ABSTRACT
This chapter teaches how to take the informal theory-making skills and direct them toward building explanatory theories to guide research. It also shows how to derive testable hypotheses from the explanatory theories. Descriptive research can be essential to developing an understanding of the world because it can provide accurate information about what is and what is not. Theories do this by providing a logical basis for expectations or predictions about the world that can be compared with reality through research. Deductive reasoning is the reverse of inductive reasoning. Deduction moves from abstract statements about general relationships to concrete statements about specific behaviors. Deductive logic is a process by which the information contained in a set of statements can be made explicit. The important point here is that evidence about the accuracy of hypotheses represents evidence about the accuracy of a theory only when the hypotheses are linked to the theory by deductive logic.
