Thanks Ray - reassuring to hear this. At this risk of making a public turkey of myself by replying without reading the attachments first:
The question (little set of questions) I'm often asked is "and what's the relationship between these (potentially informal) theories and 'formal' (sociological/other substantive domain) theories? What if there doesn't seem to be a relationship to formal theory? How does one then choose a formal theory to use to construct an MRT from the outcomes?"
I'm thinking here of the apparent 'leap' you made from (hmm, doing this from memory after a glass of red on a Friday night) was it from Naming Shaming and Faming to reference group theory? How to decide which theory to 'leap to' there? I'd like to hear your ideas/strategy on the selection of the formal theory...
Meanwhile - a variation on the same strategy you've outlined: in a current review, one of the things that I did was note the 'formal theories' that were referenced in the literature as I was reading it. There were several, relevant to different aspects of the question. Some proved more useful than others for developing early propositions, and many of those 'useful theories' turned out to be worthy search terms in their own right...
Cheers
Gill
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