RESEARCH METHODS; WRITING A CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW Describing the Literature Forensic Critique Reviewing an article Radical Critique

DESCRIBING THE LITERATURE In most cases your literature research identifies a lot of material – possibly too much than can be sensibly dealt with. So the next step in conducting your literature review is to map out and identify the key works and material in the literature. This exercise has two purposes; It is necessary for you to show the person who marks your term paper that you are aware of the breadth of literature relating to your topic. It is also necessary to show the marker that you can prioritise the literature and identify the key works, theories or concepts that are of pivotal value to your chosen topic. Describing and mapping the literature pertinent to your research topic is a step-by-step process that moves from the general to the specific. It is essentially an editing process.

Prepare a “map” showing the location of all appropriate literatures. This first step involves identifying the different fields of literature that may be appropriate to the study, without, at this stage, looking at any of it in detail. Literature = academic books and papers that deal with the same issues and that respond to each other in developing debates about a topic. There will be many literatures rather than one solitary unified literature and it is up to you to identify them, cluster them and draw the appropriate boundaries between clusters. Make use of book “jacket descriptions”, academic abstracts, bibliographies and references. A Venn diagram with the main theme of the dissertation in the centre with related themes “touching” is a useful diagrammatic tool.

Present an argument about which literatures you are going to concentrate on. Normally the map of the literature will contain more fields than can be managed in the literature review. It is important to reduce it to two or three fields. In the first step of the Literature Review credit is scored for showing an awareness of the broad scope of the literature. In this phase credit is gained by choosing (and rationalising you choice) from the identified fields the subset of key fields your review will concentrate on. The choice of literature will reflect the angle or perspective you wish to take on a topic.

Provide an overview of the chosen literature. At this stage it is necessary to give a more detailed description of the literature chosen. It is important that you think carefully about how you will structure this overview. [ The way not to structure an account of the literature is to work through a list of research works one at a time.] Your account of the literature should be structured thematically. You should draw, out of the works you are using, the main themes, questions or issues that are discussed. These should become the sub-headings within the overview chapter of the literature review. Under each sub-heading it is necessary to give an account of the relevant theories and the evidence provided in support of them. The discussion should be comparative, weighing one author’s views against that presented by others. Similarities and differences should be identified and their significance, if any, explained.

One way of thematically structuring an account of literature is as follows; Identify the main “camps”, “waves”, “schools”, ideological stances or positions. There are always arguments and debates within a field of literature. It is necessary to describe the nature of these arguments. Identify the dominant or loudest voice in the academic debates. Compare and contrast them. Decide the depth of the disagreement between the parties and their arguments. Sometimes the differences are great and significant. On other occasions the differences are trivial to all except those involved in the debate. Evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. If the differences are significant, decide which side of the argument you believe to be stronger. Be careful not to let your parts of the literature review become detached from the literature review as a whole – state the relevance and significance of each piece of theory to the term paper topic.

Provide an argument to explain and justify the short list of theories, concepts, frameworks or techniques that you have chosen for use in your research project. Once again credit is gained by illustrating critical thinking and prioritising skills. Provide a critical account of the chosen concepts, theories or arguments. This is a detailed review of particular theories designed to test their fitness of purpose for use in the project. The best literature reviews are those whose themes and ideas are taken from the literature, evaluated, and then woven into a coherent argument about the subject matter of the term paper.

FORENSIC CRITIQUE Forensic, among other things, means a minute, detailed and logical examination of evidence. This definition is relevant to doing a literature review. Once you have identified the key concepts, theories and arguments that you will use in your research, it is important to put them under scrutiny before relying on them. Forensic critique, in the context of a literature review, thus means the process of testing academic ideas to test their usefulness. There are two ways of tackling a forensic critique; the first is to identify the key arguments in a piece of work and to evaluate the soundness of the logic they utilise. The second is to scour the piece for examples of weak argumentation. Both approaches will be considered in turn here.

Soundness of arguments: All arguments have three components. These can help you recognise when, in a text, an argument and not an assertion or an assumption is being presented; Premises – these are assumptions or claims that something is true or is a “fact”. Most arguments are based on several premises, but can be founded on one only. Inference words – these are indicators that the writer is about to draw a logical inference or conclusion from the premises presented. Examples are “thus”, “therefore”, “because”, “implies”, “hence”, “it follows that”, “so”, “then” and “consequently”. Conclusions – a conclusion is an arguable statement. It is either a statement about the relationship between the premises or is an inference about the likely consequences given the circumstances and the premises.

It should be possible, using this threefold classification and by looking at the inference words, to identify and summarise the main arguments presented in a book or in an academic article. It is possible to lay out the arguments as flowcharts. Judging the strength of an arguments is a two-pronged activity; Assessing the truthfulness or validity of the premises. Are they supported by research evidence? What research methods were utilised? Assessing the logical strength of the conclusions drawn from the premises. Conclusions that are drawn deductively are stronger than those drawn inductively. Deduction is when a conclusion is drawn that necessarily follows in logic from the premises that are stated. So a deduction does not depend on observation or experience; it is simply a matter of logic. Induction is when a conclusion is drawn from past experience or experimentation.

Evaluating argumentation: Another way of judging the strength of arguments is to see whether the authors have made any of a number of well-known logical errors. Such common flaws in argument are; The use of emotionally toned words Making sweeping statements Proof by only selecting material that backs up the authors point of view The recommendation of a stance because it is a mean between two extreme perspectives The use of logically unsound argument Failure to distinguish factual statements from opinion Changing the mean of a term during the academic argument Disguising the lack of clear thought by extensive use of jargon Ad hominem arguments – attacking the arguer

REVIEWING AN ARTICLE Identify the main arguments in the academic paper What is the point of the arguments? Identify the “inference indicators”, the words such as “therefore” that indicate that a conclusion is being drawn from the evidence presented. Assess the context for the argument. Identify the premises from which the conclusions are drawn. Locate the premises in the text. Check the acceptability of these premises. Are they well supported by evidence? Are they well supported by citations from the literature? Are you convinced they are true?

Check the logical strength of the conclusions drawn from the premises. Are the conclusions logically based on the premises? How strong are the conclusions? Look for counter-arguments. Could the premises support a counter conclusion?

RADICAL CRITIQUE A radical critique is one that challenges assumptions and conventional ways of doing things. Identify a conventional position. COWDUNG = the conventional wisdom of the dominant group Problematise it – reveal that the issue is more difficult than commonly thought. Identify contradictions and negations (a self-destructive feature of the position) End with an aporia i.e. the recognition that something is wrong but that it is difficult to see what can be done about it short of changing human nature and sensibility. Radical critique is extremely challenging but also admirable.