Explore – Smartphone-based Activities: Put your investigative skills to the test with these quick interactive activities. Dig deeper into key concepts and understand how they might relate to your own research project via guided website searches and online discussion questions.

7.1 Student theory

Sometimes social theory can appear to be abstract and daunting. Google ‘social theory’. What seems the most useful definition? Now read the following paper:

Mauthner, N. S., & Doucet, A. (2003). Reflexive Accounts and Accounts of Reflexivity in Qualitative Data Analysis. Sociology, 37(3), 413–431.

In this paper, Natasha Mauthner and Andrea Doucet discuss how basic theoretical issues arose and were settled during their own PhD dissertations.

What more have you learned? How does this paper compare to what you found in your own Google search?