Hi all,
Was wondering if anybody is working on their literature review yet? I have started writing mine and I'm a little confused. When one writes a literature review, is it specific to the topic of my research or does it start as a general overview and then become more specific? For example my thesis topic is on social support and it's effect on the CD4 cell count of Hispanic men with HIV. So when I write my literature review would it all deal with social support, CD4 cell count and HIV or can I have general reviews on social support and HIV or just about HIV and it's effect on the CD4 cell count...HELP!!!!
Sitara
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Great question. I wish I could help! I am not there yet, but I do know that a couple of women in our class have started and some have completed their literature review. Hopefully they come into this blog. I will email the class this blog address again just so they can remember to come in and check it. As of now, I don't think many people have visited this blog. It is finals week after all!
Hi Sitara,
I think for a good lit review you should write about all the topics you mentioned. That is social support, HIV, CD4 cell count and Hispanic men. You should tie all the topics together under a public health theory such as social support theory or social cognitive theory. The book that we used in 661 also available as an eBook: http://www.cancer.gov/PDF/481f5d53-63df-41bc-bfaf-5aa48ee1da4d/TAAG3.pdf is a very helpful theory book. I don’t recall that we discussed social support theory in 661 but if you go to pub med, just type in social support theory and you will get a list of references. Furthermore another important theme for your review will be health disparities among Hispanics. So this is how I would proceed.
1) If your study is tied to a larger grant ask your supervisor for a copy of the grant so that you get the big picture of what the study is all about
2) Get a list of references to articles from the grant document
3) Read up on a few articles to the central theory you want to use, from the eBook or from the literature you find elsewhere. Sometimes there is a plethora of literature on a topic and I don’t know which ones to choose. A good way to start is just pick one author that is an expert on a topic and read a couple of papers from them and thoroughly understands the topic first. To know who the expert in a certain field is you can ask your advisor or sometimes you can guess. The way you guess the expert is to look at the reference section of the 661 eBook. If there is a certain author whose name pops up like 50 times then they are probably the experts in the field.
4) Start putting the literature you gather into bibliography software. I like to use endnote. There may be some free bibliography software online or the SDSU library may offer some of this software for download. Also many of the reference articles you may find online have links for you to automatically download the bibliography onto your software. It saves so much time.
5) Then put important references on your topics: Theory, HIV, health disparities onto your bib software. Don’t worry if you don’t intend to read every single paper you collect. You can select which ones you are going to use when you are doing your writing.
6) Then understand what the hypothesis you are testing is. For example: Social support Increases CD4 count in HIV positive Hispanic men
7) Then read a few papers in each of your subtopics and find a way to tie them all together: For example maybe you will find that social support has been found to be effective in reducing health disparities in Hispanic because of their culture of strong family ties etc. Then you start to write about social support theory or whatever theory you choose. Write about the constructs of the theory and the evidence that it works in your population of interest then you can write about health disparities in the Latino population and the Impact of HIV on this population. Then write about CD4 count and how it relates to HIV and how it can be used as a measure of the disease state.
So you can start your review on the broad topic then narrow it down to your particular subtopic at the end of the review.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful to get you started
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