Trends in Theory Building and Theory Testing over Time
Another way of examining these trends is to explore the relative frequencies of the reporter, qualifier, builder, tester, and expander categories over time.
The figure summarizes these category trends.
The graph reveals a decline in the frequency of reporters over time, with those articles filling around 70 percent of early volumes in the 1970s and early 1980s before declining to a handful in the 1990s and none in the 2000s.
A chi-square test showed that this trend was statistically significant (X2 [df = 15, n = 667] = 166.86, p < .001).
A significant increase in qualifiers was observed:
only a handful of these were published in the late 1970s and 1980s before they rose to 40 percent of a the typical volume in the late 1990s and 2000s (X2 [df = 15, n = 667] = 45.32, p < .001).
The figure also reveals an increase in expanders from the late 1990s to the 2000s, with their representation reaching a peak of 30–40 percent of a typical volume in the 2000s (X2 [df = 15, n = 667] = 56.45, p < .001).
In contrast, there was no significant change in the representation of either builders (X2 [df = 15, n = 667] = 18.63, n.s.) or testers (X2 [df = 15, n = 667] = 19.63, n.s.) over time.
Builders hovered around a mean of 6 percent of a volume, with no detectable trend taking place.
Testers oscillated around a mean of 14 percent of a volume, though they seemed to be declining from the mid 1990s into the 2000s.
(From Colquitt, Zapata-Phelan (2007). Trends in theory building and theory testing)
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