Reflections after third seminar

At the seminar we discussed the meaning of theory and what theory can apply. We discussed the five different types of theory that Shirley Gregor wrote about in her text. We had at the seminar, a hard time understandning the big differences between them, but after the discussion, it became clearer. We discussed the individual papers we had read, and the theory behind them.

During the seminar I learned that theory is not concrete. It is a set of statements about something, and it is the theory that makes is possible, in a research, to gather hypotheses.

I read and analyzed the text Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth and concluded the text had a type three, prediction theory. Due to their research and research questions was partly based on earlier similar research and they predicted to get similar answers. But unfortunately, I had not interpreted the text in the right manner, and the authors wanted to analyze if the patterns from previous research was the same. Therefor, the basic theory in my text, was theory one, analysis, that says, what is. And I now realise that this theory makes more sense. Because the authors do not measure the youths internet use depending on e.g genders, more how they use the internet and what they use internet for. They base their research questions and hypotheses on erlier studies that have been done with adults. And therefore they analyze if the homeless youths use the internet in a similar way. During the seminar, Leif asked us the question How many trees represent a forest? We can have a theory of how many trees that represent a forest, but we need to analyse our theory to get the right answer. This is similar to the research paper I read. From earlier studies they could obtain several hyptheses, but they needed to analyse, if they could reject it or not. It is hard to know which theory to apply to a research paper, and we learned at the seminar that there are often more, than just one theory to apply.