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To Theorize or Not to Theorize: When to Theorize without Putting the Cart before the Horse (Or Descartes before De Horst)
Anthropology is somewhat unique amongst the social sciences in having three different but defensible frameworks that determined the primary methodological and analytical foundation of the ethnographic research process. One justifiable research configuration in applied medical anthropology is to conduct “atheoretical” (exploratory, descriptive) research. In this form, no explicit explanatory or exploratory theory is adopted or expected to emerge. This approach is used predominantly in descriptive projects with the intent of presenting an “insider” view of a culture and adopting a culturally relativistic stance that avoids critique or cultural shaping from alternative viewpoints. If theory emerges from this approach, it does so because of the use of cross-cultural comparison and analogy, rather than systematic interpretation from a particular explanatory paradigm.
A second approach is to use the anthropological version of “Grounded Theory,” sometimes described as an emergent theory approach where theory is derived from the data themselves. In this process, the data shape the theory rather than the theory shaping the data collection. The result of the “emergent theory” approach is the development of new theory or the modification of existing theory; but the end result is still a theoretical framing for the research (from an inductive rather than deductive stance).