Necessary Preparations For Writing A Social Work Dissertation Literature Review

Finding dissertation social work ideas today isn’t difficult because a lot of social work studies are being published every day. Even though you will find tons of interesting topics on the internet, it is important that you pick one which you are passionate about. Part of the crucial parts of your research is the Literature Review. This is how you should prepare a good literature review for a social work paper.

Understand the purpose of literature review

The literature review should represent how well you understand social work. This means that you should be well versed with social theories, history, jargons, important variables, and methods. You must explain some prominent studies in the past and how they relate to your project. Note that your literature review can be published as an authentic scholarly manuscript. Other scientific rationales for writing dissertation social work literature review are:

  • Outlining recommendations for future research on social work
  • Developing a subject context
  • Putting social theories and ideas into practice
  • Highlighting methodological inspirations
  • Letting the reader glean on the structure of social work
  • Solving research problems and showing their importance
  • Finding new approaches and lines of inquiry regarding social work
  • Establishing correlation between social ideas and practices
  • Improving vocabularies related to social studies
  • Separating past studies from what should be done
  • Discovering new perspectives

Determine your coverage

Coverage of literature review is how broad you want to cast your net as you carry out the review. There are 4 types of coverage namely:

  1. Exhaustive review.
    In this approach, you locate and use every aspect of your research, whether published or not. This will take time but the important thing is to determine a bounded population and use manageable articles.
  2. Selective citation.
    Here, you only examine particular articles e.g. those which have been published in journals and leave out conference papers. But if you have to exempt conference paper, be informed.
  3. Representative review.
    You pick sample articles and deduce characteristics of the overall population from the sample. Random sampling is not very accurate and the best option is to find a proof that your sample articles are really representative. Taking both is advisable.
  4. Purposive sample.
    In this approach, you will only study the fundamental articles in social work. You must convince the readers that your chosen articles are actually the most basic studies and those that have been disregarded are indeed non-pivotal.

You already know that Literature Review is a vital component of your dissertation work. To come up with a good review, start by picking a topic that will impact on your future employment and use the above tips.