ABSTRACT
Chapter overview In Chapter 1 we learned about different types of sociological questions. One of these is the theoretical question, which is concerned with understanding social phenomena: why is something happening? How can we explain social phenomena? The answers to such theoretical questions are theories and this chapter is about what theories are, what makes a theory a useful one and what tools sociologists use to represent theories. The overarching aim is that you learn how you can translate the intuitions we all have about social phenomena into sociological theories. This means that we need to make our stories, which are often implicit and incoherent, both explicit and coherent, and analytically decompose its various elements. All this means that you start thinking like a sociologist about theories. The chapter is organized as follows. I begin with an example of a social phenomenon, namely the puzzling relationship between birth month and success in sports (2.1). Then I provide an explanation for this observation and, in doing so, discuss what theories are (2.2). Coming up with a theory is one thing, however it is something else that the theory is also useful. I introduce several principles which we can use to evaluate how useful a theory is (2.3). Subsequently, I describe Durkheim’s classic theory of suicide in more detail, as it nicely illustrates a useful theory (2.4). After this, I review in more depth the key elements of sociological theories. These are concepts and typologies (2.5) and hypotheses and causality (2.6). At the end of this chapter I introduce various tools that sociologists use to systematically represent their theories. In particular I discuss the use of “conceptual models” (2.7) and “formal models” (2.8).
