Theme 3 – Research and Theory

The journal

I have chosen the journal Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The journal has an impact factor of 2.019 and it focus on social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies. Within that the journal publish work from different disciplines such as psychology, political science, business, education, media studies, information science, sociology and other disciplines.

The paper

I chose the paper More than Friends: Popularity on Facebook and its Role in Impression Formation by Scott, Graham G. which have been published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

The paper investigates the role of popularity online and its impact on targets’ personality and appearance. The study manipulated a few Facebook profiles using criteria for a popular profile (such as many friends and wallposts from other than the user oneself) and an unpopular profile (with few friends and few wallposts, mostly from the user oneself). As a total they did four profiles, two popular (one male and one female) and two unpopular (one male and one female). They then used 102 undergraduates who viewed these profiles and judged the individuals represented by each criteria (e. g. popular male etc.). The study showed that popular profiles were perceived to be more socially and physically attractive, extroverted and approachable than unpopular profiles.

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

Theory is about the connection between phenomena, it explains why, how and under which circumstances acts, events and structures occur. Theory is not references, diagrams, data, variables and hypotheses. However, these things can support the theory and thereby make it more believable.

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?

I think the theory in the paper I chose would categorize under Explaining and predicting. The paper are investigating which aspects of online personas that are used to form impressions. They test what kind of features that makes an online persona more attractive. They also explain why some features are more requested than others. Although I do not really think that they actually predicted something for the future this category describes their theory the most.

3.       Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?
The benefit with this theory is that it uses some kind of test and then evaluate it. So it is both a test and then an explanation about the results which is really good. A limitation is that the test in the paper that I read might be a bit subjective since it measures people’s impression.