Note: Theory A theory, for our purpose, is something that explains the relationship between two or more things (this is, technically, a definition of an hypothesis rather than a theory, but this distinction is not particularly important for our purpose). For example, it is a fact that in 1995 approximately 160,000 marriages in Britain ended in divorce. Sociologically, we would like to know why this happens. For example, we might be interested in trying to discover the main cause of divorce and, to this end, we would develop a theory of some description to describe / explain a possible relationship between divorce and something else (for example, the age at which people marry). We could then test our theory by collecting evidence through systematic social research. |