Even though this weeks subject was easier to relate to I think that the seminar was a bit confusing to me. Interesting but a little bit hard to grasp. I got the part where we said that theory is a set of propositions but wasn't as sure about the part where we said that a hypothesis could be turned into a theory. Or, I understand that you are able to do this, but I forgot to ask if data alone from an empirical study is enough to convert a hypothesis to a theory. Since I read in this week's articles that data is one of the things you most commonly mistake for being theory I wonder what it actually takes to turn an hypothesis into a theory.
Thinking about my article, I still think as I wrote before the seminar that the whole article would have been more interesting if it would have been put into a bigger context. Like we discussed in the seminar, the research was quite narrow and it would have been much more interesting to see how people would be affected by these results rather than the results itself.
After this week I think it's easier to understand what is not theory than what actually is. The five things that Sutton & Staw mentioned in their paper (references, data, list of variables, diagrams and hypothesis) actually made sense when you read them one by one. It made sense that none of these alone could prove a theory but I guess a lot of people want them to do that because it's easier to jump to conclusions than actually proving them. You have to look at the whole picture and rather answer why the data showed these empirical patterns? Why these references are relative to your work. That is the only way to come close to something that is called theory I guess.
Hi Andreas,
SvaraRaderaI agree with you, theme 3 was easier to grasp than the other teams but the seminar kind of made it all confusing to me. I think it’s a great question you have, what turns a hypothesis into a theory? My understanding on what a hypothesis is, are after the seminar that it could be tested as true/false or irrelevant. Is then a true hypothesis a theory? And how many times to you have to test the hypothesis as true to be an acceptable theory?
I think this is really hard and there is probably no right or wrong answers to this.
Happy weekend!
Sofia
Hi, this is a topic that needs many thoughts and discussions to achieve a concrete idea of what a theory is, the different types of theories and how to distinguish a theory of a hypothesis. It's complicated because, before this course we never had stopped to think about any of these concepts simply we assumed we understood their meanings. Moreover we used to refer to scientific theories when we use the term, which aims to explain the nature of an event using the popular "scientific method", which can be falsifiable, different from philosophical theories.
SvaraRaderaOn your reflection you have several excellent questions, which despite having my ideas clearer about what is a theory, I'm not able to answer concretely. However i think there are many different points of view when answering them.
Isaac Rondon