Application Assignment: Synthesizing Literature

One of the early stages in developing a research project is to examine the available literature on your topic of interest and related topics.

A literature review is a carefully crafted examination of credible literature relevant to your focus topic. A literature review determines how the resources you found:

• Relate to and are relevant to your purpose
• Enable you to fulfill your purpose by offering different perspectives and insights to the purpose you identified
• Are similar to or different from one another
• Create a solid, evidence-based argument to support the purpose of your study
• Have implications for social change
• Stimulate new questions for future research
• Offer resources (included in the reference list) you can consult in your study

Discovering what others have produced and organizing and synthesizing this information into a coherent picture will allow you to place your own research interests into the larger context. A literature review should not be a mere summary of your articles but instead should relate to how the literature supports your study's focus.

To prepare for this Assignment:

• Review the Learning Resources on literature searches and references:

o Chapter 2, "Review of the Literature," and Chapter 4, "Writing Strategies and Ethical Considerations" (read the Writing Ideas section, pp. 79-87) of the Creswell text

o Chapter 7, "Reference Examples" of the APA Manual

o Research Planning and Writing section of the Research Resources and Tutorials webpage

o Sections on Critical Thinking, Literature Reviews, and Synthesis in the Writing Resources area of the Literature Reviews webpage provided by the Writing Center

o Trustworthiness handout to assess the trustworthiness and reliability of a resource

o Media programs:

- Roundtable: Research Methods
- Conducting a Literature Review
- Synthesizing Resources and Ideas
- Consuming Research: Critical and Ethical Strategies
- Five Basic Steps for Evaluating Sources
- Evaluating Sources by Using the Three Cs

o Library guides on conducting searches:

- Subject Terms and Index Searches webpage
- Keyword Search Strategy webpage
- Boolean webpage
- Find Full Text: Overview and FAQs webpage

• Conduct a literature search in the Walden Library for articles related to an area of research interest you identified in the Week 1 Discussion

2. Focus only on full-text scholarly or peer-reviewed articles or dissertations and be sure to note the number of results or hits that you get. Narrow or broaden your results so that you have approximately 15 viable scholarly sources that include:

o Three seminal (classic) professional journal articles (written at least 10 years ago and by an important scholar in the field)

o Seven current articles (written within the past 5 years) from primary sources published in professional peer-reviewed journals (APA, 2010, pp. 9-10)

o Two secondary sources or articles related to your topic of interest

o Three Internet sources related to your topic of interest

Note: You will use these same articles again in future assignments.

As you explore the literature related to your topic of interest, you also want to examine what aspects related to your potential topic have not been studied in depth in the field and/or uncover issues related to your topic that the field needs to know more about. Consider any crucial issue in the field or the literature that may be unclear or in dispute.

• Identify 4-5 articles related to your topic of interest that you will synthesize for this Assignment. Consult the Article Analysis Matrix Excel worksheet to help you keep your analysis organized.

Write a 3- to 4-page literature review synthesizing and critically analyzing these 4-5 articles.

Consider these questions as you synthesize your articles:

• What are the trends in the literature?
• What aspects of the topic have been researched?
• What aspects of the topic need to be researched further, according to the articles?
• Based on the literature, what commonly held assumptions exist within the field?
• Based on the literature, what areas of discourse, contention (if any), or divergent perspectives exist?
• Where would your research interests fall within this framework? Does your topic fill in a gap in the research? How does it relate to the existing literature you have found?