Summary
Contents
Subject index
Advancing Family Theories explores two contemporary theories of the family - rational choice theory and transition theory. These diametrically different approaches illuminate what differing theories reveal about families. The book also discusses how meta-theories can assist in building and refining theory and offers insight on the "understanding versus explanation" debate. Advancing Family Theories gives students a precise notion of what a theory is and how theories work in research. The book not only looks at philosophical realms but also examines particular substantive theory to explain and predict family behaviors.Advancing Family Theories Family Theories, Second Edition (SAGE, 2002), or is effective on its own. The book helps students with the task of taking abstract and very general theories and reducing them to a level of specific research models and hypotheses.
Understanding Theory: Product and Process
This book is intended for graduate students and scholars of the family. It necessarily assumes a certain degree of background in family theory and even more so in philosophy and history of science. There are two dominant approaches in philosophy of science. One approach is to cover the schools of thought. For example, Benton and Craig (2001) do an excellent job with this sort of approach in their recent book. Such approaches usually cover schools such as positivism, empiricism, phenomenology, and so on. Although this approach has its merits, it is not the approach I take in the next section. The reason for this is that although such approaches educate the student, they seldom confront the ...
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