74 6 Background Chapters
Developing Critical Thinking.........................................................................
One approach to thesis writing requires students to review the literature and pro-
duce a chapter entitled Literature Review’, thorough and polished, before they are
permitted to proceed with their own work. The idea is that, informed by a literature
review, they would be able to see just where previous researchers had drawn un-
warranted conclusions or had disagreed with each other, and would then be able to
design brilliant experiments to resolve these problems.
You certainly should read the literature before you leap into a full-scale research
program, and should also attempt to write down your understanding of it. This is
a good way to learn how to follow the important arguments through, and to un-
derstand the agreements and disagreements. But until you have done some work
of your own—perhaps collected and analyzed some data, for example—it is not
possible to be ‘critical’ in the sense implied by ‘a critical review of the literature’.
It follows that you will not yet be able to design those brilliant experiments that
have so far eluded the other researchers in your area. You may be able to design a
research program, but almost certainly it will be tentative. With luck, the results of
this preliminary program may help you to design a better set of surveys or experi-
ments next time (by which time you will have thought about it a bit more, and will
have gone back and re-read the literature). It also follows that your reviewing of the
literature is an ongoing process. You should still be reading it when you are setting
out results, discussing your findings, and writing conclusions.
How do you convert your initial ‘literature survey’ into a critical review of ex-
isting theory that will lead logically into the work that you design and undertake
yourself? A review of current theory serves three purposes: it gives the background
information required to contextualize the extent and significance of your research
problem; it identifies and discusses attempts by others to solve similar problems;
and it provides examples of methods they have employed in attempts to get these
solutions. Make sure you deal with all of these.
The first purpose is the most straightforward. Its sole purpose is to establish the
parameters of your argument. Guide yourself through this section of the research
by asking the four standard journalist’s questions: Who? What? Where? And when?
Keep this section short, and do not get caught up in unnecessary detail. Simply put,
it provides a map of the territory you are seeking to cover. It signals to your readers
that you intend to follow the scope of your investigation and are confident enough
to guide them through the complexities of the topic.
First attempts to review existing theory often stop after an initial draft. But when
you have put your problem in the context of ongoing research in the area you have
hardly started! Identifying and discussing possible solutions to your problem is the
second purpose of your review. This is where you need those critical skills. It is
likely (and expected) that you will have read much more widely in the topic area
than you need for your review. Your initial journey through the literature will have
helped you to gain a better understanding of the many complex facets of your cen-