The Process…

Post 7.

You will read advances on my dissertation that are not timely from here on. I have not written in this journal since I dived into completing Chapter 2 – The Literature Review.

The early job of finding studies related to my topic of interest was easier after doing a mind map. While developing this one, I organized my ideas and categories of concepts. From these concepts, I created the outline of my literature review.

I realized early on that my literature review would guide my dissertation. The second task was to form files on Mendeley that matched my literature outline. The studies I was finding I saved in the corresponding file. To categorize the studies, I read the abstracts. I knew that the abstracts might not contain all the necessary information, but it was a start. As I accumulated studies in the files, I would go back and begin to read each of them thoroughly.

Study after study, I recorded each reference, methodology and design, theorist or conceptual framework, purpose, research question, sample population, and findings. I made an Excel sheet to include one page per topic on the outline, and on each page, I labeled the columns with the data. The last two columns on each page were summary and analysis. I wrote these two in paragraph form after reading each study. I was already anticipating using each of those paragraphs in my review. Additionally, I wrote the analysis of each study in paragraph form, including the methodology, findings, strengths, and limitations. I ended the analysis with how it related to my research.

I repeated this process for each study, in each category. By the time I reached saturation, I had read between 70 to 80 studies. I did not include some studies in the review because they were not closely related to my research or were published five years ago. There was very little information about my specific topic of interest, which justified my research even more.

When connecting all the information under each topic in the outline, I treated my writing as a lecture. I tried to explain the relationship between the studies in each topic to someone who knew nothing about my research. Additionally, I connected the information to the conceptual framework to better understand what had been explored previously and what has not. Such information, in turn, served to justify my research.