What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications

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Three “obvious” statements, all three backwards

Autumn 1949. The sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld is writing a piece introducing the first two volumes of The American Soldier, the summary of the huge studies the US Army had carried out on its soldiers during the war. The Army’s research branch had done about 300 studies and piled up more than 600,000 interviews.

He opens with a game: he lists a few “findings” and next to each puts a reason that makes you say “of course.” Try it yourself:

• Better-educated soldiers showed more symptoms of psychological disturbance than the less educated. (Intellectuals are known to be sensitive.)
• Soldiers of rural background were in better spirits than city soldiers. (They are used to hardship.)
• Southern soldiers stood up to the climate of the hot Pacific islands better than Northerners. (They are used to the heat.)

Did you buy it? Lazarsfeld explains: every statement on the list was the direct opposite of what was actually found. The less educated soldiers showed more symptoms; Southerners did not adapt to the tropical climate any better than Northerners.

The real point: had he announced the true results first, the reader would have called those “obvious” too. Human beings can react in any number of ways; what matters is knowing which reactions are common under which conditions. Everyday common sense finds a reason for any result after the fact. A theory has to speak beforehand.

Story

The same living room, three different pairs of glasses

Joshua Meyrowitz opens a 2008 article with a joke. Scientists from different countries study the same rats. Each group “discovers” in the rats the traits that fit the stereotype of its own country: one sees orderly hierarchies, another animals driven by the impulse of the moment, a third creative long-term adaptations. Everyone sees what they already “know.” Meyrowitz calls it a joke about observer bias; but he adds that something similar probably lies beneath all our ways of knowing about human communication.

Then he sets a scene: a family is watching the television news. One research camp sees the family exposed to a dominant ideological text. Another sees the family using the media for ends that are useful and pleasant to them: keeping watch on the world, socialising the children, finding something to talk about. A third looks neither at content nor at intentions but at the structure of interaction the medium creates: television, unlike the newspaper, puts family members of different ages and genders into the same experience. McQuail reports these three narratives under Meyrowitz’s labels “power, pleasure and pattern.”

Why so many views? McQuail gives one reason plainly: there is no single definition of “communication” that everyone agrees on. Some take it to mean transmitting information, some giving and taking meaning, some sharing, some exerting influence. On top of that the field grew out of the meeting of many disciplines. This lesson is here to help you find your way through that crowd.

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The names and years you will meet in this lesson

For exams, it helps more to know who answered which question than to memorise years. Still, here is the skeleton of the lesson:

• 1935 – Karl Popper: Logik der Forschung, later The Logic of Scientific Discovery (English 1959). The idea that a scientific theory must be falsifiable.
• 1941 – Paul Lazarsfeld: the distinction between “administrative” and “critical” communication research.
• 1949 – Robert K. Merton: Social Theory and Social Structure and “theories of the middle range.” The same year Lazarsfeld’s American Soldier review appeared.
• 1962 – Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the paradigm.
• 1983 – Denis McQuail: first edition of Mass Communication Theory; sixth edition 2010.
• 1993 – Potter, Cooper and Dupagne: counted the field’s “three paradigms” in journal articles.
• 1999 – Robert T. Craig: the “seven traditions” of communication theory.

The order tells a story too: first came the discussion of how science works (Popper, Kuhn), then the scale of theory in the social sciences (Merton), then communication research’s own internal divisions (Lazarsfeld, Potter and colleagues, Craig).

Story

Theories are not born in a vacuum: three scenes

Scene 1: Princeton, late 1930s. A radio-audience research project runs on Rockefeller Foundation money. On Shepperd’s reading of the archival letters, the project took shape around the “public interest” clause of the Communications Act of 1934 and the debate over educational broadcasting. Alongside Lazarsfeld, the survey master from Vienna, comes Theodor Adorno, an exile from Frankfurt. The two think very differently. The label “administrative research,” according to Pooley and Jeřábek, began as Adorno’s shorthand, hardly a compliment, for this radio research work.

