Table Of ContentDoing a Literature Review
Releasing the Social Science
Research Imagination
Chris Hart
SAGE Publications
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi
Contents
List of figures and tables
Preface
Undertaking research for a thesis or dissertation is an experience that most
people never forget. Worries about what topic to investigate, how to go
about doing the research and writing at length are common concerns raised
by research students. No one can do the research for you; the responsibility
is yours and yours alone. This often leads to feelings of isolation and
sometimes to a loss of confidence. But, with a little planning, careful
thought and the adoption of the right attitude, you will be able to set
realistic objectives and find that the stress and anxiety of doing the research
can be managed and even enjoyable! Few experiences match the sense of
achievement and exhilaration that result from finishing your thesis or
dissertation.
This book has been written for postgraduate research students at both
master's and doctoral level. It came about from my personal experience of
doing research, first for a master's dissertation and then for a doctoral
thesis, and subsequently from teaching postgraduate students over number
of years. In both my dissertation and thesis, a search of the literature was
necessary along with a critical analysis of what was found. I did not find
books or articles on either searching or reviewing. Advice from supervisors
was to read other people's reviews to see how they had gone about the task.
This was good advice and I saved a great deal of effort using other people's
summaries of research - time I would otherwise have spent searching the
literature, reading what was obtained and writing an analysis. But it did not
a provide proper solution to the main problems that I and other research
students faced at the time. We needed guides to show us how to search for
materials on our topics and how to analyse what we were reading.
Luckily, at the time, I began teaching sociology on an Information Studies
degree and was exposed to the systems and procedures by which knowl-
edge and information was organized for storage and retrieval. I quickly
came to realize that an entire discipline had the knowledge sought by other
disciplines on how to search for literature relevant to a research topic. The
range of methods by which information was arranged in the different
libraries around the world and the technologies for accessing information
were all new to me; words like OPAC, Dialog, DataStar and JANET all
meant nothing to those of us with a social science background. This was
the early 1980s, a time when computers had yet to make an impact on
higher education.
Preface ix
Knowledge of how information was organized contributed immeasur-
ably to the success of my dissertation and subsequent thesis. In the
intervening time period I have developed practical and conceptual
knowledge about searching for relevant literature and have taught this to
successive postgraduate students. At the same time I have collected and
developed ideas and practical methods for analysing and synthesizing
ideas found in the literature. Meanwhile, along with my students, I awaited
books that could be used by most people undertaking postgraduate
research. As none have appeared, this book is the result. It attempts to
provide an introduction to one of the most difficult of tasks, that of
literature reviewing.
This book is not a manual nor is it prescriptive. It is an introduction,
aimed at postgraduates, on what it means and what is involved in
reviewing a research literature. It therefore looks at explaining as well as
describing the ideas on which the methods and techniques for analysing a
literature are based - those ideas and methods that research students have
found to be useful when doing their literature reviews.
There are examples, at the end of each chapter, which can be used as a
guide to the literature review, but the main purpose is to help you, as the
reader, to understand what it means to be a research student. This is based
on the assumption that if you can work out how the ideas, techniques and
methods found in the literature can be adapted and used in your own
research, then you will have taught yourself some very useful skills that no
manual can provide. One of these skills is to learn how to learn. In reading
this book you will be forced, in some places, to think seriously about the
meaning of literature reviewing, the implications of methodology and
the role of argument in research. You will therefore be encouraged to avoid
copying what others have done and, instead, teach yourself how to
analyse, evaluate and synthesize ideas and so produce work that is
distinctively yours.
On a practical level, a number of references are provided that might be
useful sources to more information on a particular topic or issue. The
examples are chosen to illustrate particular methods and techniques, rather
than for their content, and hence the citations in the examples and
quotations have not been given, for these refer to the original source.
Acknowledgements
Iwould like to thank my colleagues in the School of Information Studies, at
the University of Central England in Birmingham, for their contributions,
both indirect and direct, to this book. I would especially like to thank Denis
Readon for long and enjoyable talks on and about research and for his
comradeship; the book has benefited greatly from the outcome of these
conversations. To postgraduate students past and present I express thanks
for their honest feedback on the usefulness of materials for literature
reviewing. In particular, I thank Mo Bains and Katheryn Jones who were
subjected to drafts of this book when undertaking their own doctoral
research. Thanks go to the Open University course team D820 The Challenge of
the Social Sciences, who were all supportive of this project at the early stage
when encouragement was needed. I give special thanks to Mark Smith for his
phone calls checking on progress and giving feedback from the course team,
to Keith Stribley for detailed ideas on grammar and style, and to Jonathan
Hunt, from the OU Copublishing Department, for his help in bringing this
book to print. Thanks go to Lynne Slocombe and Gareth Williams for
copyediting the manuscript and for advice on style and structure. Thanks
also go to Karen Phillips and the editorial team at Sage who had the foresight
to see the need for this kind of book. Finally, I wish to thank Beverley, who
with an extremely busy schedule, found the time and effort to help and who
allowed precious holiday time to be used for work on the text.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce the follow-
ing: Geoff Payne (1993), 'The community revisited: some reflections on the
community study as a method', British Sociological Association Annual
Conference, University of Essex, 5-8 April, a version of this paper is also
published in E.S. Lyon and J. Bushfield (eds) (1996), Methodological Imagina-
tions, Basingstoke, Macmillan; Kathryn Jones (1997) for the table 'An
etymological summary of the concept"community" 1880-1990', reproduced
in Chapter 5, from her doctoral thesis, 'Community as a documentary
reality', UCE, Birmingham, and Darren Bolton, (1997) 'A retrospective case
study of convergence within a higher education institution', MA dissertation,
School of Information Studies, UCE, Birmingham; and the Oxford University
Press for the extract from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical
Principles (3rd edn, 1944).
