PhD Theoretical Framework: How to Write It (With Examples)

Have you ever had a eureka moment? A moment where something that you’ve misunderstood for ages becomes crystal clear? I did, about half way through my PhD. Did I come up with a ground breaking discovery that would revolutionise my field? Did I develop a new theory that would change the way we think about the world? No. I finally understood how to write the PhD theoretical framework. Sound silly? It isn’t.

A PhD theoretical framework is the system of existing theories, concepts, and models that you use to interpret and analyse your research data. It provides the intellectual scaffolding for your study, explaining not just what you found, but why you interpret it the way you do.

During the office hours and workshops we run in our PhD Writing Community, the issue of how to write a theory framework comes up more frequently than any other. The theoretical framework is important, but many people find it difficult. I know I struggled with it. Then someone explained the theory framework to me in such a simple way. Here’s the eureka moment: the PhD theory framework is like a toolbox. Simple, right? Let me explain. In the literature review you highlighted the problem that needs ‘fixing’. The theoretical framework, the ‘toolbox’, details the theories, propositions, hypotheses (if you’re using them) and concepts, the ‘tools’, that you will use to address or make sense of this problem. So, your job in the PhD theory framework chapter is to discuss in detail what the tools look like, how they behave, how they have been used before, how they relate to one another, how they are relevant to your aims and objectives and what the drawbacks are from using them. The methods chapter then discusses how you will use (operationalise) those tools.

What is a PhD theoretical framework?

A simple way to understand what a theory framework is is to picture what your research would look like if you didn’t have one. Imagine you are studying local government responses to climate change. The question you want to answer is ‘why do local governments differ in their responses to climate change?’ (the subject of my own doctoral research). In the literature review you highlighted the problem that needs ‘fixing’.

The PhD theoretical framework, the ‘toolbox’, details the theories, propositions, hypotheses (if you’re using them) and concepts, the ‘tools’, that you will use to address or make sense of this problem. The list of potential explanations for why responses differ is enormous. You could approach this question with a focus on, say, psychology, power, gender, economics, and so on. The best we can typically hope for, and this is particularly true in much of the social sciences, is an interpretation of the truth. So, and this is important, we use theory to focus our attention on a small sub-set of all potential explanations, on one particular viewpoint. Now I know I’m getting into messy epistemological and ontological waters here. I am an interpretivist, so I see theory as a ‘lens’ that you apply to make sense of the world. That’s the shape of my toolbox. But, even if you’re a positivist you still pick and choose theoretical concepts and hypotheses from a range of available options; you just use them in a different way (rather than a lens, they become testable propositions, or measurement tools).

Without a theoretical framework we are left with a potentially endless choice of potential viewpoints, which would make our data collection and analysis and our discussion hugely chaotic. In other words, if we don’t know how to focus our attention, how can we present a coherent explanation?

The PhD theory framework is a natural extension of the literature review, and one of the most important chapters or sections in the whole thesis (this post explains how to structure the rest of your PhD). The purpose of the literature review, amongst other things, is to highlight gaps and shortcomings with the existing work in your field. The theoretical framework details the perspective you will take to address that gap and shortcoming. For example, in my doctoral research, my literature review focused on government responses to climate change and pointed out that there hadn’t been much discussion on local government. The theoretical framework then made an informed decision to come at it from a particular theoretical perspective (institutional theory, if you’re interested) and then discussed what that theory looks like, highlighting the key concepts and ideas. In your own research you will also need to make an informed decision about the particular theory you will employ to guide you through the rest of the research.

The theoretical framework is a natural extension of the literature review. The purpose of the literature review, amongst other things, is to highlight gaps and shortcomings with the existing work in your field. The theoretical framework details the perspective you will take to address that gap and shortcoming.

