Teaching Family Theories: Building Conceptual Models Using Deductive Theorizing

Origins and development of maternal self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting during the transition to parenthood: Toward an integrative process framework beyond Bandura’s model.

“…Finally, this framework lends itself to testing, refutation, refinement, and adaptation. In particular, specific hypotheses can be effectively deduced from the individual paths of the model, and higher order hypotheses can also clearly emerge from the framework as a whole (see the currently enclosed demonstration of how to effectively build empirically testable mid-range models, which consist of various more specific substantive constructs and hypotheses, from the current framework through deductive theorizing processes; Buehler et al, 2015).…”

“…Then, to more effectively guide future research, we provided an example (see Figure 2) to briefly demonstrate how to build empirically testable mid-range models, which consist of various more specific substantive constructs and hypotheses, from the relatively grand framework through deductive theorizing processes (Buehler et al, 2015; White et al, 2015). In doing so, conceptualizations of various theoretical constructs in the integrative framework and a more extensive list of specific substantive constructs that can be derived from their corresponding theoretical constructs were summarized in Table 1, which may serve as a useful source for researchers to select their constructs of interest and create mid-range models for the origins and development of maternal self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting over time…”

“…To better serve future research on maternal self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting during the transition to parenthood, more detailed conceptualizations of various theoretical constructs in the proposed integrative framework and a much more extensive list of specific substantive constructs that can be derived from their corresponding theoretical constructs were listed in Table 1, which may be a useful source for researchers to select their own constructs of interest and create various types of testable mid-range models. Furthermore, we also provided an example (see Figure 2) to demonstrate how to effectively build empirically testable mid-range models, which consist of various more specific substantive constructs and hypotheses, from the proposed grand framework through deductive theorizing processes (see the teaching article by Buehler et al, 2015, for a detailed introduction and a step-by-step tutorial of the deductive theorizing method).…”

“…Second, we selectively reviewed the available empirical research that is considered to be particularly relevant to the various components and propositions in our proposed framework. In this section, to better inform future research, we also demonstrated how to build testable mid-range conceptual models, which consist of various specific substantive constructs and hypotheses, from the proposed framework through deductive theorizing processes (Buehler et al, 2015; White et al, 2015). Third, we also carefully evaluated the potential utility of our proposed framework for studying the origins and development of new fathers’ emotion-related parenting self-efficacy.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Initially, I placed these units at the end of the course. After a couple of years and some nudging, I realized that these units should be at the beginning of the course so that the content and learnings could frame the study of various traditional family theories (e.g., Buehler et al, ). This suggested progress, I think, but it wasn't enough.…”