What have I learned after this week about THEORY???
The actual question that I had after reading
these two articles, was what theory is and what theory is not exactly, and how
I can tell if a specific theory is a good or a bad one. During today’s seminar I
realized that THEORY is somehow an abstract concept. There are many different
views about it, depending on everyone’s background. Different backgrounds lead
to different views of theory. For example engineers or mechanics want a
design/action oriented theory; they
care about the experiment, the result, basically how to do something.
To the point, theory is something that people construct, that actually attempts
to explain the relationship between cause and event. Also, it is basically based
on information and can be produced and supported by data, diagrams, variables,
references and hypotheses.
But, when a theory stops being a hypothesis and
becomes a theory? We must have in mind that hypotheses serve as the link between
data and theory and must always be very well grounded. A hypothesis can help to build the main idea
of a theory and also support this theory which has to be supported with further
evidence as well. According to Bailee Morris and her article “How to
Differentiate in Hypothesis & Theory”, we can say that we obtain a theory
about something after the concerning hypothesis has been very well tested. In
general, people are very certain and positive in accepting a theory, but in the
case of a hypothesis they keep a more skeptical attitude.
In my article “Television and Web advertising Synergies” by Yuhmiin
Chang and Esther Thorson, I can recognize a theory of advertising that belongs
to the type IV- EP explanation and prediction. The authors were firstly based on past experiments
and literature and then made some hypotheses on how people react and accept
advertisement presented from more than just one media source (media synergies)
and tried to prove these hypotheses right by doing an experiment. The hypotheses tests showed that a television-Web
synergy did produce an effect that was better than a repetitive advertisement
presented from one single media platform.
References:
Morris, Baille (2006), “How to Differentiate in Hypothesis & Theory”, eHow Contributor
I like that you mentioned that hypothesis are “something like a bridge”. There by you can picture the fluent passage from hypothesis to thesis in a good way. We are also able to show with this kind of picture that at one point on this “bridge” is a blur, where it is hard to say if something is more a theory or more a hypothesis. I think that we have to stay open-minded and that we have to accept that we can’t find always a 100% definition of something.
SvaraRaderaYou mentioned that you can now tell which theory is a good and which is bad. I'm just curious to know, as far as research is concerned, are there any really good or bad theories? I would want to think that a theory is neither good nor bad until it is placed or used in a particular context. What do you think?
SvaraRadera