Given the fact I am scoping in my dissertation I have looked at why this is useful in more depth. I initially found it to be a good way of making my project feasible and a way of narrowing down my literature review.
W and C begin by saying ‘the debate [in social sciences] can be characterized by two extreme and seemingly irreconcilable positions. Those who believe that it is possible to develop general theories of social behavior and argue for the cumulative development of general theoretical explanations are at one extreme. At the other extreme are those who suggest that it is not possible to construct truly general theories of social behavior’ Page 288. This can make anything you do pointless, yet scoping can help with this.
They ‘offer a strategy for constructing and testing theoretical formulations that avoids the true-false paradox. The strategy we propose requires investigators to develop and test conditional theories. Webargue that falsifying theories which have been made conditional through explicit specificationbof their scope can be a progressive rather than degenerative process’ page 289 Ergo, theories that are conditional are more useful.
We should therefore narrow down our research question and then test it.
‘scope statements provide clear guidelines for choosing the appropriate empirical situation in which to evaluate a theory’
‘’Theorists who make the scope of theoretical statements explicit are making a commitment to a class of situations in which the general principles will not be falsified’’
PAGE 294
By appending more general,i.e., more inclusive, less restrictive, scope statements to a theory, the sociological investigator makes the theory more vulnerable to falsification. PAGE 295
‘The proper use of scope restrictions provides a method of analyzing data without getting tangled up in all possible relationships among variables that are not central theoretical concerns.’ PAGE 297
In walker and Cohens conclusion they say that to resolve the true-false paradox conditional research questions should be asked.
They demonstrate that theoretical formulations that have been made conditional by specifying their scope are different than theories that have been made conditional by adding new theoretical variables to them to make them work.
Finally, scoping forces researchers to make a commitment to count a theory as false if it encounters negative evidence under the given conditions we therefore must commit to accepting the results after we scope.
Alexander Dawson 