Instruction
Here is some Literature Construction guidance ("Eating This Elephant"): A Literature Review is a critical evaluation of previously published research findings. It involves searching to find, organizing, integrating, and evaluating the methods, results, and discussions of a well defined selection of quality published research. To critically evaluate means to reveal/describe the progress of quality psychological research toward clarifying/understanding an important focused psychological topic and/or problem. Selecting one or more specific and focused topics of high personal interest to you is the starting point. Then, you will probably benefit from searching the psychology databases for a few examples of literature reviews about focused topics related to your chosen topic or some other psychological topic of interest to you. Of course, a careful examination of their structure and methods of writing is a part of this step. Their written structure, the grouping of the selected research reports, often is in one of the following forms (similarity and dissimilarity of concepts and/or theories of interest) (similarities and/or dissimilarities of research methodologies) (major historical research studies and trends in the development of this area of research) Next is doing a very good search to find many quality research reports (minimum of 20) that are directly and/or closely related to your focused psychological topic of strong personal interest. Then carefully read your selected research reports and for each one, create your own "abstract document" which contains brief descriptions of what you believe is most important in the research report (especially the Method, Results, and Discussion sections), and also include a page number upon which each thing that you describe can be found. It is a good idea to create your reference page and include each properly APA formatted reference as you abstract each research report. The suggested APA structure of your Literature Review is described as follows: Writing Task #1: Define and Clarify your chosen focused psychological topic and/or problem Writing Task #2: Summarize the previous research progress made, discussing key information and using several of the strongest and/or most important research reports to illustrate the progress of gaining greater understanding about your chosen topic. Writing Task #3: This part of the Literature Review is the most extensive and detailed. In this part of your Literature Review, identify important relationships between and among the variables being researched; identify any contradictions/inconsistencies between research findings as all research reports' findings are compared; identify any general and/or specific knowledge/data gaps (important things which have not been learned about the topic, but that need to be learned); and any flaws and/or limitations in the previous research studies. Writing Task #4: Suggest/propose/describe in detail, the next specific important things/variables/relationships about your topic that need to be researched and understood better to solve the applied (real life) problems most important to your focused psychological topic.