Theory, concept and framework turn up everywhere in research. They’re in methods textbooks, ethics forms, thesis guidelines and reviewer reports. “What’s your theoretical framework?” is a favourite question at progression panels and vivas. And yet the three words are often used as if they mean much the same thing. They seem to overlap but they really don’t. And getting them straight does make it easier to explain what you’re doing and why.

I’m going to start with concepts, because theories and frameworks are both built from them.

So what’s a concept? A concept is a named idea that picks out some feature of the world so that we can think and talk about it as an ‘it’. Inflation is a concept. So are mass, genre, patient-centred care, revolution, sustainability and identity. Every discipline has its own, often very large, stock of concepts, and some are shared across many fields. A concept usually has a history of competing definitions, and it generally tries to draw a boundary around an idea… this counts, that doesn’t. Is a palace coup a revolution? Is the graphic novel a genre or a format? Academic arguments about concepts often centre on where the boundary should go.

On its own, a concept classifies and describes. But concepts can be used in different ways. A concept generally tells you what to notice. Some concepts are tightly specified so that they can be measured, counted or tested. Others are deliberately looser. They give a sense of direction and help you know where to look, and they get sharper as you work with your data. Both uses are OK. The trouble comes when we mix them up. A researcher using a loose, exploratory concept can feel obliged to define it as if it were a variable in an experiment (Are you listening to this R2?) Or a tightly defined concept can slip in a new meaning halfway through a paper without anyone noticing – including the writer.

Concepts travel too. They get borrowed from one discipline or theory and put to work in another. That’s very often very productive. But a concept lifted out of the theory that gave it meaning runs the risk of losing a lot on the way. It can end up meaning something close to its everyday sense, which may not be the idea the writer-borrower thought they were getting. So it’s always worth knowing where a concept has come from before you take it as your own.

So what’s a theory? A theory uses multiple concepts and put them into a relationship with each other. It then makes a claim about how those relations work together to explain something. This is a long way from the everyday meaning of theory as a hunch (“I have a theory about why the printer never works”). In research a theory is a worked-out account, and the theories that last have been put through a lot of critical interrogation.

Now please excuse me, science people. I’m about to say something fairly generic and I hope it’s not too far off the mark. Let’s take natural selection as an example of a theory. Variation, inheritance and differential survival are each separate concepts. Put them together in a particular way and you get an explanation of how populations change over time. That theoretical explanation can then be tested, argued with, refined and, in principle, abandoned. That’s what makes it a theory.

Theories come in different sizes. Some are very large and offer an account of how whole societies, economies or minds work. Some are more modest and deal with a particular kind of phenomenon, say how people take up new technologies, or why some organisations learn from their mistakes and others don’t. And some are small explanations built up from the data in a single study. What they share is the explanatory claim. A list of concepts with no proposed relationship between them is more like a vocabulary. It hasn’t yet become a theory.

And what about a framework? A framework is the structure you build to organise a particular piece of research. It sets out which concepts matter for this study, how you understand the connections between them, and what that means for the questions you ask, the data you generate and how you analyse it. The framework is part of the argument for the study. It explains why this problem, why these concepts and why this design.

Frameworks can be put together in different ways. Sometimes a framework is drawn largely from one theory, so people tend to call this a theoretical framework. Sometimes it’s assembled from several sources: bits of more than one theory, previous research, policy, and the researcher’s own professional or practical knowledge. This is more often called a conceptual framework.

Imagine a doctoral researcher in nursing studying how ward teams handle shift handover. Their framework might bring together a concept of communication, a theory about how organisations learn, the results of earlier handover studies, and what they know from years of working on wards. Each of those pieces exists separately. The framework is the particular arrangement of them that makes this study possible.

And here lies the difference. A theory usually exists independently of your project. It was there before you started and it’ll be there after you’ve finished. But your framework belongs to your study. You made it, and you’re answerable for it. Research often results in new concepts – often at doctoral level these are modifications to existing concepts. The exception is of course if you’re doing theory-building research, but this is far less common. Most of us use theory rather than invent it.

Now a little caveat. Framework is a particularly slippery word. In some disciplines it means a formal analytic model. In others it might mean a set of policy principles, a coding scheme or even a checklist. So when you hear someone using the term framework, it’s worth asking what they have in mind.

And the last question. How do the three fit together? Well, they work at different levels. Concepts can be understood as building blocks. Theories relate concepts to each other and explain. Frameworks select and arrange concepts, and sometimes theories, to give a specific study its shape and its justification. A framework can contain a theory. A theory always contains concepts. But a framework doesn’t have to contain a theory, and concepts can be put to work without either.

And alas!! None of this means the terms will be used consistently by the people who read your work. They likely won’t be. Supervisors, examiners, editors and reviewers come from different disciplines and traditions, and they bring different assumptions about what these words mean.

So it’s probably better to look at your own work, asking what each piece is doing in your text rather than worry too much about the labels. If it names and defines what you’re looking at, it’s working as a concept. If it explains why your results look the way they do, it’s working as theory. If it justifies your design and holds the study together, it’s working as a framework.

Photo by Michał Bożek on Unsplash