Theory Building: Using Abductive Search Strategies

Understanding how theory is built or comes into existence is a crucial part of knowledge production for all researchers. Knowledge production can be separated into context of discovery (problem/domain definition and initial ideas) and context of justification (hypothesis testing and hypothesis improvement). The context of justification is much better understood by researchers than is the context of discovery. The concepts of induction and deduction are used in the context of justification but they cannot explain how new ideas are created. This chapter proposes the concept of abduction to address this. Abduction can be conceptualized as making guesses. In a theory building process there is a need to make guesses when a researcher makes observations which are surprising in that they depart from existing theory. Other researchers have used abduction to describe and understand theory building. This paper identifies anomalies in the existing frameworks and proposes further development of the framework of systematic combining of the theory and empirical world. This chapter argues that the concept of abduction can contribute to understand how theory is created in theory testing, theory development and theory creation, but focuses on theory building in both realist and an interpretive research.