Do you ever wonder what kind of review is needed to show your findings?
A literature review is a comprehensive study and interpretation of literature that relates to a particular topic. We identify research question and seek the answer by reviewing relevant literature. This leads you to new insights.
The review should provide the reader with a picture to the major questions on the subject. In practice, this may prove rather difficult. It requires discipline to prepare a review. We must prove that we have studied the subject.
It involves questioning assumptions, querying claims with no evidence, and considering the findings against others. The literature review must explain relationships between findings. We must produce a concept to built on the theoretical structure. We must be able to explain facts and relationships between them.
The reason for it is to summarise previous knowledge to guide our future course of action. Theory is an essential tool for research as it advance the knowledge further.
Theory has been described as being ‘a set of interrelated abstract propositions about human affairs and the social world that explain their regularities and relationships’ (Brewer 2000: 192).
It often refers to the current state of knowledge in a particular subject.
The process of establishing a map or framework and how the research will be constructed is important.
If a study is based on theory, the framework is called the theoretical framework. In a study that roots in a conceptual model, the framework is often called the conceptual framework. Frameworks can be very powerful when summarising different facts. They will also depend on the understanding and interpretation of the researches.
The critical review
We cannot include all our sources in the literature review, but focus on a particular topic. We group the topics in the relevant headings we want to investigate.
Example review:
‘Pillitteri (1994: 132) sees the decline in student enrolment in nursing education programmes to be a serious concern for the profession and Naylor (1990: 123) projected that the total number of new graduates from all the nursing programmes in the USA would drop from 82,700 in 1985 to 68,700 in 1995. Among the reasons for such a decline was that students did not find nursing attractive as a lifelong career. Such perceptions were perpetuated by unrealistic portrayals of nursing in the mass media and the alternative careers that women could enter today (Brooks 1989: 121; Fagin et al. 1988: 367; Kelsey 1990 cited in Pillitteri 1994: 132).’
(Fan 1998: 31)
All subsequent paragraphs deal with other research findings that identify similar reasons for the decline. We support each of the items with name, date and page number of the source and the full list of references at the end of the work.
A good job is to categorise the findings into main headings, each had its subheadings.
Another example
‘In this article, we examine the role of a student’s age, gender and subject of study as predictors of their academic attainment in higher education, and in particular as predictors of the classes of first degrees awarded by institutions of higher education in the UK. There has been a good deal of interest in this topic over the last 30 years, and our analysis builds on the findings of several previous investigations that examined the performance of graduates in the UK.’
(Richardson and Woodley 2003: 475)
Readers would be then taken to a table of previous analysis and predictions. The author then continues with his own findings. These are followed by different groupings and categories.
‘Interest in the role of age as a predictor of academic attainment is often motivated by a stereotype of older people as being deficient in intellectual skills (Richardson and King 1998). Cross-sectional studies comparing groups of different ages have indicated that there is a slight decline in intellectual function between the ages of 18 and 60, with a more pronounced decline thereafter (e.g. Nyberg et al. 1996; Verhaeghen and Salthouse 1997). Such results are, however, contaminated by cohort differences in life experience, and longitudinal studies comparing the same groups at different ages often find no statistically significant decline before the age of 60 (Schaie 1996: 107–36). When any age-related changes in performance are observed, they typically amount to a reduction in information processing, whereas access to stored information is usually unaffected (Klatzky 1988; Nyberg et al. 1996). There is thus no reason to expect a reduction in attainment with advancing age in situations that demand the retrieval of knowledge (Baltes et al. 1984), except when they involve time pressure (Verhaeghen and Salthouse 1997). Of course, one situation that fits the latter description is the traditional unseen examination.’
Sometimes it is sufficient to produce a brief account for selected literature and draw some conclusions.
Quotations
We can also paraphrase different ideas - expressing them in our own worlds or using quotations. The ratio between the paraphrasing and quotation should be approx.3:1 in the favour of expressing the authors ideas in our own words.
We generally use quotations to:
* bring author's definitions of important terms
* particular example of author's viewpoint that could be difficult to paraphrase
* well-expressed opinions.
The quotations need to fit grammatically with the rest of the sentence. In some cases we need to modify the quote using square brackets to include a verb or change a pronoun.
Literature review should be more than just list of references that are relevant to your research topic. We need to question assumptions, querying claims to which no evidence has been provided and considering the findings of the author against others.
Research findings can be dangerous and we need to provide evidence to warrant assumptions.
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