Literature Review and Research Design

A Guide to Effective Research Practice

Dave Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000740356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Designing a research project is possibly the most difficult task a dissertation writer faces. It is fraught with uncertainty: what is the best subject? What is the best method? For every answer found, there are often multiple subsequent questions, so it's easy to get lost in theoretical debates and buried under a mountain of literature.

This book looks at literature review in the process of research design, and how to develop a research practice that will build skills in reading and writing about research literature—skills that remain valuable in both academic and professional careers. Literature review is approached as a process of engaging with the discourse of scholarly communities that will help graduate researchers refine, define, and express their own scholarly vision and voice. This orientation on research as an exploratory practice, rather than merely a series of predetermined steps in a systematic method, allows the researcher to deal with the uncertainties and changes that come with learning new ideas and new perspectives.

The focus on the practical elements of research design makes this book an invaluable resource for graduate students writing dissertations. Practicing research allows room for experiment, error, and learning, ultimately helping graduate researchers use the literature effectively to build a solid scholarly foundation for their dissertation research project.

PART I

On research

The general answer to questions about how to do a research project or a literature review may be “practice,” but that doesn’t give much guidance about how to practice or what to practice. For that, we need to take a look at the general processes of research, your (the researcher’s) place in that process, and the role of research literature in that process.

To design a research project effectively, it helps to understand research and the researcher’s place—your place—in the world of research. The better you understand how research works, the better you can work to find a research project that will work for you. Complicating the issue, however, are two factors: 1) the more closely you examine the issues of research, the less certain it becomes, and 2) there is a gap between theory and practice.

What are the issues of research? I think that pretty much any scholar trying to explain research to a child, for example, would explain it as the attempt to distinguish fact from fiction or truth from falsity. There is a nice certainty and simplicity to that. Unfortunately, research is rarely certain or simple.

Chapter 1 is concerned with the theoretical issues of research and where the researcher fits in: what is research trying to accomplish? If research is, speaking loosely, the attempt to separate fact from fiction, what are the theoretical concerns of that attempt?

The theoretical issues that shape research are important, but research is not just a theoretical exercise. It is an actual practical activity. It’s something on which researchers have to spend time and effort. There is no research that doesn’t involve practical activities. Designing a research project may be all prospective, in the sense that you might create a plan for later execution, but it, too, is an activity. The more practical dimensions are the concern of Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 1

Research philosophy

Aiming at the wrong target is never a good way to achieve success. If you have to design a research project, it’s important to have reasonable expectations. Idealized views of the scholar may focus on the individual working alone, in the ivory tower, separate from the world, following strict methods, and discovering objective facts that “speak for themselves,” as the expression goes. But this perspective is unrealistic. Methods don’t have all the answers, facts don’t speak for themselves, and scholars work in communities.

Research is about describing and explaining the real world: what is it and how does it work? It wants to tell a coherent story about the world, but not just any story; one that is, in basic terms, fact, not fiction. But separating fact from fiction is not trivial … if, indeed, it is at all possible: there is good reason to believe that uncertainty cannot be eliminated, for all the best efforts of researchers.

Nonetheless, research continues because people have questions and want answers. Although logical certainty may not be available, communities of researchers develop that share ideas that structure their work. Speaking broadly, we can say that all academic researchers share a community and language—one in which a “dissertation” is a major research project done by a student, for example. And then each school is its own community. And each department within a school is a community. And all scholars studying a similar subject form a community, and so on. And the participants in these communities try to talk with each other, about what they have found as well as about the strengths and weaknesses they see in other people’s works. This conversation among community members manifests in the research literature.

If you are trying to design a research project for your dissertation, then, the literature can be a guide to how to develop research that will satisfy the expectations and interests of your research community (or communities).

A story about the world—your own version

Researchers do research to tell better stories. Research wants to explain the world, and so it tells stories about how the world works and stories about how research works. A research project will develop when a researcher is trying to tell a story and comes up against a question that wants an answer.

The basic purpose of research is to tell a story about the world. The story must meet academic standards, but it is a story all the same.

Sometimes this is obvious. History is obviously a story—the story of what happened at some past time and place. But the “story” in many fields is not as obvious.

Physics, for example, with its experiments and equations, is not obviously a story. But physics tells the story of how physical objects act or interact. Newton’s first law, which states that an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by some force, is fundamentally a narrative about the behavior of objects: first there is an object at rest, and as time passes, that object remains at rest, and then, maybe, some force acts on the object and the object responds/reacts in some way.

Present-day scientific explanations—for example, a heliocentric solar system governed by gravity, or the Big Bang—may not appear to be stories, but they replace explanations taken from myth and rely on the same basic narrative structure. A god driving a chariot across the sky is much more obviously a story than saying “the earth rotates on its axis, causing the sun’s apparent motion,” but both describe a series of events that explain the sun’s daily progress across the sky. Explaining the world’s creation as the will of a god is an alternative to the Big Bang—both are stories.

Biological sciences tell stories about the behaviors and development of living beings. Chemistry tells of the behaviors of molecules and substances.

Philosophy tells stories of how ideas interact. Descartes’s famed “I think, therefore I am” is a narrative of causal behavior, in this case between premises: my thinking implies my existence. Mathematical and logical proofs have similar causal structure: because premise A is true, then premise B must be true, etc.

