Theory
This week we studied the theory on the subject of... theories. It was quite interesting to analyze what is theory and give it a proper definition. Doing this, we used the article "What Theory is Not" (Sutton, Staw), which reminded me of another work of this format, "The nature of explanation" (K. Craik) that has been written in 1943. Surprisingly for me, there were the same ideas in the both articles, that leads to the conclusion that this subject is still could be discussed, 60 years later.
The most important point for me was to remember that any science paper with references and diagrams, hypothesis and various data is not theoretical if there is no hypothesis that can be tested - it is an easy scheme to use while looking for the information for my master thesis and other work.
Also, theory is an important philosophical term, used since times of Plato and Aristotle. It is a human tool used in order to understand and systematize our knowledge about the world. It doesn't exist by itself, as we pointed out during our group discussion.
Five types of theories can help in describing some scientific papers due to providing structured templates of parameters for every kind of theory to include. At the same time, sometimes it is impossible to choose the only one theory, or discuss its types at all, as we learned during the seminar. Personally, I consider Gregor's work as a good mind exercise.
Practice
We discussed various theories in order to find the paper with actual theoretical concept, and have learned (and googled) a lot of theories in the end, such as Social capital theory, Game theory, Social Cognitive theory etc. It was interesting to learn how the hypothesis development works, to see the similarities in the structure of every theory, and try to think about each theory in the case of particular research, and then globally.
The editing work can also be considered as very useful. We had a difficult task: to edit a description, which was already complete. These skills sometimes can be very useful, while working on a voluminous text.
Yes, the debate on what theory is has been going on for a long, long time. Some are hoping for a "simple" definition but I do not think it will happen. I think research is becoming more open and is accepting different, complementing theoretical perspectives.
ReplyDeleteHypotheses are often useful, but in many cases our master theses in media technology asks How or Why-questions. If one is exploring a new, emerging phenomenon it is sometimes difficult to define specific hypotheses. But, you surely need to have some idea about what you are looking for (and underlying theory and research methods) and are expecting to find in order to design a good study.
It was certainly a challenge for your group to edit the wiki since several groups had worked on it before. However, I think you made good additions and changes. It was also a challenge for the first groups to decide what to write - what is most essential when one tries to describe what a theory is?
I am thinking about wether to build on the wikis when I teach this course next year, or we might start from scratch again - what do you think?
Thank you for the comment, Stefan!
DeleteIndeed, hypotheses should be based on observations and, as stupid as it could sound, on initial intuition - I think this is the basis of scientific endeavor.
The Wiki editing exercise was especially useful for this reason: some of us got the editors job, and some were writing the definition from the beginning. As a journalist I know that both tasks are really important: sometimes it is more difficult to improve somebody's text than to write your own.
As to the Wiki content for the next year - IMHO students must work on their definitions. As far we had only "Theory" - this one should be done again, but the additional information (examples of theories, papers) is very useful and it would be a pity to lose these findings!
It is very interesting that people were trying to understand and create a format of what THEORY is, since old times. I agree with you that this conversation will always be a "hot topic" in the scientific researches. What type of theory are you thinking to use for your master thesis?
ReplyDeleteInteresting you say that you had difficulty editing a description of theory, that "was already complete". I also had the same difficulty during my group seminar. We never really added any definition to what was already there, but we made some corrections the wording of the definitions that were already present. It made us think hard about what was being said, what we meant to say and understood versus what the real meaning of theory is. I reckon that it was a very good exercise to edit that Wiki.
ReplyDeleteDear Katya,
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the exercise from the seminar about theories was very interesting. However, I often find stating which type of theory is exactly used in some papers quite confusing, especially in those that employ the usage of mixed research methods. Do you think that as long as one can state whether a given theory *is* a theory it, its classification isn't ultimately that important? I'm wondering if your impressions are similar!