The Challenges of Writing a Literature Review
My role for our final research paper is to write the literature review. I have written one literature review before in my Government Research Methods class here at Colby. I was pretty sure even before asking Adam how to formulate a literature review for an education paper, that it may look slightly different than the one I had written for my Government Class. Sure enough, the format was slightly different. Adam told us that the purpose of a literature review is to come up with a thesis about the existing literature on your topic. The goal of the literature review is to ultimately inform your analysis. The focus of our literature review would focus on the role of community service in the elite school context.
(https://iupui.campusguides.com/literaturereview)
Luckily our group had already done the work of compiling relevant existing sources of research done on topics relating to our research question. Our six topics of focus were: the reproduction of elites, the role of community service in elite schools, the impact of short-term/low-impact community service, the relationship between Elite Schools and Public Schools in Chile, and the Socioeconomic Gap in Chile. We divided up the topics per person, assigning two topics per person and we were suppose to find a source for each. My topics were the relationship of elite schools and public schools in Chile and the Socioeconomic gap in Chile. Thus, when I went to write the literature review these were the only two sources I was familiar with. I read through the other notes on the sources Anya, Nick and Julia compiled and somewhat understood what they were about. I guess this is one of the challenges in doing group work. It is hard to write an analysis including sources that you did not personally find. After reading through the sources I started to get a relatively good idea of how to combine all the sources into a smooth analysis in the form of a literature review.
As instructed, we limited our literature review to six outside sources. This is something that definitely feels contradictory as the purpose of the literature review is to gather all existing outside literature that is relevant to your research. I found myself wondering if I had enough sources to make a convincing statement about existing literature on the role of community service in elite schools. Ultimately, I have to accept that for this particular project the literature review is not the focus and thus it is ok that it is limited in quantity.
As I was writing the literature review, another challenge that arose was the temptation to relate the literature findings to our own findings. For example, if something in the outside literature contradicted our findings I found myself wanting to make note of that in the analysis. After questioning this with Adam, he reassured me that the literature review was not the place to discuss any of our own findings, that was the purpose of the discussion. As a group we will write the discussion together, which I am sure will pose challenges as we are all only familiar with parts of the data. This is something that I have learned about group work from this project, you must rely and trust the work of others to inform your own role and work.