Comparing Literature Reviews

· There is much more reading required to complete the assignment than other assignments in this class  (the literature reviews of two dissertations!), so plan ahead and start your reading early enough before the deadline to allow you to complete the assignment. 

· #1 from the directions means you should focus on differences in the structure of the literature reviews, and only the structure of the literature reviews. If I cannot find any differences in the structure of the literature reviews presented in the paper, then the answer to the questions asked will be treated as absent rather than incorrect regardless of whether you brought up differences in other sections of the paper. The biggest problem that I see in the comparing literary reviews assignment is people presenting differences in areas of the two dissertations that are outside of the literature review. So please make sure that you are focusing on the exact topics described in 1 & 2 of the directions. 

· #2 from the assignment directions means that for each of the differences you identified in #1, there should be an explanation of why those differences you observed in #1 would occur. Differences between qualitative and quantitative methodologies can be brought up as part of that rationale to explain a specific difference between the literature reviews you observed. The rationale section is usually underdeveloped in these papers. If you find yourself giving the same exact explanation for each difference, you may not be putting in enough detail about the differences between quantitative and qualitative studies. 30% of the grade on this assignment is based on the rationale section, and 50% on the differences, so roughly similar proportions of the paper should be devoted towards each of those sections. 

· Please do not present summaries of the literature reviews or similarities between them. Devoting lots of room in essays to presenting summaries or similarities between the two generally means you won’t have enough room to describe the differences in the literature reviews or the rationale for those differences in sufficient detail to earn a good score on the rubric. 

· Another common problem that I see is with organizational structure: Often people present a long list of information about one study’s literature review, then presents a long list of information about the other study’s literature review. However, this is a comparison essay, so presenting long summaries does not really help the reader see what information you are comparing across the study. A more effective way to organize it is often to present an observation about one study, then present what the other literature review did by comparison, then present the rationale as to why the difference in methodologies would cause that difference in the literature review. For example, if I was doing an essay comparing the third chapter of these two studies, I could say something like “Wigton’s study had 21 participants, while Vangilder’s study had 44. It is surprising that the qualitative study had a larger sample size between these two studies because normally quantitative studies have much larger sample sizes in order to obtain sufficient statistical power to run the data analysis. The reason Wigton’s quantitative study had a smaller sample size was likely due to the restrictions of using archival data.”