At any point in your involvement in the industry, whether internship or employment, you may be tasked with reading, consulting, evaluating, using, and conducting valid and reliable research in your field.
This assignment is independent, but we will take time in class to focus your projects, refine ideas, discuss the literature you have read and analyzed, develop your research plans, and discuss your results. This collaborative effort among your colleagues will help you to identify flaws in your research, and will enable you to help others.
The project will be broken up into three parts: the Literature Review, the Research Paper, and the Presentation.
Part 1 – Literature Review:
The first step in the research process, after defining your purpose and declaring your research questions, is to conduct a literature review. Examining prior studies provides justification for your own research, and helps you refine and conduct your research design. You will identify what other literature contributes to your area of inquiry or problem. It should focus primarily on findings.
Since a literature review is a new format for many people, we will be talking in class about formats, purposes and ways of conducting a literature review. Your literature review should include:
Major studies: What are the major writers in your area? What do they have to say about the results of previous work? What are their strengths? Where are there gaps in the research?
Patterns: Where has the research been conducted? What common threads do you find? Where do studies contradict each other?
Gaps: What are the gaps in the literature? What is missing, either from content, process, or methodology?
Sampling: What populations have been sampled? Have generalizations been drawn that make sense? What other populations should be investigated?
Parallel research: What other research has been done in related areas that might affect your pursuit of the problem statement?
Methods: What are the common or prevalent ways in which research has been done in this area?
Annotated Bibliography: What sources have you consulted? Which ones are most valuable? Which ones provide a general background and which ones are focused on your problem statement?
The literature review should be four (4) to six (6) pages, typed and well-organized analysis of no fewer than ten (10) scholarly articles. It should include an introduction describing the purpose of your research, your research questions or objectives, a conclusion summarizing the results, and an Annotated Bibliography of all the works cited.
Sample Solution