Theory
This is the landing page for everything related to your theory. By theory we mean your knowledge and assumptions about how the process you are interested in works and behaves. Your theory may be very explicit and detailed, but it may also be more implicit and general in nature. Often the goal of your study is directly tied to specific aspects of this theory. For instance, your knowledge and assumptions about the process are likely to form the basis of your research aims, affect how you measure the process of interest, and influence your analysis plan for the data. Alternatively, your goal may itself be to develop, refine, and test your theory, through an approach known as theory formation.
Your theory starts with determining the relevant constructs, [cases], and temporal lens for the process you are interested in. When you have identified these foundational elements, you may think about how the constructs behave within a person (or dyad, family, if these are the cases you focus on), over time considered through that particular temporal lens.
Aspects to think about in this context are: the distribution of the constructs you are interested in, the types of temporal patterns you expect over time, whether you think the process is ergodic or not, how external events may impact the process you want to study, and how these aspects may change when you consider various timescales. Your knowledge and assumptions about these aspects will be crucial for deciding how to measure your constructs and how to analyze your data; through this, it ultimately determines what features of the process you get to see, and which ones remain unseen. Hence, the interplay of these decisions will determine what you can learn with your study about your theory.
Below we have specified multiple topics to think about with respect to how the process you are studying works—such that you can exemplify your ideas, and use this to inform your decisions on how to best capture that process with your measurements and analyses.
Themes
Theory formation
Making your knowledge about the constructs and processes you are interested in explicit.
Distributions
What values are possible, and how likely are these, given the construct, cases and temporal lens you are interested in.
Temporal pattern
Characteristic ways in which the process fluctuates or changes over time.
Ergodicity
Do processes differ across cases (e.g., persons) and over time or not.
Timescale
The way in which the behavior of a process over time changes when we observe it less frequently over time, or with time aggregated observations.
Context and events
The behavior of a process may be related to external events and the context a person is in.