Reflection theme 3
This week was more concrete than the previous weeks. But still it was pretty hard to grasp. I could only attend to the first part of the monday-lecture, because I had another lecture in another course at the same time and I wanted to attend to both of them. The seminar was good in my opinion, it was interesting to hear how others defined and thought about theories.
I enjoyed choosing an article on my own, which enabled me to chose something that I’m interesting in.
After the seminar and lecture I still find it hard to say what theories are and what they are not. In my text there was a theory of what social capital is, but when I read it the first time i just thought it was a definition. The difference between a definition and a theory is still unclear to me but as i understood it, definitions are more superficial and not dependent of time. I raised the question whether or not a description over what social network sites is if thats a theory or description and as i understood it and can be both, it depends on how the author formulates it. A description is often shorter than a theory and a theory contains maybe relations between the different components that are a part of the notion which you are describing.
One thing is clear that a scientific article must contain at least one theory, otherwise it's just an article.
Leif described the difference between a normative theory and a destructive theory. Normative theories are implicit theories and theories that are not true or false, like whether or not people have the same value, its just how people understand it as. And destructive theories are facts, "this is how it is". Its the opposite to normative theories.
The question if a hypothesis is a theory is also still unclear. It sounded like a hypothesis can be a theory if it is grounded in a theory. Like if you want to test a theory. Theories helps you construct good hypothesis and good hypothesis gives good results.
As you say, it is hard to what theories are and what not and I think that this is the very essence of a theory and why they exist. People feel comfortable in a black and white world where everything is a question of yes or no, right or wrong. It makes it easy for us to interpreting the world. But as theory proves to us the world is grey and there are no right or wrong answers and because of this theory is needed for us to be able to create an understanding for questions.
SvaraRaderaI think the paper"what theory is not" give us a good explanation that "hypothesis do not contain logical arguments about why empirical relationships are expected to occur". The negative example if a paper presents a lot of hypothesis but none of them can be explained or motivated, it has no theory. So I agree with you that a good theory need a good hypothesis, but it also need good explanation as result.
SvaraRaderaI also find it hard to say what theory is and what it’s not. In the paper I had chosen there were a part where the theories were presented (like some sort of background almost), so at first I thought it were not that hard to find the theories in my paper. After the seminar though I realized that there were other things in my paper that also maybe could be counted as theory.
SvaraRaderaHey Erik!
SvaraRaderaThank you for sharing the difference between normative and destructive theory. We did not talk about this at our seminar, so this was completely new for me. Actually, I have never reflected upon that there are different sorts of theory as well (which makes it a little more complicated). so thank you for sharing that! I agree with you about that a hypothesis can be based on theories, that is one thing I learned at our seminar too. But there are still some question marks about what theory is, and it seems like it can be lot of things. But therefore, I think the text "what theory is not" made it much more clear. Keep up the good work!
/Hannah