Scene 2: postwar America. In McQuail’s account, the “dominant paradigm” took shape especially in the decade after the Second World War, when North America held an overwhelming lead in both the social sciences and the media. Functionalism came from sociology, the transmission model from information theory, and the measuring tools from surveys and statistics. The opposing line began with the Frankfurt School exiles who went to the USA in the 1930s and took shape in the 1960s and 70s under the influence of the “ideas of 1968.”

Scene 3: 1968. In one year a violence commission finances a content analysis of violence on television, and this leads to the birth of the cultivation line. That same autumn in Chapel Hill, the issues undecided voters called important are compared with media content. The result: agenda-setting.

Our interpretation: a theory is the answer to an era’s question, money, technology and method. “Who, when, on whose money, chasing which question?” is the first step in reading a theory.

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The core claim: a theory is a lens

The lesson defends this claim: a theory is a systematic set of ideas that helps make sense of a phenomenon, explain it, predict it and guide action; in communication there is no single “true” theory, only many traditions asking different questions; so a theory should be read not by “is it true?” but by “what does it ask, what does it see, what can it not see?”

The broad definition is McQuail’s: a theory need not be only a system of law-like propositions; it can be any systematic set of ideas that helps make sense of a phenomenon, guide action or predict a consequence. This definition takes “theory” out of the laboratory: the patterned practical knowledge a journalist uses to choose news, and an audience member’s own experience with media, both fall under the umbrella. We will come back to Merton’s stricter definition shortly.

Why do we find the lens a good comparison? Because a lens magnifies one thing while blurring another. In the distinction McQuail reports, critical theory tries to relate the problems underlying media practice to social issues, while applied theory aims to use communication more effectively for practical problems. Both see something real; both see little of where the other is looking. (The lens image is ours, not a scientific term.)

Step by step

The four jobs of a theory (and one overtime shift)

On paper a theory is a set of sentences; its value shows in the jobs it does. Four jobs follow from the verbs in McQuail’s definition and from definitions of communication science:

1. Making sense (describing): grouping scattered observations and naming them. Saying “these two events are really cases of the same kind.”
2. Explaining: why is it so? The definition of communication science by Berger and Chaffee speaks of explaining phenomena through testable theories.
3. Predicting: “if this condition holds, expect that outcome.” A prediction lets a theory work against itself.
4. Guiding: helping you choose what to do and how in practice. Media practitioners do this too: they use practical theories to choose news, to please audiences, to stay within limits.
5. Overtime shift, for critical theories: exposing. Critical theory aims to make visible the problems and faults underneath media practice.

Imagine: on a local news site an editor thinks “short headlines get read more in the evening” and shortens the headlines. That is a guiding theory; it may be untested, but it steers behaviour. If an academic measured it for a week, it would move to the prediction stage.

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Six relatives: common sense, hypothesis, generalisation, theory, model, paradigm

Merton complained that the word “theory” risks becoming meaningless: it is applied to everything from small working hypotheses through vague speculation to axiomatic systems. For exams, tell the relatives apart:

• Everyday (common-sense) theory: the knowledge we all draw from our own experience. It really does steer how we use media. But it is untested; Lazarsfeld’s list showed the risk.
• Hypothesis: a testable claim about a single relationship. In Merton’s phrase, the small but necessary working hypotheses produced in abundance in day-to-day research.
• Empirical generalisation: an isolated proposition summarising an observed regularity. For Merton a theory is more than that: it is the set of assumptions from which the generalisations themselves are derived.
• Theory: a set of logically connected propositions from which observed regularities can be derived.
• Model: a schema that simplifies and shows the parts of a process and their relations. Shannon and Weaver’s model draws communication as a process running from source, message, signal, channel, receiver to destination. A model often shows “how it runs,” not “why.”
• Paradigm: in Kuhn, the exemplary achievements a scientific community shares, with the beliefs, tools and values tied to them. In communication writing it is often used loosely for a “dominant way of looking” (as in McQuail’s “dominant paradigm”).

