Summary
Contents
Subject index
This concise, hands-on book by author Elizabeth A. Wentz is essential reading for any graduate student entering the dissertation process in the social or behavioral sciences. The book addresses the importance of ethical scientific research, developing your curriculum vitae, effective reading and writing, completing a literature review, conceptualizing your research idea, and translating that idea into a realistic research proposal using research methods. The author also offers insight into oral presentations of the completed proposal, and the final chapter presents ideas for next steps after the proposal has been presented. Taking the view that we “learn by doing,” the author provides Quick Tasks, Action Items, and To Do List activities throughout the text that, when combined, develop each piece of your research proposal. Designed primarily for quantitative or mixed methods research dissertations, this book is a valuable start-to-finish resource.
The Literature Review
The Literature Review
Introduction
Chapter 4 describes how to write the area of specialization (AOS Statement). The AOS document defines the area you consider your specialty and describes the major research themes within. The literature review starts where the AOS left off and digs deeper into those themes by discussing what is known about your particular area, identifying the methods used to investigate those themes, and highlighting what remains unknown.
A literature review is a synthesis (not a summary) of previous work in a specific area(s). A synthesis means you are bringing together different aspects of the literature and creating something new with it. The result is a critical evaluation of the current theory and methods of a particular topic reflecting what is known, how it ...
- Loading...