Theme 3 (Pre): Research and theory

Select a research journal that you believe is relevant for media technology research. The journal should be of high quality, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Write a short description of the journal and what kind of research it publishes.

I selected the journal “Social Networks – An International Journal of Structural Analysis”, which is an interdisciplinary and international quarterly. The journal has an impact factor of 2.000 and publishes theoretical and substantive papers with a focus on social relations and associations that may be expressed in network form. Main research fields are social behaviour, social networks and social structure.

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.

Summary:

I chose the research paper “Twitter users change word usage according to conversation-partner social identity”. The authors Nadine Tamburrini, Marco Cinnirella, Vincent A.A. Jansen and John Bryden investigated how people express social identity on a social network. Former studies have shown that expression of social identity is often strongly context dependent. This means that the language which people use within social groups is showing a convergence of behaviour. However, the former studies looked only at specific groups or social situations on a relative small scale. Due to its network size and the publicly accessible nature the research paper used the social network “Twitter” as object of their analysis to gain a considerable statistical power. The research paper asked if individuals shifted their linguistic behaviour according to which social group they are messaging and if this level of language variation for a community correlated with how strongly linked a community is within itself. The data of online communities that the authors used came from a previous study of the Twitter website (Bryden et al.,2013) and comprised 189.000 Twitter users. The authors found out that users adjust word usage according to the community of their dialogue partner. Furthermore, they found evidence that the more a group was isolated from the rest of the network the more it showed linguistic convergence. These findings echoes other studies of linguistic variation within and between groups and the idea that communities may develop unique linguistic styles.

Critical examination:

* Are the data valid and reliable representations of the empirical reality they attempt to capture?

The research paper was based on data with a date range of January 2007 to November 2009. For a publication in January 2015 and due to the fast changing environment of social networks the data could be more up to date in order to get more reliable results.

* What is the significance of this research?

According to the authors the significance of this research is the scale at which this study took place as previous have looked at convergence did not find significance with sample sizes on a small scale. In my view the significance of this research is not very significant as it only indicates that future studies on social identity, social behaviour and cooperation are likely to prove fruitful on large scale as the results were compatible with prior studies.

* What might you have done differently?

I wouldn’t have used Twitter as basis for this research paper as the messages are very limited with a maximum of 140 characters. As Facebook has already implemented its tagging function within comments in September 2009 an empirical analysis of more current data with an increased expressiveness might have increased the significance of the whole research paper.   

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

Gregor distinguishes five different types of theory. According to his nature of theory in information systems there are the following types of theory existing:

1: theory for analysing

2: theory for explaining

3: theory for predicting

4: theory for explaining

5: theory for design and action

However, and as these distinctions might be not plausibly to a first year university student I would describe theory as a mean to structure complexity and abstractness in order to let phenomena of interests fall into patterns, resulting in a collection of results and conclusions.

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?

The major theory which was used in “Twitter users change word usage according to conversation-partner social identity” is theory type I. “Analysis”. The research paper provides a clear description of how people express social identity at a large scale on a social network and its aim is to gain statistical power. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the power of methods which analyse subtle human behaviour on social networks and thus it is never leaving the thematic field of analysis and description.

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

In my view the limitation of theory type I. “Analysis” is that the research only creates the base, without creating new insights and perspectives. Thus, it is a preliminary stage for the other theory types, except for theory type V. “Design and Action”.

Due to its sole focus on analysis and subsequent on description theory type I. can bring out findings what have been undiscovered respectively unperceived. The concentration on investigating avoids an incomplete evaluation of a situation. Thus, it is maybe sometimes better to be master of one trade, and not a joker of all.