Building An Explanatory Theory

1. Theory 2
2. Classificatory Theories
3. Explanatory Theories
4. Building A Classification Theory
5. Building An Explanatory Theory
6. Step 2: Identify causal factors
7. Step 3: Trace interactions among variables
8. Step 4: Propose a scheme for evaluating causal variables
9. Adapting And Revising Theories

There are many ways to go about building a theory. We will demonstrate one way that utilizes the definition of explanatory theory that we have adopted in this book:

An explanatory theory identifies (a) the variables important for understanding some observed outcome and (b) explains how those variables interact to produce that outcome.

The following are steps that can be taken to devise a theory of cultural selfidentity that fits our definition of theory.

1. Select some phenomenon that you want to explain, in the sense of identifying the causes that have brought that phenomenon about.
2. Decide which variables or components have apparently functioned as factors contributing to why the phenomenon turned out as it did, and cast those variables in the form of propositions.
3. Envision how the variables interact during the process of self-identity development, and illustrate the process with life-like examples.
4. Propose a scheme for evaluating or measuring the causal factors.
5. Find or create the specific assessment instruments and methods to use in gathering information about each variable.
6. Apply the evaluation scheme to a real-life situation to test how well the theory explicates the phenomenon it is designed to explain.

We now demonstrate those steps with a hypothetical example.

Imagine that we've read about couples from different cultural backgrounds who bear children of mixed cultural heritage. In our reading, we have encountered such passages as the following:

All my life I've been aware of being half and half. I feel like I'm on the fringes of things in a lot of ways. I'm half Jewish and half Christian. I was raised a political radical, but I don't really have any politics. I don't have any geographical roots. I just feel there are a whole lot of ways I don't belong. I've wanted to know who I was ever since I was a teenager. ( Cowan & Cowan, 1987, p. 246)

[My white maternal grandfather] wasn't exactly thrilled when he heard my mother was about to marry a black man. "I want to crawl inside a hole," he had said. ( Funderburg, 1994, p. 9)

Don [white American] and Cherry [Japanese] lived in Australia. . . . Don forbade Cherry to speak Japanese to their girls or teach them anything about Japan. "If they grow up to speak Japanese, they'll speak it to each other at school," he said. "That will make them different. They stand out among the other kids as it is. But they're not Japanese, they're Australian, and they're going to speak English." In response to such pressure, Cherry counseled her daughters, "You're not Jap, you're Australian girl. I'm Australian, too." ( Spickard, 1989, p. 147)

Imagine, as well, that these passages are relevant to one of our interests, which is people's self-identities and the ways those identities are formed. We consider self-identity to mean a person's conviction about "who I am." Part of self-identity consists of an individual's feelings about "the cultural groups I really belong to, the groups whose members accept me as one of their own." Such groups can be defined by ethnicity, religion, social class, age, language, and more. We are particularly curious about the development of identity in bicultural individuals -- in persons whose parents are from different cultural origins. Unfortunately, we have been unable to locate a formally organized explanation of that process, so we propose to create our own theory of bicultural self-identities development. In the following description of our approach, we identify the mother's original culture as Culture A and the father's as Culture B.