This week I have explored a journal and read a research paper. During the week we also had two seminars, during the first we discussed the journals that we picked and the papers that we read and during the second we discussed the theory in our paper and what theory is.
Before this week I had a very different view of what theory was. Now I have understood that it is not a guess or a thought but more of a serious scientific proof of a phenomenon. One year ago when I started to think about my bachelor thesis I did not understand what the term theory really meant and that created some confusion when I started writing.
It really helped me understand what a good theory was when criticized the theories in the papers. Most of the criticism was about how the data was collected and analysed. Most of the tests were done with people involved and the group of people were not always representative for the rest of the population. Theories can also be based on other theories, this was something my group talked about at the second seminar. We chose social capital as our theory to present to the group and found out that it is really hard to test that the theory is solid and also to use it. How do you define social capital? Well if you have a thousand friends it does not matter much if they are all having a very low human capital. Human capital is another theory and we thought that social capital was dependent on human capital.
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