So, the job of the theoretical framework isn’t to repeat the literature review. Instead, think of it as a separate, mini literature review, this time focusing on the theory you will employ. You don’t have to discuss every particular use and discussion of the theoretical position you employ. If you did, you’d quickly run out of space and time. Remember, your examiners are likely to already be familiar with the theory, meaning that rather than discuss every possible thing that there is to discuss about it, you instead need to discuss how and why the theory has been adapted and adopted to the context of your research.

Related guides: Not sure whether something belongs in your literature review or your theoretical framework? Read our guide to the difference between a literature review and a theoretical framework. For a bird’s-eye view of how the framework chapter fits into the rest of your thesis, see how the four sections of a PhD thesis fit together.

Where the theoretical framework sits in your thesis

Before we get into the steps, it helps to see the framework in context. The theoretical framework is the connecting tissue between your literature review and your methodology. The literature review tells you what is broken. The framework tells you which lens you will use to examine the break. The methodology then tells you how you will gather the evidence. Get the framework wrong and the rest of the chain wobbles.

How to write a PhD theoretical framework in 6 steps

The structure below is the one I now use whenever I help a PhD student work through this chapter in our writing community. It works for qualitative and quantitative projects, and across most disciplines in the social sciences, education and health research. Don’t treat it as a rigid recipe. Treat it as a sequence of decisions, each one building on the last.

Step 1: Identify your research problem and the lens that illuminates it

Start with the problem, not the theory. This is the step most students skip, and it shows. They walk into a supervisor meeting with a theory they like the sound of and try to retrofit it onto a research question that doesn’t really need it.

Go back to your literature review. What is the gap you identified? What is the question that gap forces you to ask? Write the problem out in one sentence. Then write what kind of lens you would need to make sense of it. You don’t need to name a theory yet. You just need to know whether your problem is about meaning, behaviour, power, structure, mechanism, or experience.

Imagine you are a second-year education PhD studying why working-class students at a Russell Group university feel they don’t belong. Your problem is not ‘low retention rates’. Your problem is ‘how working-class students experience institutional belonging’. That sentence alone tells you the lens has to be about meaning and identity, not about variables and measurement. You’ve already narrowed the field of usable theories from hundreds to maybe a dozen, and you haven’t even opened a journal article yet. That’s the point of Step 1.

Step 2: Survey the theories in your field that have been applied to similar problems

Now you go shopping. Not for the theory you’ll use, just for the candidates.

Look at three places. First, the theoretical frameworks used in the empirical papers that sit closest to your research question. Second, the handbooks and review articles in your field, the ones with titles like ‘theoretical perspectives on…’. Third, what your supervisor mentions in passing. Supervisors often drop theory names without explaining them, and those mentions are usually the most useful. Write them down even when you don’t yet understand them.

Make a shortlist of five or six theories. For each one, jot down two things. What problem was it built to explain? And which famous study has used it well? You’re not committing to anything yet. You’re just building a small inventory of options that you can defend in front of your supervisor.

For our education PhD, the shortlist might include Bourdieu’s habitus and cultural capital, Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice, Reay’s work on class and higher education, and Goffman on stigma. Each one offers a different way of seeing the same problem. That’s exactly what Step 2 is for.

Step 3: Choose one anchoring theory (not three or four)

Here’s where most students go wrong. They try to use everything. The result is a chapter that reads like a reading list, not an argument.

Pick one. The theory that, when you imagine writing your analysis chapter through its lens, makes you nod rather than wince. The one that frames the problem most precisely, not most broadly. You can borrow concepts from the others later, and Step 6 will show you how. But you need a centre of gravity.

Practical test: write a one-paragraph summary of your study using the language of your chosen theory. If the paragraph feels forced, the theory is wrong for the project. If it feels like the theory is doing the heavy lifting and you’re just following along, you’ve found your anchor.

For our education PhD, Bourdieu’s habitus probably wins. It explains why belonging feels embodied rather than conscious, why students from non-traditional backgrounds describe a constant low-level discomfort they can’t quite name, and it has been used in dozens of comparable studies. That’s the anchor. Reay, Lave and Wenger become supporting voices. Bourdieu becomes the spine of the chapter.