The word “law” rarely appears in communication; the definition by Berger and Chaffee, as reported, speaks of “law-like generalisations.”

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Middle-range theory: neither giant nor tiny

A large part of this course is about “middle-range” theories. The term comes from Merton: middle-range theories stand between the small working hypotheses produced in abundance in day-to-day research and the grand unifying efforts to explain all of social behaviour, organisation and change under one roof.

In Merton’s description these theories are abstract but close enough to observation to become testable propositions. Their domains are limited: reference groups, social mobility, role conflict, the formation of norms. His own comparison: like a theory of prices, a germ theory of disease or the kinetic theory of gases. Such theories are not derived from a single “theory of everything”; later they may prove consistent with one. In Cole’s words, this is the American style of sociology that Merton created, tying theory tightly to empirical testing.

In this course, theories such as agenda-setting, cultivation and the spiral of silence can be read as close to this description: each takes a delimited domain (the news agenda, television’s picture of the world, fear of being in the minority) and treats it with testable propositions. This is our reading; Merton did not classify media effects in this framework. In exams, link Merton’s name to middle-range theory and to the position between “grand” and “small” theories.

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McQuail’s kinds of theory: scientific, cultural, normative, operational, everyday

McQuail (6th edition, 2010) says that if we understand theory not only as law-like propositions but as any systematic set of ideas that helps make sense of a phenomenon, guide action or predict a consequence, we can distinguish at least five kinds.

• Social scientific theory: general propositions about the nature, workings and effects of media, based on systematic and objective observation, which can be tested and confirmed or rejected.
• Cultural theory: very diverse. Some forms evaluate cultural products against quality criteria; others challenge the hierarchy. Its core is often imaginative and ideational, and it resists the demand for testing by observation.
• Normative theory: says how media ought to work in line with social values. It is found in laws, regulations and ethics codes.
• Operational theory: the practical knowledge media practitioners build up in their work: choosing news, pleasing audiences, designing advertising.
• Everyday (common-sense) theory: the knowledge we all draw from our own experience with media. It also lets us tell “reality” from “fiction.”

Watch out: in the fourth edition of the same book (2000) only four kinds are listed (scientific, normative, operational, everyday). Cultural theory was added later. If an exam asks “four or five?”, check which edition you read.

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Craig’s seven traditions: seven answers to “what is communication?”

In 1999 Robert T. Craig proposed reconstructing the field as a “dialogue.” In his account communication theories are traditions distinguished by how they define communication and problems of communication; each tradition appeals to some commonplace beliefs about communication and challenges others. Craig calls his scheme “tentative.” The seven traditions and the “communication theorized as …” phrases (in our wording):

• Rhetorical: as the practical art of discourse.
• Semiotic: as intersubjective mediation by signs.
• Phenomenological: as the experience of otherness, dialogue.
• Cybernetic: as information processing.
• Sociopsychological: as expression, interaction and influence.
• Sociocultural: as the (re)production of social order.
• Critical: as discursive reflection, reflective critique.

The reader edited by Craig and Muller organises its texts around these seven traditions. Craig himself later notes that the article is often cited as a gesture toward “the famous seven traditions.”

Don’t mix them up: the sociopsychological tradition looks at the communication of the individual and the relationship through the trio of expression, interaction and influence; the sociocultural tradition sees communication as producing social order. The first foregrounds “why was that person persuaded?”, the second “which shared meanings is this community reproducing?”

Myth check

“A good theory is a neutral mirror”?

What people assume. A scientific theory is a neutral mirror that reflects communication as it is; values and pictures of society are not its business.

What the evidence says. In McQuail’s account the “dominant paradigm” in fact carries an essentially normative view of society: it presumes a “good society” that is democratic, liberal, pluralist, orderly and well informed. It does not treat social inequality as a basic problem as long as tensions can be resolved by institutional means. The opposing “alternative paradigm” openly rejects value neutrality and reads society critically.

