Theme 3: Research and theory

1. Briefly explain to a first year student what theory is, and what theory is not.

Theory is a way of explaining a phenomenon, a specific description. The theory tries to concretize why, how and when things occurred. The intentions of the description are to promote a bigger understanding into the specific phenomenon. Scholars like Kaplan and Merton define theory as the answer to queries of why. A theory has to be proved in a logical sequence with clear arguments to why something is as it is.

This leads to the explanation of what theory is not. The authors Sutton and Staw give five examples of what theory is not: references, data, list of variables or constructs, diagrams and hypotheses. The reason why references are not theory is because by only listing references to existing theories is not the same as explicating the logic order of the theories in the context. Sutton and Staw say this “References are sometimes used like a smoke screen to hide the absence of theory.” The same mind-set can be applied on the other four examples. Data, diagrams and hypothesis are supposed to be used as a tool to explain or clarify the theory and therefore it cannot be used to answer the question why, that is required to classify as theory.



2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

For this question I chose an article from the Journal of Communication called Historicizing New Media: A Content Analysis of Twitter. The major theory used in my article is the type analysis. As the title reveals the purpose of this article is to analyse the rise of Twitter, who are the users and in which way do they use this service, what is the content. The authors refer to earlier examples of diaries, analyse the content and draw parables to the user content of Twitter. As foundation to their theories they use historical literature from the 18th and 19th century and the way diaries were used then. In Table 2 the attributes of analysis are that ”it says what is. No causal relationships among phenomena are specified and no predictions are made.” The authors don’t make any predictions, they just explain how it used to be and use that information to make sense out of the content on Twitter. They don’t mention anything about the future and how it could be, just the present.



3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The benefits of using the theory type analysis that it answers the question ”what is”. It is an important form of theory when you have little or no knowledge about the specific phenomena. It gives a deeper understanding of the phenomena, which the reader needs to really understand the context. The limitations of the theory are that it doesn’t connect the analysis with future predictions, which could wider the context of the content. The theory doesn’t go beyond analysis and description, which imitate the information given to the readers.