Step 4: Explain why this theory and not the alternatives

This is the step that turns a description into an argument.

You have to do two things in this section. Show that you understand the alternatives well enough to have rejected them. And show that your choice solves a problem the alternatives don’t. Examiners care about this far more than they care about your potted history of the chosen theory. They want to see you reasoning, not reciting.

Be specific about what each rejected theory would have missed. A communities of practice frame would have told us how students learn to belong over time, but it would have missed the embodied, classed dimensions of why they feel out of place from day one. Goffman on stigma would have given us the management of spoiled identity, but it would not have given us the structural inheritance that produces the stigma in the first place. Bourdieu does both.

Notice what’s happening in that paragraph. You’re not bashing the rejected theories. You’re showing that you understand exactly what they offer and exactly where they stop. That’s the move that makes your examiner trust you.

Step 5: Define the key concepts you will use in your analysis

A theory is a bag of concepts. You will not use all of them. Pick the three or four that you will actually need when you sit down to code your data.

For each concept, do three things. Define it in the original author’s terms. Define it in your own words, in the context of your study. And give one concrete example of what it would look like in your data. That third move is what separates a theoretical framework from a glossary.

For our Bourdieu example, the concepts might be habitus, cultural capital, field, and symbolic violence. Habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms, is the set of dispositions a person carries from their social origin. In your study, it is the unconscious sense of ‘how things are done here’ that working-class students arrive with from home and find suddenly unhelpful at university. In your data, it might look like a student saying ‘I just didn’t know you were allowed to email a professor’. That sentence is habitus colliding with field. Naming it that way is the work the framework does for you.

Define four concepts like this and your analysis chapter is already half-written. You’ll find yourself reaching for these definitions every time you open a transcript.

Step 6: Build the bridge from theory to data

The final step is the one most chapters fail to make. You have your theory. You have your concepts. Now you need to show how they will actually shape what you do with your data.

Write one closing section that does three things. State how the theory will guide your data collection. State how the concepts will structure your analysis. And state what kind of claim you will be able to make at the end that you couldn’t have made without the theory.

For our education PhD, that section might say: interviews will be designed to surface moments where students notice a mismatch between their dispositions and the institutional environment, because Bourdieu predicts these moments are where habitus becomes visible. Coding will use habitus, cultural capital, field and symbolic violence as primary categories, with sub-codes generated inductively from the transcripts. The framework will let me argue that institutional belonging is not a matter of confidence or skill but a matter of structural fit, which has implications for how universities design their first-year support, not just their pastoral care.

That paragraph is the bridge. It is also, quietly, the answer to the question every examiner asks: so what? Get Step 6 right and the rest of the chapter has a point.

Free download: the Theoretical Framework Canvas

If your theoretical framework still feels impossible to pin down, the free Theoretical Framework Canvas will help you work through the six steps above on a single page. It’s the worksheet I use with PhD students in our writing community when they get stuck. One page, six boxes, one anchoring theory by the end. I asked 250 PhD examiners how they’d approach a theoretical framework if they were starting again, and their answers shaped the canvas. Downloaded by 10,000+ PhD students. Get your free copy here.

How to structure a PhD theoretical framework

The key when writing your theory framework is to show your understanding of the broad theoretical school and to define the key concepts, both with reference to the existing literature, but also to your research questions and problem statement. There are ten things to consider and include in your theory framework section/chapter. These aren’t necessarily in order, but they are all things that you will need to think about and, if relevant, discuss.

