureaucracy (pp. 3–23). New
York:
Oxford University Press.
Frederickson, H.G., & Smith, K.B. (2003). The public
administration
theory primer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Gioia, D.A., & Pitre, E. (1990). Multiparadigm perspectives on

theory
building. Academy of management review, 15(4), 584–602.
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Lu 313
forum
Jiahuan Lu ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate in public
administration
and policy at the School of Public Policy of the University of
Maryland in
College Park. His research focuses on public and nonprofit
management,
government contracting, and performance management.
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