During this week's seminars I had a chance to
discuss and learn more about journals and research papers in detail.
People have chosen a variety of papers for our assignment which was
particularly interesting for me to discuss. Furthermore discussions
on definition of theory and examining what type of theory was used on
our chosen research papers was very useful for me to understand the
content more clearly.
During
the first seminar we discussed about journals that we have chosen for
the assignment. When I first started searching for a journal through
several web sources, such as online libraries and scholar search
sites, I struggled a lot on finding a proper journal with an impact
factor over 1.0. Eventually I chose one from our course wiki. Because
of this, in my opinion, learning about other journals through
discussing their content with other people who have studied on them,
would help me a lot on future assignments. Moreover examining other
research papers and analyzing each research paper’s positive and
negative sides such as, the way how they conclude theory, the way
they use
research methods, the way they present research results, the way they
analyze the issues, the way they examine the facts and how they
introduce their methods taught me a lot on analyzing and
understanding a research paper. In short I can say that I have
learned about what to look for while searching for a research paper.
During the second seminar session we have
analyzed the theories that are used in our research papers. I can
easily say that it helped me a lot on comprehending the term “theory”
and the way it conducted in a paper. Seminar session also taught me
where to search for the information about theory in a paper. I
learned that theory, that the paper is based on, can be found after
the introduction and before the method part. Sometimes theory can
obviously be stated as "social … theory" in papers
however more often description of a theory is given in text so that
the reader should have figure out the name of the theory.
From
the discussions about theory I have learned that we may either use
existing theories or we may introduce our own theory by defining what
type of theory used within the paper, as stated by Gregor(2006)
Analysis,
Explanation, Prediction, Explanation and Prediction and Design and
Action,
and describe the way it conducted. The important thing about theory
is, it has to explain why, how, who(target group), under which
circumstances events occur and connect this to a phenomena in a
causal relation.
References
Gregor,
S. (2006). The Nature of Theory in Information Systems. MIS
Quarterly, 30(3), 611-642.
Scolari,
A. C.(2013). Media Evolution: Emergence, Dominance, Survival, and
Extinction in the Media Ecology. In: International Journal of
Communication, Vol. 7, 1418-1441.
I agree with you on that the clarification on what theory is and how searching for theory methods when analyzing an article became MUCH more understandable after discussing it in the seminar group and trying to match theories to a specific article.
ReplyDeleteI kept subconsciously thinking about a new term for the theory method we came up with in our group- all day...what DO you call a theory method that puts people in a strange environment with strange tools and watch them slowly learn how to cope with the tools they are given based on only their own intuition..? Late that night I came up with "Theory of cognitive sensory intuition"... (theory of cognitive intuition= why we know something without knowing it, just based on intuition and instinct)
I now have a headache :D
Hi,
ReplyDeleteYes it was really difficult to derive the theory within the paper before I learned where to check for it. Now it is really easy to understand the theory used in the paper.
"Theory of cognitive sensory intuition"... :D, I think it is pretty good definition. :D