McQuail goes one step further: the study of mass communication is not a field from which we can expect “theoretically neutral, scientifically verified” knowledge about effects or meaning; it is bound up with values and social conflict. Lazarsfeld’s 1941 wording, as Shepperd reports it, points the same way: administrative research is a “tool” that people or agencies use for given purposes.

Our interpretation: the problem is not carrying values but hiding that you carry them. Asking “which society does this theory treat as normal?” gets in the way of any claim to neutrality.

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Three pairs of glasses: social scientific, interpretive, critical

Potter, Cooper and Dupagne (1993) divided mass communication research into three paradigms; McQuail summarises the division:

• Social scientific: empirical questions about media are tested with quantitative methods. Assumption: social phenomena can be observed and measured, and regularities can be tested.
• Interpretive: qualitative methods, the meaning-giving power of media. Assumption: communication is the production of meaning and depends on context; the aim is understanding.
• Critical: based on critical social theory, especially leftist or political-economy views. Assumption: communication sits inside power relations; the aim is to make them visible.

There is also a two-block version of the same division. The dominant paradigm rests on the ideal of a liberal pluralist society, on functionalism, the linear transmission model, the idea of “powerful media, but softened by groups,” and quantitative analysis of variables. The alternative (critical) paradigm criticises society, rejects the transmission model, is non-deterministic about technology and messages, and turns to qualitative methods and cultural or political-economy theories.

The oldest division is Lazarsfeld’s (1941): as McQuail reports it, the critical orientation relates the problems beneath media to social issues, while the administrative (applied) orientation uses communication to solve practical problems. These are not sharp walls, but directions.

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Two axes: media or society, culture or material forces?

McQuail places theories on two axes.

First axis: media-centric or society-centric. Media-centric theory grants communication much more autonomy and influence; it sees the media as a primary mover of social change, driven especially by developments in communication technology, and attends to the content and consequences of different kinds of media. Society-centric theory mostly sees the media as a reflection of political and economic forces; media theory becomes a special application of broader social theory.

Second axis: culturalist or materialist. Culturalists focus on the realm of culture and ideas, materialists on material forces and facts. The divide corresponds roughly to humanistic vs. scientific, qualitative vs. quantitative, subjective vs. objective. The two axes are independent of each other; together they yield four perspectives:

1. Media-culturalist: the subjective meaning of the audience’s experience with a particular kind of media.
2. Media-materialist: how the medium’s technology, the relations of production and reception, and organisational contexts shape content.
3. Social-culturalist: subordinates media and their experience to deeper forces affecting society and individuals; social and cultural issues come before political and economic ones.
4. Social-materialist: a critical view of media ownership and control; the claim that these shape the dominant ideology.

McQuail adds that media theory itself tends to respond to major shifts in technology and structure.

Step by step

How does a theory work? From a “sea of air” to Pascal

Merton’s own example shows the mechanism of a theory well. In his account the seminal idea of a middle-range theory is usually simple: Boyle conceives the atmosphere as a “sea of air.” The image yields inferences: if pressure increases as you go deeper into a sea, then, as Pascal inferred, air pressure on a mountain top should be lower than at its base.

1. Image: “the atmosphere is a sea of air.”
2. Inference: so pressure on a mountain top should be lower.
3. Testable hypothesis: measure pressure at the top and at the base.
4. Test: is the inference confirmed?
5. Fruitfulness: does the idea generate new questions and hypotheses about atmospheric pressure? By Merton’s account, this is how the idea is judged.

A social example works with the same skeleton. Common sense says that the greater the loss in a disaster, the greater the felt deprivation. The theory of relative deprivation assumes that people compare themselves with others they see as similar, and so predicts that under some conditions those who suffered a bigger loss may see others even worse off and feel less deprived. By Merton’s account, empirical evidence supported the theory, not common sense. It is the same lesson as the first card’s “obvious” game: a good theory sometimes says in advance the opposite of common sense.

