Due September 27th

In groups of 3 or 4, select a relevant social work issue and determine a general research question. Each person in the group must choose at least one relevant academic reading (chapter in a book, journal article, research report). Also, I want a research question that is likely to have a substantial amount written on it. The group should delineate research and writing responsibilities fairly, determine individual task deadlines, and write a 6 to 8 page literature review. Be creative and incorporate terms and concepts from class. The research question should be clearly stated in the paper and the report should present all relevant materials and conclusion (that includes your group’s opinions, comments, thoughts and further questions that your lit review has raised).

Start on it right away because you will want to set deadlines for finding the appropriate materials, analyzing the readings, writing, editing, and proofreading. I understand that this is a very short amount of time to coordinate all this. Much of it will be determined by teamwork, coordination, communication, and responsibility to your teammates (group members should exchange contact information). It simulates a real-life situation where you may be asked to quickly adapt, re-write, or change an aspect of a program when you have very limited time to conduct a study. Use APA format and citations.

An example of when you have limited time for a literature review: Kalamazoo High School A (KHS A) is experiencing a sharp increase in school violence. You are one of employees that the principal has asked to conduct a literature review and make recommendations; and they want to implement something next week. You know that you don’t want to duplicate efforts so you, and the others assigned to the task, decide to coordinate efforts. You come up with the following research question: What are the known factors contributing to school violence? Commonsense tells you that your principal wants you to find data that are relevant to KHS A (in reality you’d want to verify that). You run to the dusty basement bookshelf to grab your old college textbook to use as a reference. You start your lit review by determining the research question and sub-questions; then you start your library search. You hit the library first because you know that the academic journals and books are typically very credible sources. Next you begin searching online for online academic journals and other credible sources like universities and professional organizations and associations. You are looking for key words, phrases, concepts, chapter titles, paper headings and sub-headings, you think, ‘who are the experts being cited in the literature,’ who is a credible source,’ and ‘is this article relevant in answering my question or for providing me with information to support my question?’ You then read and analyze, learn new key words, refine the questions, eliminate irrelevant material, gather more information, and read and analyze. In your analysis you ponder, ‘what are the impacts or main arguments? How did the authors reach their conclusions?’ You synthesize the literature, add your thoughts, opinions, and criticisms; you provide the thought processes that you used to develop your conclusions. You draft, write-up, and edit the paper; you use the computer’s spell check (in Microsoft Word you simply hit the F7 key); you proofread it again and share it with others to proofread. You make the final touches. And whew! Just in time… You hand in the lit review to the boss!

Your report is a combination of all of the relevant documents that you read. I don’t want a bunch of individual reports stapled as one report. Part of the grading will be on the flow and logic of the paper format. I don’t want it to look like 3 different people wrote individual sections of the report.

Include a reference page. Include everything you read or used that lead to the creation of the paper (other people’s writings and ideas).

Format the paper any way you chose as long as it is logical. You probably want to look at a few examples of lit reviews to see how they are formatted and structured.

What is the importance, significance behind studying this issue? How could information from the study be beneficial?

¨ What wer our broad initial assumptions? Why what is this research question important to know?

¨ What were the results, impacts, main ideas, concepts, and limitations; how did you bias the information? Summarization the main ideas in the literature.

¨ Synthesize results—do not repeat the results—summarize and discuss general trends, further questions, more specific questions. Hypothesize after lit review and include a discussion of your hypotheses in the conclusion.

Everyone is expected to participate fairly! If anyone has problems with a group member, they can email me confidentially.