Theme 3: Research and theory - Reflection

Last week we chose an article of our own. I initially had some problems finding an that appealed to me but I found one about the relationship between social capital and social media (Facebook in this study).

However when I was at the seminar and while reading other blogs I've realized I must work on my paper-finding-skills since there were many interesting papers.

When I read the questions last week and was asked to describe what theory was (before reading the course literature), my first instinct was to describe it something very similar to a hypothesis. While reading I found out that was not the case even though a hypothesis can the beginning of a theory. A hypothesis is usually an educated guess with no empirical proofs. When the proof is there, a hypothesis can become a theory.

I felt the text by Sutton and Staw gave a clearer picture of what theory means by explaining what it isn't.

At the seminar this monday we were divided into groups of three and we discussed our papers and journals with each other. Later we presented one of our papers to the whole seminar group. Ours was "Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study" by Petter Bae Brandtzæg. It was a quantitative longitudinal study on what social implications social media sites can have. The study was conducted on 2000 persons between 15-75 during a three-year period. Its theory was based on the "Social capital theory" which was the same as mine. What I understood at the seminar was that my paper might have fitted in the theory type: Analysis and explanation, not only analysis that I wrote in my last blogpost.

At the second seminar we talked about the theory of cooperative principle. In every conversation we usually leave room for interpretation. The theory of cooperative principle is divided into four subgroups called Gricean maxims and what these maxims explain is the assumptions we make in conversation by measuring the quality, quantity, relation and manner of the conversation.

We also looked at the course wiki on "What is theory?". I got stuck on the phrasing "theory should in some way be generalized" and we started to talk about what kind of generalizations there could be. In science of nature there usually can be a theory of something that is considered common knowledge and can be generalized but if/when it fails just once, it no longer holds. In other disciplines it might not be as easy to refute since the theories can be wide and unspecific on circumstances e.g. the theory of critical mass.

What I learned from this was that things change and old theories are continually being tested in new ways and therefore they wont last forever.