Theorizing theory: Invitation to a broader conversation about ‘theory’ in sociology

‘Theory’ is a seminal term in sociology. Sociologists tend to ask that articles, chapters and monographs are ‘theoretical’, ‘develop theory’ or ‘make a theoretical contribution’. Yet, as demonstrated in Gabriel Abend’s 2008 article ‘The Meaning of ‘Theory’, it is generally unclear what sociologists mean when they talk about theory. Abend distinguishes seven different meanings sociologists tend to impute to ‘theory’ and argues that no single definition can usefully capture these substantively different meanings. Counter to Abend, we propose and defend a minimal and versatile theory of theory, which does capture the important common denominators in sociologists' various uses of the term theory. The major strengths of our proposal are that it enables informed and synthetic discussion and fosters reflexivity about differences and similarities between different types of theory. Our minimal theory of theory thus serves as an invitation to a broader conversation about theory in sociology.     

Evidence in Norwegian child protection interventions – Analysing cases of familial violence

How is expert evidence used in care order proceedings when children are considered for foster care placement because of familial violence? What are important factors and how do the decision-makers use and evaluate evidence from specialists and experts? In this in-depth analysis of 104 published care order decisions from the Norwegian County Boards, I investigate how decision-makers use and evaluate evidence from expert witnesses to determine whether a care order may be granted. The analysis shows that the evidence largely revolves around social functioning, care context and topics about how parents and children relate to each other. Led by the law, the decision-makers use this evidence to determine whether the child's situation is harmful, whether support services are viable and whether a care order is in the child's best interests. I find that decision-makers draw unevenly on evidence with regards to these legal requirements, and that the use predominantly defers to expert authority. However, there is also evidence of independent reasoning, where deferral to the epistemic authority of the experts is weakened. This is shown through evaluative and critical assessments and scrutiny of the disciplinary evidence.     

Prior distributions expressing ignorance about convex increasing failure rates

This paper deals with the specification of probability distributions expressing ignorance concerning annual or otherwise discretized failure or mortality rates, when these rates can safely be assumed to be increasing and convex, but are completely unknown otherwise. Such distributions can be used as noninformative priors for Bayesian analysis of failure data. We demonstrate why a uniform distribution used in earlier work is unsatisfactory, especially from the point of view of insensitivity with respect to the time scale that is chosen for the problem at hand. We suggest alternative distributions based on Dirichlet distributed weights for the extreme points of relevant convex sets, and discuss which consequences a requirement for scale neutrality has for the choice of Dirichlet parameters.