Revising the Literature Review

1. Revising the Literature Review • The most common problems encountered in literature reviews are • Developing hypotheses about populations that you have no hope of randomly sampling from given your time and resource limitations • Questions such as “do men earn more than women” are probably not in the cards for you this semester • Not providing a clear definition of the variables of interest at an operational level or even at a conceptual level • You may have said that you wanted to study the impact of “political alienation” on media consumption. What are these variables? How would you define and measure them in an unambiguous way? • How have other researchers defined them? You want your work where possible to be contextualized by previous findings and thus it is important that definitions be consistent across studies, and very precise • Spending a lot of your literature review building a case that things are really bad in such and such a domain, from a societal perspective, without spending any time establishing that a claim that you propose to examine may be true, based on previous research or your own excellent reasoning • Don’t write a five-page jeremiad plus a hypothesis!

2. Revising the Literature Review • Assuming that the review of relevant literature was adequate and reported previous research related to the variables of interest, what is sometimes missing is in the section that immediately precedes the hypotheses/ research questions • The goal of the literature review is to set up your hypotheses by making them appear to be the inevitable outcome of what has gone before

3. Revising the Literature Review, cont’d • There are some classical strategies for setting up your hypotheses. If you are an Aristotle fan, you could call these topoi-places to go to find arguments • By the page which immediately precedes your hypotheses, you should be talking about a handful of studies which are all closely related and dealing with the same fairly narrow construct • Let’s take for an example your research hypothesis that men are less likely than women to support women’s basketball

4. Revising the Literature Review, con’t • One of the ways that we get from a literature review to a hypothesis is by demonstrating that the most immediately relevant literature is inconsistent • Four studies say women support women’s basketball more than men do, and four studies say the opposite • You make the claim that your study will seek to resolve these inconsistencies • You demonstrate that the inconsistent studies used inconsistent statistical methods and/or • You demonstrate that they had inconsistencies in construct conceptualization and operationalization and/or • You demonstrate that they used inconsistent causal reasoning and/or ignored alternative (confounding) variables and • You state that in your study you will remedy these problems and in brief, say how

5. Revising the Literature Review, con’t • Suppose that all of the studies say the same thing, but you disagree • You can argue that all the studies share (some of) the same common flaws or that each of them has a flaw • They lack statistical inference validity: they used a series of univariate tests but they should have done a multivariate analysis; or their effect size was very small and they got significantly lower scores for men because of their huge N • The lack construct validity: they defined support for basketball in terms of ticket sales but you will define it in terms of several different measures including TV viewing and reading about the team in the sports page • They lack internal validity: they attributed men’s lack of interest to gender role when the lack of interest, if it exists, is caused by lack of promotion of the sport among potential male fans; they did not assess plausible alternative explanations • Your study will not suffer from these problems

6. Revising the Literature Review, cont’d • Another approach, though one that is not without danger, is to claim that no one has tested this hypothesis/asked this research question before • You could get caught with egg on your face when you make this claim at a conference and somebody in the audience names ten studies that have been done that you apparently overlooked • For this reason it is a good idea to limit the “never done before” approach to very narrowly defined hypotheses • If you are to make this claim it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate that it’s a bad thing that nobody has looked at this issue before • Maybe no one has looked at it because it’s (a) obvious or (b) trivial or (c) the relationship you are proposing would seem to be counterintuitive or inconsistent with existing theory • Your job is to tell the reader where the gaps and inconsistencies are in the literature and make a compelling case that your study is the answer