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Popper’s puzzle: the theory that says “yes” to every answer

The question Karl Popper set out from was: which theories are scientific, and which are not? His answer: falsifiability. A theory is scientific if it could be incompatible with some possible observation.

He compared two kinds of theory. Einstein’s was “risky”: tests such as Eddington’s 1919 observations could have refuted it. The psychoanalytic accounts of Freud and Adler, on the other hand, fitted every human behaviour; they left no observation that could refute them. A theory that says “yes” to every result is a theory that no result confirms.

Popper went one step further: theories are not “proven”; by surviving tests they are “corroborated,” but never verified. Logik der Forschung came out in 1935, its English translation in 1959.

Imagine a “media effects” theory that says: “News viewers are affected. If you see they aren’t, that is a resistance effect, so there is still an effect.” Find the problem: which observation could refute this theory? None. The theory risks nothing. By Popper’s criterion it is not strong but untestable. McQuail too concedes that media theories are often hard to formulate in testable form.

Lab

Judging a theory: four questions and three more

A checklist helps you tell a good theory from a weak one:

1. Is it testable? Which observation would falsify it? (Popper.)
2. What is its scope? How many phenomena, how many situations does it cover?
3. Is it parsimonious? Is there an explanation that does the same job with fewer assumptions?
4. Does it have heuristic value? Does it generate new questions and new research?

Textbooks summarise Littlejohn and Foss’s list like this: scope, parsimony, heuristic value, and in addition openness (does it recognise other perspectives?), appropriateness (do question and theory fit?) and validity (overall worth and practicality). The appropriateness criterion matters: interpretive and critical theories do not face “is it testable?” with the same rigidity. McQuail says cultural theory resists the demand for testing by observation.

Mini lab (two imaginary theories). Theory A: “Every change in society is the work of the media.” Theory B: “A topic that leads the evening bulletin three times a week rises in the public’s importance list the following week.” Apply the four questions to both. A’s scope is huge and it is simple; but which observation would refute it? B’s scope is narrow and it is testable; but does it generate new questions? You needn’t say which is better; just see in which criterion each is strong and in which weak.

Step by step

Placing a theory on the map: a five-question compass

When you meet a theory in class or in an exam, ask these five questions; each gives you a bookmark:

1. What kind of theory? Social scientific, cultural, normative, operational or everyday? (McQuail.)
2. Which glasses? Social scientific, interpretive or critical paradigm? Dominant or alternative? (Potter and colleagues; McQuail.)
3. For whom, for what purpose? Administrative (applied) or critical? (Lazarsfeld, 1941.)
4. Where is the action? Media-centric or society-centric; culturalist or materialist? (McQuail’s four perspectives.)
5. What does it count as communication? Rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, cybernetics, sociopsychology, sociocultural theory or critique? (Craig.)

Imagine a study that examines, with a critical eye, how a channel’s ownership structure shapes news content. On the compass: critically oriented; social-materialist; close to the critical tradition in Craig. Every placement is open to debate; the map is a starting point, not a verdict. The map on the summary card is the short form of these five questions.

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What does the field actually publish? The 1993 count

Researchers who write about paradigms made speculations that differed from one another. Potter, Cooper and Dupagne (1993) set the guessing aside and counted: they looked at six characteristics of mass communication articles in eight major communication journals.

Findings:

• The social science paradigm made up over 60% of the studies.
• The interpretive paradigm, about 34%.
• The critical paradigm, less than 6%.

The authors’ conclusion has two layers: the social science paradigm was the majority in mainstream journals but could not be called “dominant” in the field. In addition, most work in social-science form failed to meet scientific standards on theoretical orientation and on quantitative data collection with probability sampling.

Two cautions. First: the count is from 1993 and limited to eight journals; it is not evidence about today’s picture. Second: the title says “mainstream journals”; critical work may have been published elsewhere (our interpretation). Even so, the count refutes, with concrete data, the idea that “the field advances with a single theory.”

