THEORY READING - WHAT IS A THEORY?

WHAT IS SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH?

Students who research fashion/dress for the first time may think that it has nothing to do with social sciences. However, fashion/dress needs to be studied social scientifically … in order to earn enough respect in academia because we come across abundant nonacademic information about fashion in our everyday life. They are in magazines, newspapers, catalogues, TV programs, and Internet sites, among many other media sources. Some are subjective opinions and essays on fashion without any reliable sources. (Kawamura, 2011, p.18).

WHAT IS A THEORY?

The word 'theory’ is a grand term that is intimidating and frightening to many students and even scholars. It is difficult to grasp and it is difficult to comprehend in its entirety in concrete terms since they are not concrete. Theories are found in the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, and economics, … 

To locate and read about these theories requires searching literature databases, or reviewing guides to the literature about the research topics.

A theory is a generalisation about a phenomenon, an explanation of how and why something happens. Therefore, theoretical perspectives are interrelated sets of assumptions, concepts, and propositions that constitute a view of the world …

Theories help us organise our otherwise disorganised world, make sense of it, guide us how we behave in it or we should behave in it, and also helps us predict what might happen in the future. They are created by developing a set of propositions or generalisations that establish relationships between things in some systematic way are are derived from information that people collect by seeing, hearing, touching, sensing, smelling, and feeling, which is the process of data collection. (Kawamura, 2011, p.20).

UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF A FASHION THEORY

There is no one fashion theory per se that is universally accepted, and since fashion/dress studies requires various perspectives, approaches, and interpretations, there are multiple fashion theories that rely on major social theories. ...

... academic disciplines engaged in theorizing fashion include … humanities (art and design history), social sciences (anthropology, area and ethnic studies, cultural studies, economics, geography, history, psychology and sociology), business (marketing, merchandising, and retailing) (Kawamura, 2011, p.22).

REFERENCE

Kawamura, Y. (2011) Doing research in fashion and dress. Oxford: Berg.