Tips on Writing your Literature Review for A Quantitative Research Study

by

Dr. Tracy L. Jackson, PhD, MSW

Your chair has instructed you to start retrieving articles to help you write your literature review. You have completed this task and now you have a myriad of articles yet you are unsure how to write your literature review. I have found this is a challenge for many learners. Unfortunately, the books and articles you find on writing a literature review do not provide a step by step guide on how to do it. You usually have to wing it with guidance from your chair. I am going to share some pointers with you that I used when writing my literature review and that I share with my current learners.

Your literature review must connect with your research problem. You should start with an intro and remind your chair and committee what your research problem is for your study. Remember, writing a dissertation you are going to be repetitive. Next, you need to cover the literature pertaining to your variables of your research topic. You need to show your chair and committee what has been done and what is missing in the literature on your research topic. When your chair and committee read your literature review, they should be able to understand how you came up with your variables in your research questions.

Since you are covering the variables from your study in your literature review, you should find studies that are similar to your research study. For example, my research study was on parenting stress and social support among single and married African American mothers. My variables included parenting stress and social support. I found studies that discussed both parenting stress and social support in mothers as well as studies that discussed each variable individually. Since both variables were not a new concept, I provided a summary and synthesis of germinal studies. Most universities encourage learners to use articles that are no older than five years old. As a chair, I like to see a historical review of the research variables. Using germinal articles can help you show how the variables have developed over time and why your research problem is significant today.

You should find articles that focus on the population you want to study. Since I was interested in single and married African American mothers to sample for my study, I found studies that have been done on this group. If there are no or limited studies on your population, this is good because this will show there is a gap in the literature. This will help you explain why your study is needed. For my study, there were limited studies conducted using African American mothers as a sample. Therefore, I presented studies that sampled other races of women. I also was interested in African American mothers with elementary school aged children. This was lacking in the literature and most of the studies I found focused on preschool children.  Again, I found this to be an advantage because this showed the gaps in the literature. Gaps in the literature can help you by showing how unique your study is and how your study will add to the existing literature.

Remember for your literature review find articles similar to your research topic. Share the research problem, sample population, research method, data analysis and findings. This will help you to explain why the research methodology you have chosen for your study is necessary. Also, share the strengths and weaknesses of the studies. Now, take all this information and discuss it in your conclusion section of your literature review with a breakdown of the studies. This is where you will be able to connect the dots and it should lead you right back to your research problem. At the end of your literature review, you should be able to justify how you came up with your research questions based on your thorough review of the literature .