Revising the Literature Review
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The most common problems encountered in literature reviews
are
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Developing hypotheses about populations that you have no hope of
randomly sampling from given your time and resource limitations
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Not providing a clear definition of the variables of interest at an
operational level or even at a conceptual level
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Questions such as “do men earn more than women” are probably not
in the cards for you this semester
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
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Don’t write a five-page jeremiad plus a hypothesis!
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
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 topoiplaces 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
Revising the Literature Review,
con’t
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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
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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
Revising the Literature Review,
con’t
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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
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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
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
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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
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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
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For this reason it is a good idea to limit the “never done
before” approach to very narrowly defined hypotheses
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