Post reflection - Theme 3: Theory and research

This week’s theme was “theory and research” and the focus was on theory. Probably because theory is an important ingredient that good research depend on. You could say that the theory guides the research. I learnt what theory is not, but I still think that theory is an concept that is hard to know how you use it the right way. That it can take a little practise to create good and useful theory that can be proven. I think that branches of science have different views on theory and what is legit theory. And this makes it hard to define what theory is in only a couple of sentences. During the seminar we discussed; “What theory is”, “what is the difference between theory and hypothesis”, “different kinds of theory”.

We came up with the conclusion that a hypothesis is more of a statement that you want to test if it’s right or wrong. You could say that it’s an unproven theory. Since one thing I learnt this week is that a theory must be proven to be real theory. When you create a theory for a research before doing any methods you take different sections of theory from previous research that is all considered true and combine these into a new theory that can be proven.