Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review

A Multimodal and Cultural Approach

Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, Rebecca Frels

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473944121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This dynamic guide to doing literature reviews demystifies the process in seven steps to show researchers how to produce a comprehensive literature review. Teaching techniques to bring systematic thoroughness and reflexivity to research, the authors show how to achieve a rich, ethical and reflexive review.

What makes this book unique:

• Focuses on multimodal texts and settings such as observations, documents, social media, experts in the field and secondary data so that your review covers the full research environment
• Puts mixed methods at the centre of the process
• Shows you how to synthesize information thematically, rather than merely summarize the existing literature and findings
• Brings culture into the process to help you address bias and understand the role of knowledge interpretation, guiding you through
• Teaches the CORE of the literature review – Critical thinking, Organization, Reflections and Evaluation – and provides a guide for reflexivity at the end of each of the seven steps
• Visualizes the steps with roadmaps so you can track progress and self-evaluate as you learn the steps

This book is the essential best practices guide for students and researchers, providing the understanding and tools to approach both the 'how' and 'why' of a rigorous, comprehensive, literature review.

Part One Overview

1 Foundations of the Literature Review

Chapter 1 Roadmap

Background Concepts

Knowledge broadly represents a degree of familiarity—somewhere between awareness and expertise—with someone or something that is acquired through education (i.e., study) or experience. Although no single agreed- upon definition of knowledge exists, its importance has never been in doubt. In fact, many famous people have extolled the virtues of knowledge. Major fields of study are labeled using the word science or sciences, such as social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, cultural and ethnic studies), health sciences (e.g., nursing, dentistry, occupational therapy), natural sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics), applied sciences (e.g., law, social work, education), and formal sciences (e.g., mathematics, statistics, computer sciences). It should not be surprising why the word science is so prevalent here when we examine the origin of this word. Interestingly, the word science comes from the Latin word scientia, which means “knowledge.” Thus, as eloquently stated by Johnson and Christensen (2010, p. 16), it is reasonable to define science as “an approach for the generation of knowledge that places high regard for empirical data and follows certain norms and practices that develop over time because of their usefulness.” As Johnson and Christensen (2010, p. 15), surmised, “Science includes any systematic or carefully done actions that are carried out to answer research questions or meet other needs of a developing research domain (e.g., describing things, exploring, experiencing, explaining, predicting)” and “includes many methods and activities that are carried out by researchers as they attempt to generate scientific knowledge.” Also, many ways exist for generating knowledge, including experience (i.e., formally known as empiricism), which stems from observation and perception, expert judgment, and reasoning (i.e., formally known as rationalism), which primarily includes deductive reasoning (i.e., arriving at specific conclusions based on a set of premises or hypotheses), inductive reasoning (i.e., making generalizations based on a specific number of observations), and abductive reasoning (i.e., starting from a set of accepted facts and determining their best explanations).

The Quest for Knowledge

Because science results in an accumulation of knowledge over time, science can be seen as cumulative. Thus, it behooves us always to find out what we know about a topic of interest and then to use what we know as a starting point. Indeed, failure to do so could lead us unnecessarily to “re-invent the wheel”—an idiomatic metaphor used wherein the wheel is symbolic for human ingenuity and creativity. Moreover, a lack of awareness of existing knowledge might lead us to utilize practices that have been found previously to be ineffective. This is especially the case for the field of research. For example, if a primary school teacher decides to use a teaching strategy that researchers previously have demonstrated as being not only ineffective but also detrimental to academic achievement, this likely would have dire consequences. In such a case, before using the strategy, the teacher should find out as much as possible about it before adopting it. The best way to do so is via what has been traditionally called a literature review or review of the literature. In fact, regardless of the academic discipline, the most common way of acquiring knowledge is by searching out what has already been done—through the literature review.

Many authors of research methodology textbooks inadvertently perpetuate myths about the literature review process by understating what the literature review entails. Unfortunately, it is likely that these myths explain why many researchers—as many as 40% (Onwuegbuzie & Daniel, 2005)—who submit articles for possible publication in journals write inadequate literature reviews. The literature review involves activities such as identifying, recording, understanding, meaning-making, and transmitting information. To some degree, the literature review represents a study that seeks to represent what is known (or not known) on a particular topic, and optimally it includes both quantitative and qualitative information from collected sources, as a literature synthesis. Whether the literature review is conducted to inform primary research or is a stand-alone work, it involves the literature reviewer making meta-inferences within multiple steps.

Definition of the CLR

Throughout this book, we present some of the same rigorous techniques that are utilized within the mixed methods research tradition—which are referred to as mixed methods research. We outline this literature review via a series of “steps.” However, although the steps are presented in sequence, they are not linear. Rather, the steps are dynamic integrated parts of a comprehensive process for searching and reflecting on the new knowledge acquired in creating a literature review. Specifically, these steps are a meta-framework for a new, comprehensive literature review, to which is referred as the CLR. Later in this chapter, we provide you with some of the essential components involved in this definition using a more detailed verbiage for understanding the CLR.

Box 1.1

The Comprehensive Literature Review (CLR)

The Comprehensive Literature Review (CLR) is a methodology, conducted either to stand alone or to inform primary research at multiple stages of the research process, which optimally involves the use of mixed research techniques inclusive of culture, ethics, and multimodal texts and settings in a systematic, holistic, synergistic, and cyclical process of exploring, interpreting, synthesizing, and communicating published and/or unpublished information.

