Friday, July 22, 2022

Your Literature Review is Like a Qualitative Research Project

 No, seriously, it is.  Stay with me on this one for a bit, whether you are writing a literature view or teaching others how to write them.  You can think of reading notes as 'data' you have collected on an 'unknown culture' (the literature in your field).  Think of yourself as an ethnographer or anthropologist.  You have been a 'participant observer' in this culture (spending hours and hours in the library or on-line), 'talking' with the 'members' of this culture (reading and thinking about the articles, essays, and books) and seeking to inhabit their point of view by finding out what they say and why they say it (taking notes on the findings, methods, and methodological stances in previous research).  You've been asking questions about what they tell you (interrogating these findings, speculating about why, ultimately, they matter), and you have started to trace some connections and contrasts in what all the 'members' say; that is, you've been detecting what look like patterns in what you have found so far -- findings that tend to point in one direction but not another; an interest in some kinds of questions but not others; a preference for some methods over others.  You've also stumbled on some things that you intuitively feel are going to be important, but can't say why yet. You have, in other words, started to form some hypotheses about what this 'unknown culture', your field, is really all about.  With these hypotheses in mind, you continue your interactions with this new culture (locating additional sources, doing more reading and note-taking), asking if the patterns you have detected thus far hold and revising your model if they do not as you collect more evidence (qualitative researchers call this negative case analysis).

There is another way analogies with qualitative research can help us as we grapple with our literature review.  Qualitative researchers often use thematic coding to make sense of the mass of evidence they collect, and this too can be applied when you are doing your literature review.  Thematic coding is the process of assigning labels to the pieces of information you collect. Let's say, for example, that you are doing a study on attitudes towards wellington boots (well, why not?).  You have been reading studies on your topic and you now have masses of notes.  To start, you extract from your notes all the findings from these studies, and you put each finding on a separate card or slip of paper (that's what I do, anyway -- does anyone else proceed like this? Let me know!).  You start going through the findings from the literature in your field, looking for common themes, and you give each of these themes a name, a code.  For example, some of the findings seem to be about colour, so that is one of your codes: findings about colour.  Other findings seem to be about how long the boots last, how water-proof they are, how resistant to wear and tear they are. Durability, you think.  All of these findings are about durability.  You have just assigned your second code, durability. You proceed, many, many times -- the process is massively iterative and along the way you'll refine your codes, read additional studies, integrate findings from those studies, code and re-code again and so on.  Eventually, you will reach a stage when you can fit all the findings into workable codes, ordering an unruly mass of, for example, 50-odd disparate findings into 4 or 5 main themes that represent the major patterns or trends of study in your field.  How do these patterns add up to the need to ask your research question?  That is your next task in coming to grips with this 'new culture'. 

All of this labelling might strike you as pedestrian, especially when you start -- assigning your first few codes doesn't feel like you are doing anything significant.  It doesn't even feel like work.  But as you proceed, I bet you'll find yourself agreeing with Nowell and colleagues*: coding is thinking, and thinking quite deeply in a disciplined and structured way. It 'is a process of of reflection and a way of thinking about data' (pg. 5, italics mine).  When we code, we 'move from unstructured data to the development of ideas about what is going on in the data' (pg. 5). This coding process, in fact, is the beginning of your critical voice; that is, your original synthesis of why previous work in your field matters. You won't find the codes in the papers themselves, and there will be no paper that tells you what the codes are, because the codes come from your original assessment of why the work you are reading is important.  No one else will look at the mass of material in quite the same way. So if you haven't tried thematically coding your literature review notes yet, give it a try and let me know how you get on. 

* Nowell, L. S., Norris, J. M., White, D.E., and Moules, N.J. 2017. 'Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria'. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16: 1-13.





 

Friday, July 8, 2022

Should I Include Older Sources?

 This is a question I often get from my students, perhaps because they have heard things like Your literature review has to be up-to-date or You have to know what is current on your topic.  While both of these things are true, it does not follow that you should as a matter of course exclude older sources in your field. 

While this is one to discuss with your supervisor, in general terms my view is that there is no reason to ignore older sources just because they are old, and there can be many good reasons to include them.  You can be up-to-date and deal with older sources.  As the author of the literature review, you decide what gets covered and what doesn't, and that decision should be made on the basis of what the source in your hand contributes to the synthesis you are writing, not on some arbitrary cut-off date for publication. In any field, there will be the pioneering papers, the game-changing books, the edited collections from the conference that got it all started -- the sources that nearly everyone else in your field cites.  At the very least, you should read these and know their arguments thoroughly, since they are formative in your field.  

But there is another reason why these works are valuable.  Since much of the work in your field will include an account of them, you need to know what these sources said so that you can evaluate these later accounts.  You'll find that something very interesting tends to happen with the pioneering sources.  They are cited so often in so many places that an idea about what they said enters the public consciousness of the field and a consensus view about why they matter emerges. This consensus is often based on a particular aspect of the pioneering work, or a set of aspects, or even on just on a few quotes.  Other points of equal value in the original body of ideas may simply be forgotten.  Over time, the idea of what the pioneering source said can travel some distance from what it actually said, and the consensus about why it matters is taken for granted and no longer interrogated.  These differences between what the pioneering sources actually said and what current sources say they said may be just what you need to critically evaluate the work in your field in order to suggest a new direction. 

You might also find the opposite situation -- that much of the current work in your field has not travelled very far at all from the pioneering sources and that instead of progress there are just various re-statements of problems identified several decades ago.  Here too is an entrance for new work. 

And, of course, you could find that current work has taken a good account of the pioneering works and that there is a healthy debate on a wide range of issues and you can then place your work in this on-going debate.  The only way you will know this, however, is if you have read these pioneering works and come to grips with what they said. 


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