Final post

I want to start this final reflection with the overarching goal in this course: To understand theory and method for media technology. The intention was to provide us with deeper understanding of what theory is, how knowledge is produced and constructed, how a research is conducted and how we can classify the value of researches we read. That is quite a lot to cope with and learn in just a few weeks. In general the course provided us the optimal possibility to learn. Through working on the themes, putting them into own words and repeating the learnt information is transformed into knowledge in the most optimal way. Sometimes I would have wished that the discussion seminars would have been about more than just the questions that we tried to answer already. Some more perspectives would have been nice and interesting. But that’s enough about the reflection of the course in general.

In the beginning we had to work on really abstract topics and when looking at the course title I often asked myself for what all that work was. Looking back at it now I understand that the course is built up like a road that leads you to a basic understanding of research. It began with the essential and really philosophical questions about what knowledge is in general. The Critique of Pure Reason of Kant and Plato’s Theaetetus challenged us in taking another perspective of the world. Of course we all knew before in some kind what knowledge is: Knowing the capital of China, know what colour comes out when you mix blue and yellow, knowing what two plus two is or knowing about words in other languages. We learnt our entire life until now and also will continue to learn until our time is up on the earth, but I think the least of us were coping with these questions before about what knowledge actually means. Especially when it comes to greater topics like Metaphysics, what happens to knowledge that we can’t confirm posteriori. Is it still knowledge or just a theoretical construct? When does a theoretical construct become knowledge? And is the knowledge that we think to have as well knowledge for someone else? It continued through the following themes that made us question if the structures and traditions we are having in the society are just myths and if we we can overcome them with enlightenment. It was important to think about all these topics in order to understand what we are trying to do with research. We want to enlighten the world. We want to provide theories to construct knowledge in the people’s minds.

But then at the same time knowledge is not always the same thing. When it is based on theory or provided through theory knowledge can be really different in hard sciences or social sciences. So understanding for ourselves that theory is not just easy to capture in our field is a basic background understanding that all of us should have. Especially when we are starting to conduct researches we should always know where we are going and what our overall goal with it is. The struggles of theories in social sciences are, that the knowledge that is provided through them is just the building of theoretical constructs. Maybe “just” is not the right word here, but these theoretical constructs try to explain not something that is easy to catch or can be seen or felt, like in hard sciences, it is again something theoretical about what happens in human being. Human behavior can of course be seen and maybe “felt”, but the intentions, opinion or decision processes can’t. So what we are trying to work with are theories about theoretical things.

Next to trying to understand what we are aiming to receive and provide to others through research, the course taught us the methodology to do so. Basically there are two ways of accessing research fields or collecting and interpreting data: Qualitative and quantitative. Each of them approaches informations or fields differently. The basic thought behind qualitative research is to explore fields or different topics. The aim is to gain new information that we didn’t know about in this context before. Compared to that the intention of quantitative research is to confirm findings and generalize them through standardization. Both methods cover lots of options about how the information can be collected or interpreted. For qualitative methods examples are interviews or observations. For quantitative methods examples are surveys or content analysis. Theories play in both areas a central role. Simply said either we try to confirm a theory (quantitative) or we try to extend and find new theory (qualitative). In reality it can not be distinguished of course.

Next to these basic methods we also have Research through Design where the methods to get to a theory can often neither be sorted into a qualitative or quantitative approach. The topics and goals are not the same as the ones that are trying to be achieved as in let’s say the “traditional” researches. The method is the designing process itself and the outcome is a solution for a specific case and not a concrete theory. As kind of a “meta-method” we learnt about case-studies. Here can be both methods used (qualitative and quantitative). The aim is to understand specific cases. The research process is lead through the field and a research question is the outcome and not the start (like in qualitative and quantitative research).

In the end we have to ask us again why we want to do researches and what our intentions are when we are doing research. I think that the course gave us exactly what it aimed to do: Giving us the opportunity to find ourselves in the research world through facing one the one hand the different opportunities that we are having to do research and on the other hand to clarify for ourselves why we intend to do so and what our aim is.

I want to end this last blogpost with a quote from one of my earlier posts: “I am still not entirely sure what it means for me, but I think every researcher has to reflect on what knowledge means for themselves. For the moment I can say that we as maybe-future-researchers in social sciences should always seek to being creative and investigate the things that we are interested in. Even if it is just a small piece of knowledge that we are gaining through a research, it is still a puzzle piece to the understanding of the world. And with world I mean our personal world with our perspectives and comprehensions, that are based on our previous knowledge and that shapes our values and behavior.”