In Chapter 1 we saw that theory was a multi-faceted concept but carried within it a common idea: theory abstracted from the data in order to explain what was happening and why it was happening. Moreover, a theoretical explanation was expected to contribute to a discourse about technology and learning, and make justifiable, critically aware claims backed up with content knowledge and knowledge of research methodology. This was helpful, but I did not explain how researchers might go about the work of developing theory and, more specifically, how they might move from describing to explaining what they had found. This gap is addressed in this chapter, which looks at theorising. It is divided into three sections, which cover:

• • Describing and explaining: how do they differ?

• • Does theorising require another way of thinking?

• • Is theorising making it up?

Describing and explaining: how do they differ?

What are researchers doing when they are theorising and how does theorising look different to other kinds of research reporting? To address these two questions I begin by focusing on the difference between describing and explaining set out in Chapter 1: describing is about what happened while explaining is about why it happened. Both are core to research output, and the differences between them can be subtle. For example, statisticians talk of descriptive statistics (in contrast to inferential statistics) not only when they categorise data but when they explain by drawing attention to associations between variables, say, in the form of scatter plots or statistical tests. Moreover, qualitative researchers differentiate between thin and thick description. Thin description describes actions as they appear on the surface, while thick description covers the meaning of actions and represents a theoretical contribution in its own right. For example, the discussion of routines in Olson (1988) might be thought of as an example of thick rather than thin description.

It seems then that categories are helpful in drawing attention to different kinds of reporting and the approach I take here is to differentiate between basic, interpretative and analytical description and between narrow and wide types of explanation (see Table 2.1).