Chapter 4

Reviewing the Scholarly

Literature and Planning

a Study

Expansion Box 4.1: Goals of Literature Review

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Literature Review

• Where to Find Research Literature– Periodicals– Scholarly journals

• Citation• Abstracts

– Citation Formats

Literature Review

– Books• ASR Style• APA Style• Other Styles

– Dissertations– Government documents– Policy reports and presented papers

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• How to Conduct a Systematic Literature Review– Define and refine topic– Design search– Locate research reports

• Articles in Scholarly Journals• Social Sciences Index

Literature Review

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Literature Review

• Sociological Abstracts• Keyword

• Taking Notes– Source File and a Content File– Have File and Potential File– What to record– Organize notes

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Literature Review

• Writing the Review– Requires planning and good, clear writing– Skills– Reading journal articles

• What a Good Review Looks Like– The wrong way

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Using the Internet for Social Research

• Upside– Easy, fast, and cheap; links connect sources– “Democratizing” effect; wide net cast

• Downside– No quality control; not complete– Often time consuming; difficult to document

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Qualitative and Quantitative Research Orientations

• Nature of data– Soft & hard data

• Linear and non linear paths• Preplanned and emergent research questions

– Specify the universe

• Limitations to research– Time, cost, access, approval, ethics, expertise

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Techniques for Narrowing a Topic into a Research Question

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Table 4.1: Quantitative Research versus Qualitative Research

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Qualitative Design Issues

• The Language of Cases and Contexts• Grounded theory• The Context is critical• Bricolage• The Case and Process• Interpretation

– First, second, and third-order interpretation

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Qualitative Design Issues

• The Language of Variables and Hypotheses– Variation and Variables– Types of variables

• Independent variable (IV)• Dependent variable (DV)• Intervening variable

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Qualitative Design Issues

• Causal Theory and Hypotheses– The Hypothesis and Causality

• At least 2 variables• Expresses a cause-effect relationship• Can be expressed as a prediction• Logical link between hypothesis and theory• Falsifiable

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Qualitative Design Issues

– Testing and Refining Hypotheses– Types of Hypotheses

• Disconfirming hypotheses• Alternative hypothesis• Null hypothesis

– Aspects of Explanation• Clarity about Units and Levels of Analysis

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• Level & Unit of analysis

– Ecological Fallacy– Reductionism

• Fallacy of nonequivalence• Lower or disaggregated

– Spuriousness• From Research Question to Hypotheses

Qualitative Design Issues

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Figure 4.4: Spurious Relationship- NonWhite “Race” & Low Test Scores

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Table 4.2: Summary of Errors in Explanation

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Table 4.3: Examples of Quantitative Studies

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Table 4.3: Examples of Quantitative Studies