Theme 3: Research and theory

'Theory' in its broadest form used in every day speech is a rather vague concept, which can refer to a single hypothesis or supposed chain of events. In science, however, one should be more careful with the concept since – depending on the scientific field – it has very specific characteristics and must not be used in a wrong context.

Theory could be described as a scientific model or chain of ideas that aims at explaining causalities. Theory is always presented as "possibly true" and it can be tested as well, but proving the theory right or wrong doesn't make any less of a theory. So theory is a system of ideas that provides knowledge via analysis and predictions. Theory gives the study its framework by reflecting the upcoming results on the scientific research that is done before.

According to Sutton & Staw (1995) a strong theory is none of the following:
- References to other theories without causal explanations
- Empirical findings from data (both qualitative and quantitative) are not the foundation of theory: they can support the theory, but they should not be construed as theory themselves
- Lists of variables or constructs are not theory
- Diagrams
- Hypotheses or predictions

To me it felt like these are very basic things. However, some of things listed above can indeed support the formation of a theory, but they are not to be considered as theory alone. I also believe the concept of theory is very much contextual and needs to be evaluated always depending on the context.

My choice of a scientific journal and article:

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is a web-based journal focusing in social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies. Within that general purview, the journal is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines. Its impact factor is 3.451 so it can be considered as valid for this assignment.

Without commenting whether the following was a good study or not, my choice for the article is "Who creates Trends in Online Social Media: The Crowd or Opinion Leaders?" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12145/epdf by Leihan Zhang, Jichang Zhao and Ke Xu. The researchers aim to research what causes a subject to become popular on the social media, is it the opinion leaders or crowds who decide what is worth sharing. In this post I am not going to pay that much attention to the subject or results of this study, but more to the theories and methods that were used conducting the study as well as the way of presenting the findings.

The empirical data was collected through the open API (Application Program Interface) under Weibo's license (the Chinese variant of Twitter). The size of the sample was 700 000 tweets from the Weibo stream during every day of 2013. The method used in this study was quantitative. The sample was analyzed and a certain amount of internet slang words were found and then further given value based on the appearance of those slang words. The users of Weibo themselves were analyzed as well and divided into groups based on the amount of followers they have. The figures support the findings of what's the significance of early adopters or opinion leaders at a certain peaks of subjects.

The major theory which creates the basis for this scientific article is conventional diffusion theory also known as the influental hypothesis. The theory states that a minority of people, called influentials, are generally considered to be the most critical factors affecting information cascades. According to the researchers this theory motivates the need for further study:

"However, empirical data to carefully validate these controversial arguments against the influentials hypothesis are still missing, which is the second motivation for our study."

When taking a closer look to the paper one could say it is both explanative and predictive. As Shirley Gregor defines on her paper, the definition of explanation and prediction (EP) type of theory fulfills when a theory says what is, how, why, when, where, and what will be. It also provides predictions and has both testable propositions and causal explanations.