Theme 3: Research and theory

I’ve chosen The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) for this week’s theme because I think this journal focus on very important topics for our society today and for the future. In some sense it cover sustainability as well. The journal also got a high impact level of 3.1.

Short description of the journal at hand:

JCMC focuses mainly on communicating with computer-based media technologies. Within this frame the journal also reviews work on communication, business, education, political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines. JCMC is a web-based journal and have been active since 1995 and as such, one of the oldest web-based journals.

We are supposed to explain what theory is and what it is not, but when no one up till now has been able to come up with a formula for what theory is I can’t see how we are supposed to do that. What I can tell you, or the “first year student in a university” is that we have managed to agree on what theory is not. According to the texts we read for this theme it is clear that theory is not: references, data, variables, diagrams, and hypotheses. If I’m to speak what theory is then I would say that it is the art of balancing theoretical quantitative research with empirical qualitative research.

For the last part of the theme I read the paper “Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth (2013, Eric Rice, Anamika Barman-Adhikari)”. The authors found that the available papers on homeless youths Internet behaviors were non-existing. Some papers investigated homeless adults in general in terms of Internet use but not youth or adolescent in particular. With good coverage of housed youth and their Internet use the authors approaches a theory based upon already known behaviors and with the help of already known patterns for housed youth they implies that the same might hold true even for the homeless youths. I would say that you could put their theory under the “Explanation” row in the “Table 2. A Taxonomy of Theory Types in Information Systems Research” in the paper The Nature of Theory in Information Systems.

The problem with this class of theory would be that it is hard the generalize the outcome without rendering the specific case useless or “yes, it is true in this certain case”. It is also hard to validate the outcome outside the given case as well.