Conceptual Framework

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39Biologist Bernd Heinrich (1984, pp. 141 151) and his associates once spent a summer conducting detailed, systematic research on ant lions, small insects that trap ants in pits they have dug. Returning to the university in the fall, Heinrich was surprised to dis-cover that his results were quite different from those published by other researchers. Redoing his experiments the following summer to try to understand these discrepan-cies, Heinrich found that he and his fellow researchers had been led astray by an unex-amined assumption they had made about the ant lions time frame: Their observations hadn t been long enough to detect some key aspects of these insects behavior. As he concluded, Even carefully collected results can be misleading if the underlying context of assumptions is wrong (p.)

one that “explains, either graphically or in narrative form, the main things to be stud- ... I describe the nature of theory in more detail later in the chapter, in dealing with the uses of existing theory. Here, I want to emphasize ... see if it is a valid and useful module for constructing a …

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