• You need to have a solid grasp of your aims and objectives. These define the space in which your research will sit and your goals when conducting it. You will need to briefly recap these when you start writing your theoretical framework, both to remind the reader and so that you can relate your theory to these overarching aims.
• What theory/theories are you using? Here you need to define and explain each theory you draw upon and, in doing so, discuss the leading proponents and applications. This shows that you understand the theory you are going to adopt.
• You then need to spend time critically arguing why you are adopting this particular theory. There are a lot of potential theories you could use. Why this one? Importantly, you should relate your choice to the discussions in the literature review and your aims and objectives.
• Can the theory/theories be broken down into different schools? Which one are you siding with and why?
• A theory contains a number of concepts. Which will you be drawing upon? Why these ones? Have you defined them properly? The way you approach this section will be influenced by your epistemological and ontological perspective and, thus, whether you use hypotheses or not. If you are using hypotheses, you need to state them as such.
• How do the concepts relate to your aims and objectives?
• Have you clearly stated your ontological and epistemological perspective?
• Are you the first to use this particular theory in this particular way? What benefits or drawbacks does that bring?
• Can you spot any drawbacks with applying this theory? Does it fail to account for a particular dimension of a phenomenon? Is it difficult to operationalize?
• How are your concepts related? Are you using them as hypotheses? Or as a model to make sense of the data? Somewhere in between? Be explicit about how they are all related and what you plan on doing with them.

The goal of writing up a theoretical framework is to tell the reader why you have chosen particular theories, how they relate to the gap in the literature, and how they relate to your aims and objectives. Following these ten prompts is a good way of pressure-testing the six steps above. You are likely to be moulding and interpreting the theory to suit your purposes, which requires you to discuss your take on the theory. So, read the first hand literature; you want to get to the source of the theory and, where possible, avoid relying on other people’s literature reviews. Try not to fill your theoretical framework discussion with quotes though (the same is true of your literature review). The examiners want to see that you have understood the theory, not that you are capable of regurgitating it.

Major Theoretical Frameworks Compared

Framework	Key Assumption	Typical Methods	Common Disciplines
Positivism	Reality is objective and measurable	Experiments, surveys, statistical analysis	Sciences, psychology, economics
Interpretivism	Reality is subjective, socially constructed	Interviews, ethnography, case studies	Sociology, education, anthropology
Constructivism	Knowledge is constructed through experience	Grounded theory, phenomenology	Education, psychology
Critical Theory	Power structures shape knowledge and reality	Critical discourse analysis, action research	Social sciences, political science
Pragmatism	Truth is what works; multiple realities coexist	Mixed methods	Health, education, business
Post-structuralism	Meaning is unstable, shaped by language and power	Discourse analysis, deconstruction	Humanities, cultural studies

A short (but necessary) note on ontology and epistemology

Everybody hates ontology and epistemology, but this stuff is important, so stay with me for just one minute. There will be differences in how you approach theory and how your toolbox is used. This is because of differing ontological and epistemological positions. Those from the more realist end of the spectrum (e.g. positivists) will see theory as embodying a set of testable propositions. In this tradition, concepts are seen as variables and are tested using quantitative measurement. Those from the more idealist end of the spectrum (e.g. interpretivism) will see theory as embodying a lens that can be applied to the world and used to make sense of it. Much like the lenses of a pair of glasses. In this tradition, the concepts are there to make sense of the world by focusing your attention on a particular aspect of reality. There is no hypotheses to be proved or disproved, only an interpretation. What interpretation you take depends on the tools in your toolbox. Each tool does one job. The same is true of concepts. In either case, theories are meant to be tested and challenged. They are fluid and change over time in light of new evidence and new empirical application. If you are explicitly testing new or old theory, this is obvious. But even if you are using theory to interpret the world, you will still have something to say about the relevance of particular theories and concepts. Whilst it might not seem like it, this is a test of the theory and does advance our knowledge.

How do I choose theories and create my framework?

