Pre-reflection of Theme 3

Research Journal:

The journal I chose is ‘Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC)’.

Impact factor: 2.019 (JCMC Five Year Impact Factor: 4.748)

JCMC is one of the oldest web-based Internet studies journals in existence, having been published quarterly continuously since June 1995. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) is a web-based, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its focus is social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies.

I found this journal more related with media technology because as it broadly publishes work by scholars in media studies, communication, information science, business, political science, psychology and other relevant disciplines.

Research Paper:

The paper I chose is ‘The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites’ that is published under ‘Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC)’. This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. Also it described bonding,bridging and maintenance of social capitals and how social network sites asses one’s ability to stay connected with other people which are previously inhabited in community. The authors collected data by surveys and they came up with regression analysis of undergraduate students (N = 286), which shows a strong association between use of Facebook and three types of social network sites such as Friendster, CyWorld and MySpace. This paper is more about Facebook usage such as ‘elements is profile and perception of who has viewed profile’ and also ‘use of Facebook to meet new people vs connecting with existing offline contacts’. Also how in short period of time, Facebook has generated strong percentage of users on college campuses. The key finding of this study is, control of demographic factors, psychological well-being measures, and the general internet use is not a significant predictor of bridging social capital, and only certain kind of internet uses support the generation and maintenance of bridging social capital. This study also shows analysis of psychological measures and found that, the extent of students’ satisfaction with the life at university campus was strongly correlated with bridging social capital.

  1.    Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

According to Orlikowski and Robey (1991), ‘Theory as statements providing a lens for viewing or explaining the world’. The term ‘theory’ cannot be describe easily as it have different perspectives depending to some degree on philosophical and disciplinary orientations. Theroy is a possible answer to why and how. Theory is not a hypothesis but an explanation of the observation. But this explanations give birth to several hypotheses that can be right or wrong

Sutton and Staw 1995 argue that data, variable, diagrams, hypothesis and tables are not theories. Gregor talks about five types of theories in essay but, he says still  there is a limit to what is classed as theory. However, Abstraction and generalization about phenomenon, interactions, and causation are thought to be at the core of a theory in the text.

  2.    Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

As I understand from Gregor text, I think this paper is characterized in table 3 (Prediction). Because this study is brought up with six different hypothesis, then authors used surveys method to test these hypothesis. In another way, this study is based on one popular social site (Facebook), authors got small number of answers such as 286 from 800 people even they offered 5$ to students for participating in survey. In this way, it’s not well-organized study as it does not contain any satisfactory conclusion. The structure of study is more like predictions, testing propositions and explaining the hypothesis.

  3.    Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

I think the strength with this article is that it came up with some hypothesis that came out of perceptions or predictions. These hypothesis were later tested by using scientific methods so we have answers in terms of true and false. But on the shorter side we don’t know the underlying reasons for these conclusions and perhaps we need another study to have further deeper explanation of underlying phenomenon.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x/pdf
http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~petterog/Kurs/INF5220/NatureofTheoryMISQ.pdf