Week #3 - Research and Theory (pre-reflection)

Select a research paper that is of high quality and relevant for media technology research. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Write a short summary of the paper and provide a critical examination of, for example, its aims, theoretical framing, research method, findings, analysis or implications.

Journal of Communication: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.focus.lib.kth.se/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1460-2466

Journal of Communication (not to be confused with Journal of Communications or International Journal of Communication) is a bi-monthly journal publishing research and scholarly articles with a broad aspect of communication. It has an impact factor of 2.011.

The paper I’ve decided to extract and briefly examine, is one called “Influence of Social Media Use on Discussion Network Heterogeneity and Civic Engagement: The Moderating Role of Personality Traits”, by authors Yonghwan Kim, Shih-Hsien Hsu, & Homero Gil de Zu´niga. What the paper aims to do is to examine how the use of social media affects individuals discussion network heterogeneity and their level of civic engagement, and also throwing in one’s personality traits as a factor. Early on, the paper asks the question: “Do social media [more specifically Facebook and Twitter, Ed.] contribute to society by exposing individuals to diverse or heterogeneous perspectives thus allowing them to participate in civic life more often?”.

The results weren’t jaw-dropping, but - simplified - they reached the conclusion that heterogeneity within ones civic engagement is "relatively better" with the introverts than the extroverts, concluding that “social media can be a useful tool for introverted individuals in helping them expand their social boundaries and civic life by providing them with the necessary information exchanges and social interactions”, adding that “this is positive news”.

While I found the piece relevant and valid, some critique may be appropriate. For starters, the research doesn’t exactly ooze with originality, and the authors do hypothesize and relate their research very much with similar, previously conducted, research, as well as coming to a lot of the same conclusions. While they are frank in doing this, it still doesn’t get as interesting as if they could present results that were groundbreaking. And while it should be known that I’m not an expert at research methods (shocker), I would say the method with which they conducted the research was fairly solid - as should be expected coming from a journal with a fairly high Impact factor. They conduct the research exploring two dependant variables and use control variables, and thoroughly accounts for how they’ve used all of the above.

As they hypothesized, the authors found that the civic engagement were higher in individuals who were active in social media, but this didn’t differ much at all between introverts and extroverts. As mentioned - these results weren’t extraordinary, in the sense that this is going to echo in social media research for years to come. This was mentioned in the discussion, and… Well, it’s almost as if you could almost sense a hint of disappointment from the authors.

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

The first thing that can be said, is that Theory is not simply a collection of data, references, variables, diagrams and hypotheses, even though these five elements often are used instead of theory (Sutton, Staw). The concept of Theory is further elaborated by Shirley Gregor, who proposes a taxonomy with five categories for what theory is. These are Analysis, Explanation, Prediction, Explanation and prediction, and Design and action. Each of these categories have different characteristics, and answers to different questions (such as "What is?", "How/why is?", "What will something be?", etc). She summarizes, saying you could see theories "as abstract entities that aim to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world and, in some cases, to provide predictions of what will happen in the future and to give a basis for intervention and action". 

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? 

The major theory presented by Kim, Y, et. al, is that a high level of social media usage increases ones discussion network heterogeneity. The authors are careful in drawing conclusions, as well as proposing causality from the results. The associations and results are statistically significant, although “not large”. I would therefore want to classify the selected paper as more of Type 1 - Analysis - than anything else. It kind of wets its toes in 2. Explanations and 3. Prediction, but stays in the shallow end of the taxonomy pool. 

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

I’m not sure I’m understanding this correctly, but isn’t it so that the lack of significant and large results in the case of Kim, Y, et. al, kind of limits the “selection” of theories? I mean - of course, they could’ve presented a causality in line with their results, answering the question “why?” instead of merely “what?”. But I mean - if you get results which don’t allow you to do this, you don’t really have a choice - unless you want to be "that guy who conducts bad research". What I see as a possible benefit by presenting the theory the way they’re doing is that it strengthens related and similar research, laying another small brick in the growing collective wall of social media research, instead of trying to achieve wonders on its own - with meager results.