Compare and contrast a minimum of two middle range theories and discuss potential applications in your specific area of nursing practice.
DNP 815 W3 Discussion Question One

Compare and contrast a minimum of two middle range theories and discuss potential applications in your specific area of nursing practice.

The midrange approach was developed by Robert Merton as a departure from the general social theorizing of Talcott Parsons. Merton agreed with Parsons that a narrow empiricism consisting entirely of simple statistical or observational regularities cannot arrive at successful theory. However, he found that Parsons’ “formulations were remote from providing a problematics and a direction for theory-oriented empirical inquiry into the observable worlds of culture and society”.[5] He was thus directly opposed to the abstract

DNP 815 W3 Discussion Question One
DNP 815 W3 Discussion Question One

theorizing of scholars who are engaged in the attempt to construct a total theoretical system covering all aspects of social life. With the introduction of the middle-range theory programme, he advocated that sociologists should concentrate on measurable aspects of social reality that can be studied as separate social phenomena, rather than attempting to explain the entire social world. He saw both the middle-range theory approach and middle-range theories themselves as temporary: when they matured, as natural sciences already had, the body of middle-range theories would become a system of universal laws; but, until that time, social sciences should avoid trying to create a universal theory.[6]

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Merton’s original foil in the construction was Talcott Parsons, whose action theory C. Wright Mills later classified as a “grand theory”. (Parsons vehemently rejected this categorization.) Middle-range theories are normally constructed by applying theory-building techniques to empirical research, which produce generic propositions about the social world, which in turn can also be empirically tested. Examples of middle-range theories are theories of reference groups, social mobility, normalization processes, role conflict and the formation of social norms.[3] The middle-range approach has played a role in turning sociology into an increasingly empirically oriented discipline.[7] This was also important in post-war thought.

In the post-war period, middle-range theory became the dominant approach to theory construction in all variable-based social sciences.[6] Middle-range theory has also been applied to the archaeological realm by Lewis R. Binford, and to financial theory by Robert C. Merton,[8] Robert K. Merton’s son.

In the recent decades, the analytical sociology programme has emerged as an attempt synthesizing middle-range theories into a more coherent abstract framework (as Merton had hoped would eventually happen). Peter Hedström at Oxford is the scholar most associated with this approach,[9][verification needed] while Peter Bearman is its most prominent American advocate.

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