Theme 2, Theory

What is theory?

Theory could be understood as logical reasoning, that argues for why something that can be observed might lead to another observed phenomenon. The theory also has to argue why these two are related. This can be seen in many of the more famous theories such as the logical reasoning behind why objects acted upon by a force stay in motion until acted upon by another force. Here the force is related to the movement of the object. 

It's important to note that a theory is not something that is only observed(data). So observing that an object acted upon by a force stays in motion is not a theory, the theory is constructed by reasoning why this is the case, and then making it more certain by observing occurrences when the theory is proven to work.

When writing a scientific paper its also not enough to use references to constitute the theory of that paper. The theories also have to be explained, and the author/authors have to argue why the theory is relevant to their research. 

Theory used in the paper I selected

The paper I selected to read was a paper in the field of Medical Information Technologies that was published in the journal: Journal of American Medical Information Association. I choose the paper because of it's deliberate use of grounded theory to construct a framework of how consumer health information technologies(CHIT) should be developed and understood from the patient perspective(Or et. al 2010).

The grounded theories that are used in the paper is the theory of planned behavior that was proposed by Icek Ajzen and the unified theory of Acceptance and use of technology proposed by Viswanath Venkatesh et. al  (1991, 2003). The theory that's laid up in the paper builds on these two theories and proposes that the effective use of a CHIT system can be understood in terms of behavioral intention built up from how useful the patients think the system will be and the healthcare knowledge of the patient. The theory is then tested on a group of home care patients using a web-based system for self-care of chronic cardiac disease. 

I would place this theory in the category of Explaining and Predicting(EP-theory) found in Shirley Gregors paper on the Nature of theory in Information Systems(Gregor 2006). This because it both explains the causal relationships that can be used to predict the effective use of a CHIT system, and those causalities are explained using the two more general theories. The theory is also tested and its concluded that the theory can predict the effective usage of a CHIT system. 

I think that the benefits of using the theory in the paper are related to the theory's limitation. The benefit I see is that the theory can be applied to any user-group since its not limited to any parameters in the user group in such as what age, gender, income etc. This is also a limitation of the theory since some of those parameters are likely to be excluded by the theory even though they might have an impact on the effective use. The theory also doesn't help in understanding "how" CHIT should be designed but only explains the causal relationships that predicted to what extent the system might be used. So the theory could be used to understand the user-group and how likely they are to use a system at all, but not how that system should be designed to meet the needs of those users. 

References

Gregor, S. 2006. "The Nature of Theory in Information Systems". MIS Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3

Or, CKL. Karsh, BT. Severtson, DJ. Burke, LJ. Brown, RL. Brennan, PF. 2010. "Factors affecting home care patients' acceptance of a web-based interactive self-management technology". J Am Med Inform Assoc Vol 18, No 1

Ajzen, I. 1991  "The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes". 

Venkatesh, V. Morris, MG. Davis, GB. Davis FD. 2003. "User acceptance of information technology: toward a unified view". MIS Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 3