Research and Theory- Reflections

After yet another week of this course and its content has the work of writing about a subject and the following reflection been a nice little routine in my life. What makes the routine enjoyably is that the subjects have become more and more interesting for every week. During this week was especially the formulation of what theory is and the search for journals been most intriguing. 

Since I first could summarize my thoughts properly in life have I made out theories of various subjects, all from which baby bottle I preferred to academic theories. Despite that, I have never really formulated a definition of what a theory really is, and what a theory is not. To first try and formulate what theory is for me, and after partake in my fellow students definitions has enriched my academic abilities. When I wrote my bachelor thesis 1,5 year ago was not the theory part not 100 per cent clear, hence the quality did not meet my personal requirement. Since I am writing my master thesis after Christmas, this theory definition has helped me a lot.  

Further was it good to participate in seminars, not only because it is a good chance to discuss complicated questions, but also because it is possible to hear about interesting papers from excellent journals. The only types of journals I was familiar with before this course was the big famous ones, which frequently appeared in mass media, like Nature. Hence, I have not worked so much directly with journals, since my collection of empirical data always been focused directly on finding relevant articles, and I have not looked for relevant journals. Since many of the journals are focus on very specific subjects am I going to change my behavior in collecting empirical data in the future. For that purpose is it good that a quality rating, in form of the impact factor, exist. The impact factor makes it easy to get a quick direct response of which quality the journal holds, so no time needs to be wasted. 

I believe that Gregor's text was well written, and he distinguished the different kinds of theory types in a clear way. Luckily for me was the task of choosing what type of theory my text had easy, the author of "Tastes, ties and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com" utilized the theory of analyses. For that purpose was the seminar good, to listen to my fellow peers and their motivations of choosing the theory type they did. Next text I will receive a text may it not be as easy to pinpoint what kind of theory being used, so the seminar helped me to get a broader understanding of the different types of theory.