Characteristics of the Three Research Traditions

Virtually all researchers belonging to the three major research traditions or approaches use the literature review to inform their research, or what we often refer to as primary research. A research tradition often might be referred to as a research paradigm, and is quantitative research, qualitative research, or a combination of both—what is called mixed methods research. As you will see throughout this book, what is most interesting about the literature review process is that many of the methods associated with each of these research traditions, such as data collection techniques and data analysis techniques, also help researchers to conduct a CLR. All three research traditions yield empirical research studies. Broadly speaking, empirical research studies represent research wherein data are generated via direct observation or experiment in order to address one or more research questions (i.e., interrogative statements that the researcher attempts to answer using research techniques) and/or to test one or more hypotheses (i.e., proposed explanations of observable phenomena that can be tested via research). As such, findings from empirical research studies are based on actual evidence, as opposed to theory, assumptions, or speculations.

Quantitative research studies primarily involve the collection, analysis, and interpretation of numeric data, with goals that include describing, explaining, and predicting phenomena. In contrast, qualitative research studies primarily involve the collection, analysis, and interpretation of non-numeric data that naturally occur from one or more of the following sources: documents, talk, observations, and drawings/photographs/videos. Finally, mixed methods research, or what is more aptly called mixed research (to denote the fact that more than just methods are mixed), as noted by Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004), involves mixing or combining quantitative and qualitative research approaches (e.g., collection, analysis, interpretation) within the same study. Table A.1, Table A.2, and Table A.3 located in Appendix A toward the end of this book provide an overview of the major quantitative research designs, qualitative research designs, and mixed research designs, respectively. We encourage you to take some time and review the differences among the research traditions to prepare yourself as a literature reviewer.

With the three traditions in mind, primary research represents a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed research study conducted by a researcher(s) that is informed by, and informs, the literature review. One feature that these three types of studies have in common is that they all involve the following four phases: research conceptualization, research planning, research implementation, and research dissemination. In the research conceptualization phase, researchers representing all three traditions decide on the goal of the study, or the desired end-point of the study such as to examine the past, to measure change, or to test a theory; the objective of the study, or the action that will result from the study such as explanation; the rationale of the study, which is why the study is needed and the gap in our knowledge that the research findings will be helping to fill; and the purpose of the study, or what the researcher intends to study. Further, research questions play an important role for all three research traditions. Most notably, for all three research traditions, research questions provide researchers with a framework for conducting the study; help researchers to organize their research studies; help researchers to bound their research studies; help researchers to determine the type of data that should be collected, analyzed, and interpreted; and give research studies relevance, direction, and coherence, thereby helping to keep the researcher focused during the course of the study.

In the research conceptualization phase, all three sets of researchers—that is, quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers, and mixed researchers—plan the study that will address the research question(s), particularly the sampling design, or the number of participants selected and the sampling scheme used to select them (e.g., random vs. non-random), and research design, or the framework (e.g., outline or plan) that is used to address the research question(s). In fact, a common mistake of beginning researchers is not recognizing the central role that research questions play in determining the appropriate research tradition. As a literature reviewer, similar to those conducting research, you might have questions in mind as you conduct a literature review.

In the research implementation phase, researchers belonging to all three traditions collect their data, analyze their data, validate or legitimate their data, and interpret their data. This is the phase where all the research planning and designing undertaken by the research is actualized. For all three research traditions, the length of time needed to complete each of these steps varies from one study to the next, and is dependent on the decisions made in the research conceptualization phase (e.g., research questions) and the research planning phase (i.e., sample design, research design), as well as on the scope of the study and available resources (e.g., time, money).

Finally, in the research dissemination phase, all three sets of researchers share their research findings orally (e.g., presenting their findings in class; presenting their findings at a research conference), visually (e.g., performance ethnography wherein the research findings are performed via dramatic representations such as plays), or, most commonly, in writing. Typically, the goal here is to make the findings available to one or more others. In the classroom context, the research findings are shared with the classroom instructor. Beyond the classroom—including master’s theses and doctoral dissertations—the printed and/or digital form of the research report will be stored somewhere, such as the library or a bibliographic database. Future researchers representing all three traditions then can use this latest research report, alongside other available works, to inform their own literature reviews and studies. And, thus, the cycle of knowledge generation continues…

New Concepts

At this point, you might be asking yourself why this information is important. We maintain that ethics in research, or the guiding moral principles of research, help the literature reviewer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part One Overview
• 1 Foundations of the Literature Review
• 2 The Literature Review
• 3 Methodology of the Literature Review
• Part Two Exploration
• 4 Step 1: Exploring Beliefs and Topics
• 5 Step 2: Initiating the Search
• 6 Step 3: Storing and Organizing Information
• 7 Step 4: Selecting/Deselecting Information
• 8 Step 5: Expanding the Search— Media, Observation(S), Documents, Expert(S), and Secondary Data
• Part Three Integration
• 9 STEP 6: ANALYZING AND SYNTHESIZING INFORMATION
• Part Four Communication
• 10 Step 7: Presenting The CLR Report— Planning Phase
• 11 Step 7: Presenting the CLR Written Report
• Postscript: Theory-Driven and Model-Driven Literature Reviews
• Appendices
• References
• Author Index
• Index