Course Project Task IV/Preparing for the Literature Review

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Module 5 Overview

Many Argosy University doctoral students have benefitted from interviewing people who have completed dissertations or doctoral-level research. The first activity for this module will provide you with an opportunity to do just that. Asking questions that are not always addressed in written materials and hearing real-life experiences can provide a rich learning experience. Sometimes the stories heard by students provide them with an important list of do’s and don’ts. Sometimes the stories provided by the interviewees weave intriguing tales. Often, interviewees share the growth they experienced, sometimes in unexpected ways. Always the interviewees provide assurance that there is life after the completion of a dissertation.

Module 5 also provides you the opportunity to examine connections between all the genres that you have engaged in during the prior modules and how all those different pieces fit together to develop your literature review and beyond that to your dissertation. Instead of thinking of your research topic, article critiques, annotated bibliographies, and information literacy activities as discrete experiences, think of them instead as links to a chain. Sometimes, it is easy to lose sight of the forest (in this case, the research topic) when surrounded by many trees (what may seem like tons of paper from the different assignments and journal articles you have collected). As you reflect on this module, try to analyze what connections you specifically see between your research topic, prior assignments, and your prospective review of the literature.

One engaging part of the journal article reading and critiquing you will be doing over the course of your program is that you will begin to get very familiar with how your profession views the topic or research interest you are bringing to the field. You will also see themes emerging from the many articles you read. For example, in selecting articles related to a research topic of professional identity, there are many articles; within that broad topic group one can find several articles connected to one another in some fashion. The professional literature is much like an ongoing discussion of problems facing the field, so you will often see within your searches for literature several articles presenting different aspects of a single topic. You’ll note that there might be three or four different professional opinions as to what the pressing issues are in the topic area you are interested in studying. There will be schools of thought emerging – and patterns in the discussions of topics and problems in your field. You begin to recognize the perspectives emerging and see relatedness between the articles and studies. These patterns and schools of thought and connections can also be described as “themes” emerging from the professional literature. In using the example of the topic of professional identity, notice that the following themes, or repeated discussions, appear across the literature. In 35 or more professional journal articles, many of those articles fit neatly into one of these four categories:

Unity in professional identity (having an overarching vision for the profession),
Specialization in professional identity (having specialty areas for the profession),
Education as a primary contributor to a person’s professional identity
Standards in Competency as a professional concern

These four categories are themes in the literature on professional identity and they provide an excellent basis to frame and structure a discussion of the problem of professional identity in a literature review.

There is much discussion about whether a profession needs more unity in its identity or if certification (and specialization) is more important. The contributions of education programs to the formation of professional identity is another perspective introduced on the topic. Professional licensure and certification emerge as another theme in the professional identity topic: standards in competency.

These themes highlighted above provide a way for me to organize a literature review into a series of critical discussions. Uncovering the themes also provides you a basis of support for your own research questions. Also, using search terms from these themes will help to uncover additional literature. Through all this reading over quite some time, you are bound to find gaps in the literature – a question yet to be asked! The more immersed you are in the literature, the more likely you will know the core issues in the topic area, and the more likely you are to find gaps in the literature, such as that question that has yet to be proposed!

The reason you read so many journal articles and scholarly publications is to assure that first, we are grounded in the professional literature so we can ask research questions that will expand on the current body of knowledge. By the time you arrive at dissertation, after your coursework is completed, it is expected you will have substantial understanding of the professional perspectives on your research interests. One’s research questions naturally spring from one’s own curiosity, that’s an excellent starting point and keeps the connection with one’s passion and experience; the next step is finding a good fit between your question and the existing body of professional literature. By the time dissertation comes around, you will be quite knowledgeable about your topic.

Critical Analysis and Synthesis Versus Reporting

Once you have identified themes and patterns in the literature around which you can organize your knowledge of the problem area, you’ll have a good structure in which to present your discussion and analysis of the published scholarly works.

In addition to using emergent themes and patterns in the literature to organize your study, now it is time for you to step up into an “informed reviewer” role when preparing your discussions of your literature. The themes can be used as section headings to present a logical unfolding of the topics and subtopics related to your research interests in the professional literature. For instance, you identify the merits of the different opinions, pairing author Expert’s findings with two related studies by authors Clever and Brighter. However, instead of listing factors one and two from Expert’s findings, then discussing Clever’s discovery that relates to Expert’s findings but takes it a step further, followed by discussing Brighter’s perspective, you synthesize the material by including an integrated discussion of Expert, Clever, and Brighter’s work as those works relate to the different themes

You might find Expert came up with several interesting findings, but Expert’s’ methodology was in question because the sample size was too small to generalize the results to larger populations. You might appreciate that Clever’s work is well organized, with a sequence of planned studies, one building on the other, and also note that seven other studies find Clever’s arguments well founded and supported in other’s research. Perhaps Brighter’s research design did not factor in some aspect of the population studied that is very apparent to you but is not discussed in the article. By discussing these aspects, you discuss the themes and subtopics in your topic area as they relate to one another and how they develop a comprehensive picture of the problem discussion in the field.

The writing involved in this kind of critical analysis for literature reviews uses far fewer direct quotations than you will find in report writing. You are introducing your own perspective as a professional engaged in the discussion. Your analysis points out the merits and possible shortcomings of other studies, and compares and contrasts current findings in the field. You develop expertise in seeking out the commonalities and the differentiators in the professional literature.

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