For this theme I chose a journal called Communication Research and it has an impact factor of 2.493. This journal publishes articles about communication in societal systems.
I read the article “Redefining Media Content and Structure in Terms of Available Resources: Toward a Dynamic Human-Centric Theory of Communication”. In this article Sungkyoung Lee and Annie Lang examines the moment by moment memory processing of television messages as a function of the difficulty of processing the message.
Their aim is to give an introduction to how to be able to predict how the memory process works. In order to answer their hypotheses their method was to include 3 variables that they examined. Furthermore they presented different television messages, in the form of news reports, to their participants in their study and then asked the participants questions about what they could remember afterwards. To see how much memory it takes to gather the information in the news reports they used a method of presenting the participants with an assignment to react to a signal given during the television message by pushing a button.
As a conclusion they present their data and discuss how it is related to the predictions they made in their hypotheses. They had 4 hypotheses that were predictions of events and outcomes, and they were proven correct based on their data.
Based on what we have read in terms of theory I think that there is a theory in the article, as to not having a theory at all. In general they explained their thought process and the data that was presented. At times there were references to earlier concepts that I found lacking of an explanation to certain statements. For example it is said that:
“Humans have not evolved since media were invented. Therefore, to some extent, they process media as real environmental stimuli (Reeves & Nass, 1996).”
Although this might be a fact, I was not able to find any explanation as to why humans have not evolved since media were invented.
Overall the article had a good composition.
The following statement is to give a brief explanation as to what theory is:
A theory is what can make it possible to develop our knowledge.
It is the theory that gives an article, or report, its value.Theory is not what will huge amounts of data presented in order to answer a certain question, or hypothesis. Instead it would be the explanations and generalisations that can be made with the help from the data. In other words data are ways of finding a pattern during observations and theory would be the explanations as to why there is a pattern. Theories can be based on former theories, however only if they are able to present something new given the former theories that exist in the field. Neither are hypothesis or predictions alone a theory, they will only introduce what the article is aiming to answer.
I think that the article I read is of theory type IV (explanation and prediction). Because it holds information on what is to be expected and when it is to be expected. It is explained that the memory in a “human processing system” have a limit. That not all messages given will be stored, and predictions on how the memory will act in terms of when different difficulties of messages are presented. However they continuously aim to explain the different memory processes with terms of “resources allocated and required” which I consider to be their explanation of the phenomena of memory processing.
Benefits with this type of theory is that it is a way of theory building or theory testing (Gregor 2006).
The limitations witht this type of theory is that at times the hypotheses in these kinds of articles might lead to observing changes with a lack of a answer that they try to answer.
References:
Sungkyoung L. and Annie L. (2015). Redefining Media Content and Structure in Terms of Available Resources: Toward a Dynamic Human-Centric Theory of Communication - http://crx.sagepub.com/content/42/5/599.full.pdf
Gregor, S. (2006). The Nature of Theory in Information Systems - http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~petterog/Kurs/INF5220/NatureofTheoryMISQ.pdf
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