Sociology resources. Socialism. Sociology. Sociology. Economy and Sociology. Computational Projects for Social Life. The Social Complexity of Immigration and Diversity. Monitoring Society and Social Change. Introducing Social Theory. "Theory" in sociology. What is a sociological theory?
And how does it relate to the challenge of providing explanations of social facts? In the natural sciences the answer to this question is fairly clear. A theory is a hypothesis about one or more entities or processes and a specification of their operations and interactions. A theory is articulated in terms that permit rigorous and unambiguous derivation of implications for the behavior of a body of phenomena -- perhaps through specification of a set of equations or through a set of statements with deductive consequences. A theory may specify deterministic properties of a set of entities -- thus permitting point predictions about future states of the relevant system; or it may specify probabilistic relations among entities, giving rise to statements about the distribution of possible future states of the system.