Chris Hart
Kingswinford 1998
The literature review in research
It has become an annual ritual for graduate researchers embarking on their
projects to ask about the literature review. They usually want to know
what a review of the literature looks like and how they should do one.
Students and tutors find that there is no single text that can be used to
guide them on how to conduct the literature review; hence the purpose of
this book. It is a guide to reviewing literature for research.
The book, however, is not about reviewing or critical evaluation of the
kinds of articles found in the review sections of newspapers such as The
Times Educational Supplement or Guardian. It is about reviewing a research
literature. It introduces and provides examples of a range of techniques
that can be used to analyse ideas, find relationships between different ideas
and understand the nature and use of argument in research. What you can
expect, therefore, is explanation, discussion and examples on how to
analyse other people's ideas, those ideas that constitute the body of
knowledge on the topic of your research.
Initially we can say that a review of the literature is important because
without it you will not acquire an understanding of your topic, of what has
already been done on it, how it has been researched, and what the key
issues are. In your written project you will be expected to show that you
understand previous research on your topic. This amounts to showing that
you have understood the main theories in the subject area and how they
have been applied and developed, as well as the main criticisms that have
been made of work on the topic. The review is therefore a part of your
academic development — of becoming an expert in the field.
However, the importance of the literature review is not matched by a
common understanding of how a review of related literature can be done,
how it can be used in the research, or why it needs to be done in the first
place.
Undertaking a review of a body of literature is often seen as something
obvious and as a task easily done. In practice, although research students
do produce what are called reviews of the literature, the quality of these
varies considerably. Many reviews, in fact, are only thinly disguised anno-
tated bibliographies. Quality means appropriate breadth and depth, rigour
and consistency, clarity and brevity, and effective analysis and synthesis; in
other words, the use of the ideas in the literature to justify the particular
approach to the topic, the selection of methods, and demonstration that this
2 Doing a literature review
research contributes something new. Poor reviews of a topic literature
cannot always be blamed on the student researcher. It is not necessarily
their fault or a failing in their ability: poor literature reviews can often be
the fault of those who provide the education and training in research.
This book has been written primarily for student researchers, although it
may also be of use to those who provide education and training in
research. It is intended to be an introduction to those elements of the
research process that need to be appreciated in order to understand the
how and why of reviewing a topic-specific literature. As such, an attempt
has been made to provide an introduction to a range of generic techniques
that can be used to read analytically and to synthesize ideas in new and
exciting ways that might help improve the quality of the research.
This book is aimed at people working within the social sciences, which
includes the disciplines listed below. This list is not exhaustive;
archaeology, for instance, might have been included in this list.
built environment and economics psychology
town planning educational studies religious studies
business studies environmental studies social and political
communication and gender studies theory
media studies human geography social anthropology
community studies literature social policy and
cultural studies organizational studies administration
economic and social policy analysis social research
history political studies sociology
The main aim of this book is therefore to provide researchers with a set of
ground rules, assumptions and techniques that are applicable for under-
standing work produced in the whole range of disciplines that make up the
social sciences. The assumptions outlined in the book form a basis for the
understanding and cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines. The
various techniques aim to provide the tools for a systematic and rigorous
analysis of subject literature. Suggestions are also made on writing up the
analysis of ideas in ways that can give clarity, coherence and intelligibility
to the work.
This chapter will introduce you to the skills needed for research, the
place of the literature review in research and the importance of the review
to master's and doctoral study. In Chapter 2 we look at the purpose of the
review in research and what is meant by the research imagination. Chapter
3 examines the types of research to be found in the literature, together with
examples of reviews undertaken in a range of subject areas. It also shows
examples of good practices that you should be able to adapt and utilize in
your own work, especially in reading to review. Chapter 4 is about under-
standing arguments. To analyse a literature on a topic necessarily involves
understanding the standpoint (moral and ethical) and perspective (political