Unless you are using an inductive methodological approach (where you generate theory from the data), you will likely approach your fieldwork with a theoretical framework in mind. Which theory or theories you choose is, in part, down to your aims and objectives and whether there is a relevant theory available ‘off-the-shelf’ that is appropriate for your needs. There are generally three strategies that researchers use to develop their theoretical frameworks: there may be theories in your field that have arisen on the basis of repeated observation and testing and which are widely accepted. Or, you might find that you need to select concepts from multiple theories and create a novel framework that is unique to your particular context. A growing and important trend in social research is to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective when trying to understand the social world. This can be achieved by looking beyond the dominant, well-established theories and thinking about how other theories, particularly those from other disciplines or sub-disciplines, can be used. In any case, you must consider the following when selecting a theory: identify your ontological and epistemological beliefs. List several theories that align with your epistemological position and which can aid your understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Engage in literature review around those theories, both to familiarise yourself with them but also to understand their relevance to your study. Ask yourself how each theory connects to your problem, aims and objectives. Select the theory or theories that provide more relevant tools for your thesis.

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I have more than one theory. What do I do?

Often, you need to combine concepts, hypotheses or ideas from more than one theoretical school. Employing more than one theory is entirely legitimate. I did so in my PhD. However, you need to consider a few key questions: are the theories you are bringing together epistemologically compatible? Have you discussed each theory in the same level of detail to adequately explain the theory, your justification for its inclusion, its relation to the literature and its potential drawbacks? What benefits does focusing on more than one theory bring? Perhaps one theory has shortcomings that the other addresses? What downsides are there to employing more than one theory? Has anyone else used this combination of theories before you?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a theoretical and conceptual framework?

A theoretical framework uses established theories (e.g., social constructivism, critical race theory) to interpret your research. A conceptual framework is a custom model you build from multiple theories and concepts to map the specific variables and relationships in your study. A theoretical framework is borrowed; a conceptual framework is built.

How do I choose a theoretical framework for my PhD?

Start with your research questions, what assumptions do they make about reality and knowledge? Then review how other researchers in your field have framed similar questions. Discuss options with your supervisor. The right framework is one that productively shapes your analysis without forcing your data into a predetermined mould.

Where does the theoretical framework go in a PhD thesis?

The theoretical framework usually appears as part of the literature review chapter or as a standalone chapter between the literature review and methodology. Its position depends on your discipline and how central the framework is to your argument. In social sciences, it is typically a dedicated chapter.

Do all PhD theses need a theoretical framework?

Most do, though the emphasis varies. In social sciences and humanities, the theoretical framework is often a dedicated chapter. In STEM disciplines, it may be implicit in the methodology or briefly stated in the introduction. If your research interprets data (rather than just measuring it), you need a framework.

Conclusion: how to write a PhD theoretical framework chapter

The theoretical framework is a tricky section to write, largely because the choice available to you is huge. But keep that toolbox metaphor in mind, and keep the six steps in mind too. Each theory contains a number of tools. Your job in the theory framework is to take the tools you need for your project from the most relevant theory or theories and package them up into your own toolbox. When you’re done, you should see that the theory framework offers structure, by detailing the key concepts, tools and, where relevant, hypotheses; a way to connect to other research; a coherent, joined up set of ideas that structure the writing and help to create an argumentative streak that can run throughout your thesis; and an approach that can be reused in additional contexts once you’re done. Along the way, you need to convince the reader that you’ve picked and applied the most appropriate tools possible, given your aims and objectives. The theoretical framework frames the research. If you build that frame right, your research will shine. If you don’t then you’ll struggle. If you’d like more structure and support while working on your theoretical framework, join The PhD People, our calm, connected writing community where PhD students write together, share ideas, and make steady progress.

References and Further Reading

• Creswell, J.W. and Creswell, J.D. (2018) Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 5th edn. London: Sage.
• Grant, C. and Osanloo, A. (2014) ‘Understanding, Selecting, and Integrating a Theoretical Framework in Dissertation Research’, Administrative Issues Journal, 4(2), pp. 12–26.