Literature Review Outline

Your job in this assignment is to research a topic and build a literature review on that topic. I provide an example that would meet the requirements of this assignment in the Week Two Learning module. The first example is from a research project involving researchers from a number of institutions in which Tracy Routsong and I conducted the literature review that justified the study based on the lack of stepfamily formation research from the perspective of the stepchild.

These are the requirements of the assignment:

1) You must identify the existing scholarly research in your area. (By scholarly, I mean the sources must come from an academic journal)

2) You must include at least five scholarly sources and make sure they are the most current!

3) You must use appropriate citation methods within the text and include a reference list. (APA is the appropriate method for most communication research)

4) From this research, come up with an idea for a new research project. (Again, look at the last sentence of the example I provided and see how we make a claim about the need for more research.)

You are not going to write the literature review now, but are putting together the outline of the literature review. Just like good essays have good outlines, literature reviews have good outlines as well. So, when you submit your assignment, submit it in outline form that leads to a strong thesis with the sources being the support for that thesis.

Please make sure your literature review addresses topics centered in communication that are appropriate for qualitative research. A good way to find current research topics is to look at current issues of communication journals. Good resources can be located in the publications link of the National Communication Association and the Journal Qualitative Research Reports in Communication.