Thinking in absolutes/Over-reliance on theory

I have been sharing my work with another scholar, a PHD student, who is my writing partner. She sees and thinks differently from me and is very sharp, always identifying incoherence in my work. Recently, she shared her observation that I often think in absolutes, it is either this or that, but I do not realized the nuance and complexity about my cases that my teachers can fall somewhere between the two extremes. This was similarly raised during my confirmation exercise last December. My examiners asked me why I saw "blind patriotism" and "constructive patriotism" as two extremes. Couldn't they be on a continuum?

The more I grapple with this, the more I realized the roots of my dichotomous thinking. When I first read about scholars' theories about the two types of patriotism, I was floored! I was so excited as I found theories that I can adopt into my study. But I forgot that the tradition from which these scholars were were from the positivist tradition and quantitative researchers. Nuances did not captivate them, they wanted a way to pigeon-hole people into two groups such that they can easily explained why some people were one way and other people another way. Subsequently, their theories became popular and replicated and theorized by others, yet... people have rarely questioned the limitations of dichotimizing people into just two groups!

What happened to me was that I was "being in the grip" of an existing theory rather than "having a grip" of this theory (p. 61). Rather than using the theory to help me frame my inquiry in a certain way to reflect my aims, I was trying to support someone else's agenda. Why should I be supporting these theorists' agenda? Shouldn't my research be adding on to knowledge, rather than simply reinforcing existing knowledge, even though reinforcing knowledge is not a bad thing in itself. It is important "to distinguish between ideas that were moving [my] inquiry forward and those that, however intellectually compelling, were causing [me] to spin [my wheels]." (p. 61)

This is how Schram (2006) puts it:

...what you should avoid is the tight embrace of theory as a singular preoccupation in your work. Imposing a well-established theory on your developing inquiry may set you up with a neat and satisfying framework for your study, but it may also prematurely shut down avenues of meaningful questioning or prevent you from seeing events and relationships that don't fit the theory...theory can provide perspective and suggest pattern, but it need not define what you can see.

Schram does not deny "the practical ways in which theory can contribute" to our work though, including:

1. Offering us a way to connect our work to some larger issue or body of knowledge by inviting us to consider classes of events rather than single instances.
2. Giving us a critical perspective to criticize prior work.
3. Enabling us to not study everything by narrowing our decisions down "to attend to some things but not others in the course" of our inquiry (p. 60).

Schram, Thomas H. 2006. Conceptualizing and proposing qualitative research. 2 ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey and Columbus, Ohio: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.