Literature Reviews

Once I had determined my research topic and gotten it approved it was going it be it was time to do two very important things:

1. Buy a big binder and many tab dividers
2. Start my literature review

Doing both of these things are important to a successful research project (or at least to me they are).

The binder is important because it helps me to stay organized while working on my research.  I'm the person who everyone hates in the library because I'm always printing 20 page articles; I work better when I can highlight and write on them (don't judge me).  Having a big binder (and I wouldn't recommend anything under 5") allows me to keep all of my research together and in the order that I want it to be in.  And even past keeping my literature review articles together, having a binder allows me somewhere that I can keep different parts of my research together.  By this I mean that every time that I make a new version of a survey, or make a change to the methods section of my paper, I put a copy of the version of what I was changing in my binder with whatever corrections I have made handwritten onto the paper.  Doing this allows me to keep track of my progress as well as helping me to avoid making the same mistakes twice.  I'm making this sound overly complicated, but really it's not hard at all to keep a good research binder and it makes the organizational process worlds easier.

Compared to starting my literature review, starting my binder is a snap.  The real issue with starting a literature review is what I like to call the "wrong words game".  The wrong words games starts with the EBSCO psycARTICLES website and the keyword search.  Some people get lucky and get hits right away when they type in their topic.  I started off with "learning communities" and "college" and got one or two usable articles off the bat myself.  But once I'd looked through those articles, I had to get a little more creative.  I started searching terms like "freshman retention in colleges" and "peer cohort learning."  It always helps to look through the articles that you've already found and see what kind of terms that they use when discussing the topic.  A lot of the time they'll use terms that you'd never have thought use.  It also helps to skim through the introduction/lit review of an article you plan to use--sometimes they'll cite some tidbit of information that is relevant to your research topic which will lead you to another article that will help you in the quest for journal articles.

A side note before I continue: NEVER EVER use sites like psycINFO which only give you abstracts when writing your literature review.  Ever.  Or I'll find out who you are and come after you in some sort of scary manner.  But honestly, you only do yourself a disservice by using abstracts for your literature review.  When you only have an abstract, sure, you have the gist of what an article is about; but do you know what the article actually found in detail?  Do you know what their methods were?  Nope.  So how are you supposed to write a literature review or learn anything based on under 150 words about someone's research?  Furthermore, you miss out on valuable information by not taking the time to at least read the introduction and discussion sections of an article.  So to sum this up: don't be lazy, get the whole article.  I need to stop rambling, but I hope that every one got my point.

Getting back to my research, what can be said is that I spent probably spent an hour playing the wrong word game on psycARTICLES until I realized that I was going about this research entirely the wrong way.  Given, as a psychology major I was doing what was safe and comfortable, but why not live on the edge?  I went to the Education Complete Resource and started researching the same terms that I had been using on psycARTICLES with much more success.  Soon I had found at least 6 articles that I liked for my literature review.

Forming my Research Experiement

So this semester I'm working on a couple of research projects, and part of the assignment is to keep a journal on how things go as we work on it.  Honestly, I should have started this thing a month ago, but that's in the past now.  I'll be posting blogs about each part of my research, from the formation of it as an idea, to submission and (hopefully) presentation of this research at conference.  This particular post is about how my research idea came to me.

In September we started my research course and were told to pick our topics.  Originally, I wanted to try to do a study to see if late night programs, such as midnight basketball, would lower the rates of alcohol consumption on campus.  But when I thought about everything that would have to go into that (staff for the basketball game, organizing teams, gathering before and after alcohol consumption data), I thought that I might want to pick an easier subject.

At the time, I was also working on a completely different research project, testing game theory in college students.  In the process of organizing this study, I found out that part of my population of psychology courses was a learning community, which raised the concern that because of the high levels of interaction that these students experiences, they would have responses that might influence my results.  Also, I had to decide if I wanted to this group to complete the experiment in groups of three or as individuals (the concern being that their interactions would lead to tainted results).

To solve this problem I decided that I needed to poll the students to see how much they had bonded.  It seemed the only way around this problem that I was facing.  Once I started thinking about it, however, I realized that there was probably a lot this question of peer bonding in learning communities than what my game theory research needed to know.

I emailed my teacher, Prof. Remmiw, and told her that I wanted to change my topic, and explained to her that my clear direction and question that I wanted to answer in doing this research.  She sent me an email back saying that she really liked my idea and that she thought that I had a much clearer focus for this research idea.  And with that, I had my topic.  I  had taken the first (and most important) step down in the long trail ahead of me.