Myth check

“A single refutation ends a theory”?

What people assume. For Popper, a single failed prediction sends a theory to the bin.

What the evidence says. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists objections to this simplification: when a prediction fails, we cannot tell whether it is the theory or the auxiliary assumptions linking it to observation that are false (Putnam, Lakatos). Lakatos argues that theories are surrounded by a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses; Kuhn and Lakatos hold that big theories live on despite anomalies. The IEP also gives room to the criticisms of Kuhn and Putnam.

Popper knew this detail: changing an auxiliary hypothesis is respectable scientific practice if it yields new testable predictions. He counted Marxism as unscientific because its changes were made only to accommodate observations. So the real criterion is not “never change” but “does the change take a new risk?”

For communication the upshot is: falsifiability is a very useful question for causal claims (“this exposure produces that outcome”). But it cannot be applied with the same strictness to interpretive and critical work; McQuail notes that cultural theory resists testing and yet can work alongside scientific approaches. Question the criterion, but don’t stop asking the question.

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Maps are theories too: the limits of classifications

The classifications you learn in this lesson help you understand theories; but they are interpretations themselves, and they have four limits:

1. Divisions overlap. McQuail says the schools are converging, yet important differences of philosophy and method remain.
2. Schemes are provisional. Craig called his own scheme “tentative.” Later he discussed the consequences of adding pragmatism, proposed by another researcher, as a separate tradition.
3. Binary oppositions can harden into caricature. Pooley and Jeřábek write that Lazarsfeld was for years drawn as an “apolitical positivist,” when in fact he always used qualitative and quantitative methods together. Yavuz likewise notes that since the 1940s there has been a search for a midway between the mainstream/pluralist and critical/radical poles, and that neither tradition is a fixed structure.
4. Where you stand. McQuail writes openly that his account carries an inevitable “western” bias: most of the theory comes from Europe and North America and from work in English.

So use the map not as a mould with rules but as a first orientation tool: instead of “this theory belongs in X,” say “this theory asks question X and does not see Y.”

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Old theories are being retested in new environments

McQuail says mass communication theory tends to respond to every major shift in technology and structure. In his account, the new media forced a re-evaluation of earlier thinking about effects, because the model of one-directional mass communication can no longer be sustained. The mark of a good theory shows here: it can be retested under new conditions.

Two documented examples:

• Cultivation and social media: a 2023 meta-analysis pooled 460 effect sizes from 66 independent samples; the overall effect came out at .123.
• The spiral of silence and social media: in Pew’s 2013 Snowden survey, 86% of respondents were willing to discuss the topic face to face; only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to share it on those platforms.

These findings do not “prove” the theories; they have limits such as one topic, one moment, a stated willingness. But they show that the theories keep being tested. Our interpretation: saying “the old theory is obsolete” and saying “it is still true in the new environment” are equally hasty verdicts; the sound approach is to check whether the theory’s main assumption, such as a shared message system or fear of being in the minority, still holds in the new environment.

Lab

Mini lab: one event, seven questions

This is not a scientific study, just an exercise in using the map.

Imagine: a wave of false information spreads fast on a youth platform. Craig’s seven traditions would ask seven questions about the same event. (We wrote the questions; they are not Craig’s own.)

• Rhetorical: Whom is this content trying to persuade, and how?
• Semiotic: With which signs do image and text build meaning?
• Phenomenological: How does a user experience this, can they enter a dialogue with others?
• Cybernetic: How does information flow, which feedbacks speed up the spread?
• Sociopsychological: Who believes and shares it, and why?
• Sociocultural: Which shared meanings and rituals is this community reproducing?
• Critical: In whose interest, and inside which power relations, is this content circulating?

To do: choose two of the seven questions. What observational data would each require? (survey, interview, network analysis, text analysis…) Then ask yourself: what can your chosen lens not see?

