Theme 3: Research and theory - Reflection

This week we had two seminars, instead of one lecture and one seminar. In the first seminar we discussed the journal (very briefly) and then with focus on the paper we read. We did this in small groups of 3-4 people. We then chose a paper, mine, and discussed this and later on presented it to the rest of the class. Apparently the paper I read another group also found the most interesting, so this was very interesting to see how they looked at the paper and I found the class discussion to be very meaningful.

The other seminar we looked at theory and what it is/means, with first the focus on what our papers we read had for a theory, and then we chose one to look more into and write about on the KTH social webpage. We chose a girl in my groups paper which was very interesting. It was about what signals webshops can send customers, such as a nice and fancy website can send out the signal that they sell fancy stuff for a high price - but it’s worth it, but infact it might not be at all, it’s all about the signals that we interupt that visits the webshop. The theory for this paper we in the group thought used Explanation and Prediction. Prediction because of if something , x, leads to something else, y, this is a prediction. Which was true with the webshops, if it was a nice site with proper information about the goods being sold, you wanted to buy it vs a ugly site with little information, you did not want to buy what was being selt. The Explanation theory, that according to Gregor (2006) says; “says what is, how, why, when, and where”, I thought also was a match for this paper. The combination Explanation and Prediction is defined in Gregor (2006) as: “Says what is, how, why, when, where, and what will be.Provides predictions and has both testable propositions and causal explanations.”

We then talked about theory in general, and what we thought theory is and means. We talked about what we wrote according to the question “describe theory for a first year student.” And most of us felt that theory can’t easily be explained, and that it can mean or point to very different things. The example life-theories came up, that we believe in the theories made by men thousands of years ago.

All in all, theory is a very big topic/subject and it will be interesting to see what happens next in this course.