I read an article from Journal of Communication, the primary journal of the International Communication Association, concentrating on (no surprises here) communications research. The journal claims to be especially interested in inter-disciplinary research, to reflect it's status as a forum of general research, cross-pollinating theories from the different sub-fields that fall under the broad category of communication sciences.
The paper I chose to read was from the above journal and is named "Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media-Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naive Theory". The paper deals with corrective effects of media fact checking in political issues. It examines how contextual cues can activate deeply seated prejudice and naive theories and therefore have a negative effect of the intended corrective effects of fact-checking. The empirical basis for the paper is an online embedded survey (N=750) and the statistics it rendered. The aims is to investigate to what extent the corrective effects of fact-checking work when paired with contextual cues designed to elicit a trigger of naive theories. The method is sound and the paper does well in criticising its chosen methods, but the theories used are, although frequently referenced, numerous and it is, in my own opinion, not immediately apparent to what extent they are compatible with each other and on what levels of analysis they can be applied. This is of course, much due to the characteristics of cross-disciplinary communication research; I think the paper gains a lot of merit from it's discussion and how it relates to the theories used.
1. Theory can be understood as a set of propositions that identifies some constructs or (abstract) objects and further relating them to each other in some nominal way. Theories can fall into different categories; theories used for analysis, for explanation, for prediction, for a combination of explanation and prediction or for suggesting action or design (functionalistic theory). In the natural sciences, theories that aim to explain phenomena almost exclusively rely on some form of causality. Presenting data and diagrams is not the same as using theory, and neither is referring to others' use of theory. To have a solid theoretical base for any argument, the propositions of the theory itself needs to be a part of the argument, before implications can be suggested and conclusions from data can be drawn.
2 -> 3. The major theory used in the paper is a theory of "Naive Theories", which is to be understood as a theory of mental models that represent implicit beliefs. Heuristic methods that people use to make sense of the world around us and categorise phenomena by using naive explanation models, oftentimes subconsciously. This theory could be said to belong both to the field of psychology and sociology, but primarily behavioural science, and aims at explaining the behaviour of people, as well as to some extent predicting behaviour as well. The aim of the paper could be seen as trying to find evidence that would suggest a design/action theory for the specific domain of media-based political fact checking on the basis of empirical data in conjunction with the theories used. The benefits of the theory is apparent in it's strength of explaining empirical data from, for example surveys, where N is large. The major limitation that is evident from the paper is how sensitive the theory is to context and the diversity of the sample-group. It seems that there is large number of not easily identifiable factors that can impact the behaviour of people, apart from those factors that the theory identifies, which makes its validity hard to confirm of falsify in particular instances. It therefore a theory that is very hard to test directly, because a laboratory setting that eliminates every other source of error is practically impossible (which could be said always is the case with theories of human behaviour).
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