When you finish, you will have felt with your hands that a theory can be read not only by “is it true?” but by “what does it ask?”

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The same map in Turkish scholarship: names and debates

The map of this lesson is not a scheme imported into Turkey; Turkish academic writing also discusses the same divisions, only under different names:

• Administrative research and the positivist empirical tradition. A 2005 article by Erdoğan, Keloğlu-İşler and Durmuş treats Lazarsfeld’s “yönetimsel araştırmalar” (administrative studies) as the founding of the positivist empirical tradition in mass communication.
• Mainstream/pluralist and critical/radical. Yavuz (2015) writes that since the 1940s a midway has been sought between these two poles, and that debates on “yöndeşme” (convergence) are part of this; her keywords include mainstream and critical studies, cultural studies and audience research.
• Dominant and critical approaches. The subtitle of Yaylagül’s book names this pairing.

The English “dominant/alternative paradigm” (McQuail) can turn up in Turkish under these names. Knowing that several words (“egemen” = dominant, “anadamar” = mainstream, “çoğulcu” = pluralist, “yönetimsel” = administrative) are used for the same distinction spares you confusion when reading sources. Whatever name an exam question uses, remember that the same question lies beneath it: for whom, on what assumption, chasing which question is the research done?

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This is how exams ask it

Common patterns

• “Who developed the concept of middle-range theory?” → Robert K. Merton (1949, Social Theory and Social Structure).
• “Who proposed the falsifiability criterion?” → Karl Popper. “Paradigm?” → Thomas Kuhn (1962).
• “Kinds of theory” → McQuail: scientific, cultural, normative, operational, everyday.
• “Seven traditions” → Craig (1999).
• “The administrative and critical research distinction” → Lazarsfeld (1941).

Tempting wrong answers

• Mixing up Popper and Kuhn: one is about testing, the other about the historical workings of science.
• “Middle-range theory = a theory showing a medium-sized effect” → no. The scale is the theory’s scope, not the size of a media effect.
• Mixing up the sociopsychological and sociocultural traditions (Craig).
• Writing media-centric and society-centric the wrong way round: the media-centric view is the one that grants media autonomy and influence.
• Counting McQuail’s kinds of theory as “four” or “five”: the 2000 edition lists four, the 2010 edition five.

Alternative names

• Middle-range theory: in Turkish sources “orta boy kuram” also appears.
• Dominant paradigm: “anadamar/çoğulcu.” Alternative paradigm: “eleştirel/radikal” (see Yavuz, 2015). Lazarsfeld’s administrative research: “yönetimsel araştırma.”

This is written for general exam-question patterns; whichever source you read, run the question through the filter “for whom, on what assumption?”

Summary

Summary card: a map you can reuse

• What a theory is: a systematic set of ideas that makes sense of, explains, predicts and guides; for Merton, connected propositions from which observed regularities are derived.
• Its relatives: common sense (untested), hypothesis (one relationship), generalisation, model (schema), paradigm (Kuhn: shared exemplars).
• Middle-range theory (Merton): between small hypotheses and big unifying theories; delimited domain, testable.
• Testing (Popper): falsifiability means the theory takes a risk. Criticism: the auxiliary-hypotheses problem.
• Checklist: testability, scope, parsimony, heuristic value (+ openness, appropriateness, validity).
• Five-question compass: kind of theory (McQuail: 5 kinds; 4 in the 2000 edition) → paradigm (social scientific/interpretive/critical; dominant/alternative) → for whom (administrative/critical; Lazarsfeld 1941) → where the action is (media-/society-centric; culturalist/materialist) → what communication is (Craig’s 7 traditions).
• Why so many theories: no single definition of communication, and the field is multidisciplinary; each pair of glasses sees something different (Meyrowitz).
• Context: theories are born from an era’s question, money and method (Princeton, 1968).
• Exam traps: Popper–Kuhn, sociopsychological–sociocultural, media-centric–society-centric.