So the
theme for this time was research and theory, what it is and how it should be
used in the right way. During the lecture Leif Dahlberg explain the two
concepts, one a bit more
briefly than the other. So my main focus of the two concepts will still be on
theory. But since I did not write anything on research in my last post I will
just ad this explanation on what it is and why It is done. Why you do research
is to get more facts and knowledge about your theory but it can also be done to
develop new theories. Then there are different ways of performing the research,
in other word how you will collect data and so on.
Like a said
the most part of the theme theory took the bigger part so I will do a bigger recap
of that. If a study doesn’t get published one reason can often be because of the
lack of theory. It is something very
fundamental and has to be good in order to get your study published, but that
is something that is easier said than done. As I wrote in my first post there is
no clear answer on what theory is and that might be the reason why it can be
something difficult to get right. To provide
with some more explanation on what theory is, instead of describing what it is
not, I will a summary form note from the lecture.
Theory
is:
1.
A
set of propositions that aims to identify objects
2.
Abstract
entity aims to explain, describe and enhance understanding
3.
Connection
between phenomena and explaining why,
when and where
4.
Scientific
theories attempt to explain the casual logic between cause and effect.
The last
one indicates that there are different kinds of theories and this is something
that we discussed during the seminar. Most of us had read papers where the
theory was of the kind explanation and so was I, but after discussing the
differences between the types I started questioning my choice. And it was more
then me who did so, the more we talked about it the more insecure I became of
my choice. I chose explanation since it explains why it looks like
it does. But then we have prediction, which is when you have a theory of
how it looks like, and, there is something to test. This was the two I was
thinking about the first time around but ended up choosing explanation was because I thought that
the prediction had to be true but that is not the case. As long as you have a
theory that you can test then it is a prediction so that is why I now change my
mind. The theory has a prediction that it will differ on content between the
top and the bottom links and therefor it is a theory of the kind prediction.
For this
weeks theme I think that the lecture gave me more then the seminar. That can be because
we all read different papers and it was more difficult to discuss any answer
rather then just describing. But in the
end of the seminar we had a general discussion a bit theory and hypothesis and
the differences, which showed that it, can be difficult to separate them to.
