Can any one outline the relationship between theory and methods in sociological research?

i know that it involves the choice of study, choice of research, interpretation, but am confused with the theory bit, i dont know the relationship.

Can any one outline the relationship between theory and methods in sociological research?
Theory is why you want to do your research. Your method consists of how you plan to measure your research for instance it could be a survey based research on a number of people you are doing your study on. I am doing a longitudinal survey based research on bi polar disorder. My hypothesis is that the needs for medications used to treat the outbursts during a two year period declines while patients are being treated with social/ pharmaco therapies. The methods part is is vital to state in a research. You must tell who you are going to do your research on, how you selected them, what you are going to use to gather data, how your data is going to be measured. What type of study it is going to be. If you are in a class perhaps emailing your instructor would be more helpful.
Reply:Chose a topic and do the research--this is your research methodology and sometimes consists of interviews and/or surveys. Then, you analyze the data collected by using social theory--mostly describing the hows and whys people answered the way that they did. Or if there are no surveys, just research look at it historically--including the social factors that would allow the behaviors or goals to be met.
Reply:Basically it's like theory is awareness and thinking, methods is action, in other words jin and jang of research. They exist together during the research, constantly in interaction, and they can only develop this way.... like this.


Though I'm not an expert, I hope it'll help.


Good luck.

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