Literature Review Tutorial

1. Literature Review Tutorial January 31st, 2014 CRM4304

2. Reminder…What is a literature review? • Analyzes a body of literature • Organizes this body of literature by themes or categories • Presents the research and the ideas on the topic rather than individual work or an individual author by itself • The goal is to situate your topic among previous and current research on the subject (my translation, http://guides.bib.umontreal.ca/disciplines/296-Revue-de-litteratureRecension-des-ecrits)

3. How to go about writing a literature review • Step 1 : Find articles • Step 2: Summarize/Synthetize each document • Step 3: Identify what each document brings to the topic in general • Step 4: Make links between the articles/documents you’ve read • Step 5: Present and organize the articles (different ways of doing this, for this class, the prof wants you to organize it by theme)

4. One way of doing it…. Source: Manuel des sciences sociales, Campenhoudt & Quivy 2 options - Make a grid for each article where you insert the main ideas and number them so that you can refer to directly to your notes - Make a grid for all your articles, present the main idea of each article and this will make it easier/quicker to organize your literature at the end.

5. Finding “good” sourcesSource: Manuel des sciences sociales, Campenhoudt & Quivy • Start with a solid research question (this will make sure you don’t lose track of what it is you are looking for) • Try to avoid the really long articles/books unless you know they are essential to your topic/ research question • Look for articles that don’t only present the findings but that analyze and interpret these findings • Try to find articles that study your phenomenon/topic from different angles ( this will help you identify what the literature says and does not say)

6. Finding appropriate sources • For this class… • Peer reviewed articles • Qualitative (avoid quantitative sources such as psych. Articles) • Must have been published between 2000- now

7. A few other things… • Identify the type of data that is used (i.e. ethnographic for example) this might be helpful in organizing your lit. review • In the guidelines, Dr. Landry indicated that she wants you to find 4 articles “that will address the qualitative methodological approach you are planning to use” • If you plan on doing content analysis for example, this does not mean go find four articles that talk about content analysis as a methodological approach • Find articles on your topic, in which authors have used the same approach you plan on using! • So if you are planning on doing the content analysis of a show, chances are that you will not be the first person to do this!

8. A few other things… • One last tip… • Be clear and concise in what you are saying • Avoid using sentences like “In his article [insert title], John Smith discusses…” or “John Smith identifies the theme of poverty in his article [insert title]” • Dr. Landry DOES NOT want this. It comes off as space filler • She would prefer something like “The theme of poverty ([APA SOURCE], ex. Smith, 2014; 5) is prevalent …”

9. Exercise • Take 10-15 minutes to go over the abstracts and identify the main ideas • Get into small groups and figure out how you would organize these abstracts if you had to write a literature review • Chances are the answers won’t be the same even though we all read the same thing!