Theme 3: Post theme post

This week I learnt that there is more to theories than I knew before. I read the texts The Nature of Theory in Information Systems (Gregor, S. 2006) and What Theory is Not (Sutton, R. I. & Staw, B. M. 1995) to get understanding of what theory really is. Then I read Switch on to games: Can digital games aid post-work recovery? (Emily Collins and Anna L. Cox. 2014) and tried to apply what I learnt from the two first texts when answering questions about the theories in the last one. This proved to be hard since I had never really thought about what was a theory and what was not before, and to analyse the article’s theories I had to read it thoroughly.

Since I was sick at the beginning of the week I couldn’t go the the lecture about this subject, but I read the lecture slides after and they proved to be good enough to learn a bit more about theory.
  Examples of things I thought was interesting in the slides were that a theory “provides an explanatory framework for an observation”, “is about the connections between phenomena, and explaining WHY, HOW and under WHAT circumstances acts, events, structures, and thoughts occur” and “requires context and logical reasoning and should in some way be generalised.” I also thought it was interesting that philosophical theories cannot specifically be scientifically tested through empirical observation.

In the seminar we discussed what a hypothesis is and what a theory is.
  A hypothesis helps answer a question, but it is not a question itself. For example: you want to know if all paper is white, then your scientific question is “Is all paper white?” while your hypothesis is either “All paper is white” or “Not all paper is white”. A hypothesis is in a way a prediction that you want to be falsifiable and is a tool you can use in your way towards knowledge.

Once you get the “answer” of a question after you’ve done a lot of research you can create a theory that describes, explains and enhances our understanding of the world (in some cases it can provide predictions of what will happen in the future.)
  Theories are often formed before hypotheses, so one does not have to follow the other in a strict order.

Since theories need context they take on different shapes in different research fields, so one kind of theory can’t necessarily be used in one field of study just because it can be used in another.

When talking about theories we have to keep in mind that nothing is absolute; there are no “true” theories; there is a possibility that all theories are wrong.
  When an old theory is disproved by a new one there can be a paradigm shift where we have to formulate new theories based on this new finding. But before this happens there probably will be a time when this new paradigm needs to build a large body of knowledge before it is accepted by the majority and looked upon as the “truth”.
  The current standing paradigm will probably be replaced by a new one and so forth, and old theories and knowledge in this sense acts as a springboard for new theories and knowledge.