ion of what constitutes a good theory is being constructed, it should be borne in mind that what is really being discussed is a model of a good social scientific theory. What might be an excellent social science theory might be a dismal failure in the hard sciences, but this is not of concern during this discussion.
Having for the moment laid aside the differences among various social sciences as well as discontinuities between science and social science, one must next define the concept of theory itself. In the simplest and most basic sense, theories are tools. This is easy to forget because the category of tool seems in so many ways to be defined as a universe of tangible objects รป large, heavy, metal-edged objects that do something to the world.
But theories do something to the world as well: They organize it, explain it, connect things to each other. They make the world make sense. They even do this when there is not much sense to be made of the world.
Babbie (1989), in his authoritative work on how to conduct social scientific research, n
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