For this assignment, students will write a 4 to 5-page literature review on some topic within their chosen theme which will serve to establish a research question for the final proposal. We will spend a full synchronous session discussing this assignment, how to conduct a literature review, and how to define a research question. Literature reviews should reference a minimum of five academic sources.
A literature review is, in effect, an account of the conversation that exists in a field of study. The purpose of the literature review is to further refine your research question by identifying key gaps in the existing body of knowledge. In order to write a literature review you will have to have some general idea about the kinds of questions you want to explore, though your final research question which motivates your research proposal will be the outcome of this literature review.
Step 1: Identify your broad area of interest within your chosen theme
Step 2: Identify different topics/themes/keywords that you will use to search for literature
Step 3: Read your sources keeping in mind the following questions:
What is the authors main question?
What kinds of methods did they use?
What is their theoretical approach?
What are their conclusions?
How do they respond to other contributions to the subject? What do they agree/disagree with? Why?
What do you think are limitations of the study? Is there anything missing from the analysis? What questions are you left with?
Step 4: Thematically group the different contributions you have read (note you can break down each article into different parts also). For example, you might want to look at each articles approach to the topics from the perspective of theory, their methods, or their treatment of a particular (common) empirical issue (ie. how do each of the authors explain a particular relationship, behavior, policy, etc.). Organizing your notes in this way will allow you to see the different articles in conversation with each other.
Step 5: Write it up! Keep in mind that you should not simply be listing articles and describing the content. You are giving me an account of the existing conversation to date.
What is the problem?
How have people examined the problem?
What different approaches have been used?
Where do scholars tend to agree?
Where do scholars disagree?
What do you think?
What is missing from the conversation?
This last point is the purpose of your literature review you should conclude by indicating to me how you will intervene in these debates by posing the research question you arrive at.
Step 6: Review and edit!
Resources
https://www.ryerson.ca/content/dam/studentlearningsupport/resources/types-of-writing/Writing%20a%20Literature%20Review.pdf
https://learn.library.ryerson.ca/literaturereview
https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/twc/sites/utsc.utoronto.ca.twc/files/resource-files/LitReview.pdf
http://www.raulpacheco.org/search/literature+review
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