Making theory from knowledge syntheses useful for public health

Excerpt

For some researchers, theory is a dirty word, akin to nothing but a guess. For others, there is not enough theory. So, how do we move forward from this situation? To start, we need to define what a theory is. There are many definitions of theory, a simple one is a “… theory is an attempt to organize the facts—some ‘proven’, some more conjectural—within a domain of inquiry into a structurally coherent system.” (Klee 1997). Theories are more than just guesses, because they have to be at the very least partially supported by some facts or data. The part of this definition that may worry some is the use of the word conjectural, which may suggest that a theory is just a guess. But, almost all of our theories are partial and so to make advances we do often need to conjecture. Theory forms an important part of all scientific endeavors, including the science of knowledge synthesis, translation, and exchange (KSTE). …