Types of Theories for Research: Find the Right Framework for Your Dissertation

Understand major research paradigms and how ontology, epistemology, and methodology shape the way theories are built and used.

Explore society-level explanations of structure, power, institutions, inequality, and social change across time and place.

Learn how meaning is produced in everyday life through interaction, symbols, roles, and the social construction of reality.

Study how identity forms, how groups influence behavior, and how people navigate belonging, stigma, and social comparison.

Understand attention, memory, judgment, heuristics, bounded rationality, and how people choose under uncertainty.

Explore how learning occurs through reinforcement, observation, conditioning, and environments that shape behavior over time.

Learn what drives effort and persistence, how stress operates, and how well-being is supported or undermined in real contexts.

Compare trait, developmental, psychodynamic, and lifespan frameworks to explain stable patterns and change across life stages.

Use theory to explain prevention, risk perception, adoption of healthy behaviors, and population-level change in health outcomes.

Explore how organizations function, why practices persist, and how structure, incentives, and culture shape performance.

Understand leadership styles and how change is planned, implemented, resisted, and sustained in complex organizations.

Apply strategy toolkits to analyze industries, capabilities, positioning, and how firms build and protect competitive advantage.

Explore how economies work, how value is created and distributed, and how institutions and power shape markets and policy.

Understand states, institutions, conflict, cooperation, and global order through leading international relations perspectives.

Explore how messages shape attitudes and culture, how media influences society, and how meaning circulates in public life.

Use language-focused frameworks to analyze discourse, rhetoric, narratives, framing, and how texts produce social realities.

Explain how users adopt innovations and systems using technology acceptance, diffusion, and socio-technical perspectives.

Analyze processes, feedback loops, and complexity to explain outcomes in organizations, services, and real-world systems.

Explore theories of crime, punishment, legality, and justice, including how law is interpreted, enforced, and contested.

Compare frameworks for judging what is right, fair, and good, and learn how to justify ethical claims in academic writing.

Learn how constructs are measured, how validity and reliability are established, and how scales are designed and evaluated.

Understand how researchers argue about cause and effect using designs, assumptions, counterfactual logic, and inference tools.

Use practical frameworks to plan implementation, evaluate outcomes, and improve services using structured cycles and models.

Explore real dissertation examples to understand structure, formatting, academic tone, and chapter expectations.