Psychology tells stories of how the human mind operates. A medical view of psychology might tell the story that some psychological pathology arose through an imbalance of neurotransmitters. A Freudian view might explain that the pathology arose from a childhood event.

Literary Critical Theory tells many different kinds of stories—of how works were created, of how authors thought, of how texts can teach lessons. Reader-response criticism is a story about how a reader interacts with the work. Biographical criticism is a story about how an author’s biography shaped a work, or about how a work reveals an author’s biography. Psychoanalytic/Freudian criticism tells how an author’s writing, like a dream or a slip of the tongue, reveals the author’s unconscious.

I emphasize this story-like nature of research because research requires more than just gathering data and then presenting those data to an audience. Research requires trying to weave those data into a larger coherent story that is theoretically or practically significant. Your role is to develop your own version of the larger story, to check that story (or some aspect of it) through a research project, and then to share that with your research community.

In order to explain your work to your community, you want to weave your own story into the stories of other scholars in your community in a way that corrects, complements, or supplements the stories being told by those researchers. Of course, if you have learned anything from your research community—if you have been influenced by your professors or your readings (which is surely to be hoped!)—then the story you want to tell will be shaped by some of the same ideas used by other members of your community.

To find a research question, researchers look for the proverbial “gap in the literature,” which is either, 1) something that has not previously been described or explained, or 2) something that has been poorly described or explained. In both cases, such gaps only become visible within the context of a larger coherent story that you are trying to understand and develop.

If your job as an independent researcher is to tell your own story, it prioritizes developing your own ideas over simply learning the stories of others. This means trying to explicate your own story and then reading the research literature (i.e., listening to the scholarly conversation) to see whose stories make sense to you, and how those stories relate to your own. Which voices express ideas that you use in your own stories? Which voices express ideas that you want to explicitly reject? Which can you simply ignore?

If you’re studying education, for example, do you agree with all the different pedagogical theories you have read, or do you think that some are better than others? If you’re studying literature, do you agree with all the analyses of a given text, and if not, why not? If you’re studying biology, do you see any theories of biological processes that you question or places where current biological theory does not have answers?

It would be great to be able to identify a “best” story (or theory) with confidence, but disparate theories can be readily found, each with strengths and weaknesses. The explanation offered by one scholar contradicts that offered by another. While the competition may be good in some ways, it doesn’t offer certainty. To tell a coherent story, you must make choices between competing ideas expressed in the literature.

Focus on your idea of how the world works. Identify the questions you have within that story. It is there that research design begins, with a sense of your own story and with a sense of your own questions about that story.

In my experience, one pitfall for many graduate students is looking in the literature to find a theory to use without first thinking about the theories they are currently using. It may be hard to think of your own ideas as being “theories” on a par with ideas in the published literature, but it’s with your own ideas that you need to start. If you doubt your own ideas, remember that if you have learned from your professors and your readings, then your ideas have been shaped by other members of your community, so they’re not just wild-eyed speculation.

You have to trust what you do know and what makes sense to you, and build from there. What you know may be frustratingly limited, and you may have doubts—that is a condition of scholarship.¹ Despite limits and questions, it’s important to make explicit your own coherent story about the world, so that you can decide which questions are crucial to your story. You want to be able to learn, not by just absorbing the ideas of others but by developing, refining, revising, and making explicit your own story, and by comparing it to what you read in the literature. Then you can see where there are problems with your own story, allowing you² a better opportunity to see how a given theory might address your questions, conflict with your own ideas, or simply be irrelevant (or only tangentially relevant) to your concerns.

In addition to showing the limits of your own understanding, making your own story explicit can often reveal strong scholarly foundations that you did not consciously recognize. I have known more than one scholar who has said, “I need a theoretical framework” and has gone off to read theory, taking for granted the very theories that they already knew and used.

Many scholars doing their first independent research get caught up looking at the stories that others are telling without having a good sense of their own purpose and beliefs, and they get lost following first one theory, then another. The “literature review trap” is, on a certain level, to look for stories in the literature instead of looking for your own. Original research develops from following your own instincts (while also taking guidance from other research).

What is your story? What is the situation in the world that interests you? What are the important and interesting factors in this situation? How do they behave? And how does your story relate to, grow from, compare to, and add to the stories told by other researchers in your field?

When reading scholarly literature, test the authors’ ideas against your own: do they make sense in the context of your own story of the world? Or do they make you want to revise your own story in any way to accommodate the new ideas? Or do you simply reject them?

Exercises (30 to 60 seconds each, repeat for 5 to 30 minutes)

What stories do you want to tell or learn more about?

What stories do you want to tell or learn more about in your department, but outside your area of specialization?

What stories do you want to tell or learn more about within your area of specialization?

Fact, not fiction

God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world.

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

The two related ideas, fact and fiction, are easily understood in common, everyday English conversation. Unfortunately, the distinction between fact and fiction becomes complicated in academic practice. The importance placed on research methods derives from the practical concerns of making this distinction.

Deciding between fact and fiction is often simple and obvious, and so it is easy to develop an unconscious pattern of reasoning in terms of clear-cut right and wrong. It’s a very practical way of thinking, and almost impossible to escape. Many or most situ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: On research
• Part II: Reading literature
• Part III: Writing about literature
• Conclusion
• Suggested readings
• Index