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20
Feb
I’m creeping closer towards the completion of my doctoral coursework. This means that the beginning of my own educational research study and dissertation writing is not to far from my future. As a part of my coursework at the University of Akron, I’ve been participating in a Doctoral Student Research Forum that includes students from three research method classes (Data Collection Methods, Advanced Statistics and Advanced Qualitative Methods) and their respective College of Education faculty.
In a fairly progressive undertaking by UA College of Education faculty, Dr. Kristin Kosksy, Dr. Susan Kushner Benson, Dr. Xin Liang, Dr. Jennifer Milam and Dr. Sandra Spickard Prettyman, doctoral students from 5 different sections of those classes have been assigned to small discussion groups. From the course requirements we were provided, the purpose of the forum is to:
…provide College of Education doctoral students with an opportunity to work with other doctoral students and faculty in a collaborative and collegial manner while exploring and reflecting upon contemporary research topics.
Most recently, we have been reading and discussing articles relating to the purpose of a dissertation literature review. We began with David N. Boote’s and Penny Beile’s Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation. From there, we moved on to Literature Reviews of, and for, Educational Research: Commentary on Boote and Beile’s “Scholars Before Researchers” by Joseph A. Maxwell.
After reading both articles, one of the key connections I made to my own work grew from Maxwell’s discussion regarding the divide in the educational research community. Maxwell suggests there is a gap between those “who expect a thorough review of the research literature in the area of the dissertation (the traditional view),” and “those who want a selective review of the literature that relates directly to what the student plans to do, showing these works’ implications for the proposed study.”
This idea seemed particularly relevant to me as I am trying to pin down exactly what my dissertation research study will be and where I need to focus my attention as I begin the lit review. I’m aligning my thinking with Maxwell, as I really feel like the most important aspect to my lit review and the most beneficial expenditure of my time will be to “learn how to identify and assess relevant research findings and to apply these in evaluating and supporting some claim or action” that I make in my own research study.
While I would like to take the time to conduct an totally exhaustive review of all the literature in my area, that doesn’t seem entirely practical or doable with all the other responsibilities I have in my life. As is the case with many other doctoral candidates, this is just a small piece of my life right now. While I hope to make educational research my life’s pursuit, I feel like I am constantly struggling with how to balance my time. It may sound like I’m trying to take the easy way out, but that is certainly not true. I am just trying to maximize my effort in a limited span of time, and I think that conducting a lit review for my dissertation that relates directly to what I plan to do makes the most sense. Maxwell points to Locke, Spirduso, and Silverman (1999), who sum up my preferred way of thinking about the purpose of a dissertation literature review fairly accurately. They argue,
The writer’s task is to employ the research literature artfully to support and explain the choices made for this study, not to educate the reader concerning the state of science in the problem area.
My plan moving forward is to try and find faculty members who are like-minded in their thinking on the purpose of a literature review and ask them to be part of my dissertation committee. This is very strategic thinking on my part, which I hope will lead to the creation of a meaningful literature review that is relevant to my research study and ultimately fulfill the requirements set forth by my dissertation committee.
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2 Responses to “Examining the Purpose of a Dissertation Literature Review”
Jeremy
I appreciate your comments about the choices you are making about the literature review in your dissertation. If nothing else, it is nice to see people making intentional choices about how they approach the task.
But I do need to clarify that nowhere in my that article (unless I am misremembering) did we say that a dissertation literature review should be “totally exhaustive.” We did use the word “thorough” and it is a word that needs clarification. We have already made some of these points here in our rejoinder to Maxwell’s piece:
https://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/3509/10324-06_Boote_p32-35.pdf
My basic point, one that I still stand by, is that someone earning a doctorate ought to know the literature in their field. But that only begs more questions.
A silly interpretation of this would be to say a doctoral candidate ought to have read every single thing every published on the topic. Worse would be expecting that they not only read it all but chose to include it all in the dissertation. That would certainly make for boring reading. And I suspect that it was this idea that Maxwell was reacting to in his reply. Most of us who have done this for a while have read too many endless dry summaries of the literature.
So if “thorough” is not the same thing as “exhaustive,” then what is it? If you go back to the work Harris Cooper was doing on literature reviews in the ’80s you might find his very helpful taxonomy of literature review. You can find a short explanation of it here:
Cooper, H. M. (2003). Editorial. Psychological Bulletin, 123(1), 3-9. [republished from the earlier work]
He suggests at least four ways that we can be thorough. Exhaustive is only one choice.
But we make that choice depending on the state of the literature we are reviewing and what we are doing with that literature — the point we are trying make based on our reading of the literature we are reviewing. This is what Cooper called the ‘goal’ of the review. I am inclined to think that all of the other choices on Cooper’s taxonomy follow from those choices of coverage and goal.
But I do hear you when you remind us that many students in professional doctoral programs have to make intelligent choices about how they spend their time. You need to learn the literature on your topic but you need to do so efficiently. The most important strategy is to focus your initial search on high-quality, published literature reviews. Journals like Review of Educational Research and Review of Research in Education specialize in such synthetic reviews, but many other journals will publish literature review articles. If someone else has already reviewed the field, why should you replicate the work? Why not start where they left off? Or at least use their hard work to start your review.
In short, Maxwell left us with a false dichotomy and I worry that it is a seductive dichotomy. Can’t we both help the reader to understand the state of the literature and how the choices we made help us to contribute to the literature?
Good luck with the rest of your program.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post and leave a comment. Since writing the original post, I have found Chapter 5 of Uwe Flick’s “An Introduction to Qualitative Research” to be another good source of information as I try to determine what to include in my lit review.
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