This activity is open for two weeks and helps you learn more about conducting analysis for your literature review. They key to literature reviews is reading previous research studies on your topic and sharing what are the major things we know about your topic based on those studies.
Remember that you have been reading about literature reviews through MASP student theses, Sociology Compass, and through your textbook. 🙂 You have begun an understanding of what is a literature review and how to write a literature review. Now, you are going to do a mini-project to help you develop an essential skill to writing your own literature review. You can do this!
STEP 1 – Read articles provided and take light notes on the findings for each article. These articles come from a project about computer science and women. They are found here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pM4nIWxDcQvXCZcbATerpoxRFZ0QwAZG?usp=sharing
STEP 2 – Identify at least 3 commonalities that these researchers are finding. This means that you need to read across the articles, make sure you understand the findings of each article, and then taking a step back to identify at least three main themes that you detected across the articles.
STEP 3 – For each theme, ask yourself “How do I know this was a common finding?” Go back into the articles and pull out the quotes or summary the findings that support each of your theme. You should have evidence for each theme.
Tip: write out the theme and summarize or copy/paste quotes under it with bullet points. Be sure to keep track of which article each finding came from.
STEP 4 – Think about what is your strongest theme with evidence. Write up one of your themes and provide the related evidence to submit to this assignment. You will write one paragraph where you (a) state the theme as a topic sentence and (b) write about each finding from the studies that support the theme. Be sure to cite where the evidence came from. Use the appropriate in-text citation style. See examples at the bottom of this prompt for what finished paragraphs look like from one of my research projects.
Final note: Assignment A is all about developing this important skill of analyzing previous literature. It’s opposite of the famous Yoda saying, “Do or do not. There is no try.” There is totally TRY and you need to try to do it to see how to improve. You will be grading on TRYING out this skill. The results may not be perfect. We will focus on developing this skill. Do your best! 🙂
EXAMPLE 1
I want to share an example of a theme and the evidence across articles. This is a paragraph from a current manuscript’s literature review. Our study is how and when undocumented youth manage disclosing their immigration status to others. However, we first had to read and write about other studies who do similar research. Therefore, a strong theme that we picked up when reading about disclosure is that youth tend to do it because they need resources or support. You can see that we state this theme at the beginning and then provide evidence from different studies that support our theme.
Youth also disclose their status strategically to gain necessary resources or support (Cho, 2021; Kam et al., 2019; Murillo, 2017). This includes educational resources, as well as emotional and material support from others. Undocumented youth might also disclose their status to empower both themselves or their community amid political and public hostility (Macias, 2022; Muñoz, 2016). In this way, disclosure can serve as a form of activism (Escudero, 2020). Indeed, disclosing one’s status can allow undocumented youth to humanize undocumented peoples and to pressure educational institutions to support undocumented students (Macias, 2022; Muñoz, 2016).
EXAMPLE 2
In this next example from our literature review, we present another theme from previous studies is how and when undocumented youths conceal and protect information about their immigration status. We state the theme and then provide examples from other studies that support this theme.
Research finds that youth conceal their status to protect themselves and their family members. Youths often conceal their status to avoid retaliation against themselves or their immediate relatives, as well as to avoid general social shaming (Kam et al., 2019; Muñoz, 2016). As such, and in contrast to the situations in which they are likely to share their status, youth report they conceal their status around those they do not trust. Beyond the interpersonal context, the political or social context in which youth are enmeshed also influences their decisions to conceal (Patler, 2018). Youth who live in periods or places dominated by anti-immigration laws, who have witnessed deportation or detention, or who experienced a traumatizing migration journey may be more likely to conceal their status (Patler, 2018). In educational spaces, youth may not disclose their status when school personnel assume that they are documented (Macias, 2022). Educators may also inadvertently create opportunities for non-Latinx youth or white-passing Latinx youth to conceal their status by not asking them about documentation (Macias, 2022; Reed et al., 2022). Thus, for youth who do not resemble the stereotypical imagery of what an “undocumented young adult” looks like, educators’ assumptions about the relationship between race, ethnicity, and status can allow students to avoid disclosure.
