Relevance of Literature Review In Social Science Research Text

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A literature review surveys, summarizes, evaluates and synthesizes scholarly books, articles and other sources relevant to a particular research. It is designed to provide an overview of available sources as well as any critical evaluation of these works, demonstrating that you have done your homework in the subject at hand. As a student in social science, you may not be an authority, much less an expert. Yet, by listing an extensive literature review you have done, you are claiming you did your homework, which will help establish a rapport with the reader that you have the facts about what you are talking about. Thus, it's important for you to list all the books you have read, articles you have evaluated, interviews and experiments you have conducted and even emails you have exchanged with the experts.

Without such a thorough literature review, your reader will not be able to trust your authenticity. Similarly, by writing an extensive literature review, you can avoid repeating research someone else has already done. As you evaluate other scholarship performed on your topic, you can make sure you're not rehashing old ideas. You could be accused of committing accidental plagiarism, although you may not intentionally have stolen anything from anyone. In the process of compiling a literature review, you will be able to examine what kind of scholarship is available on your topic or how your new research is different from what has previously been done.

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As you compile your literature review, you will summarize, analyze and synthesize outside sources in your own words, thus differentiating the chaff from the grain by placing individual works in the context of your research, helping you determine the relevancy of each work. This process will sharpen your understanding of the research issue you are working on. The review will also describe the relationship among various scholarships, identifying any gaps or seeming contradictions from previous works. Such identification and delineation will further help you explain and establish why there is a need to do more research on your topic in the future.

A literature review can be written in many different ways, such as argumentative review, integrative review, historical review, methodological review, systematic review and theoretical review. An argumentative review is written to pose an opposing view to an existing position an integrative review consists of reviews and criticism on a given topic to introduce a need for a new research. A historical review traces all the scholarship that has been done on a given topic chronologically, while a methodological review examines the methods data collection, analysis and interpretation of the research, for example. In short, a literature review gives the reader a quick comprehensive summary of the topic, scope and scholarship, past and present, providing a sense of direction of the research. a new collection engages directly with how political science can achieve wider relevance as a discipline. matt wood finds the relevance of political science a must read for any scholar interested in the impact debate and he welcomes a return to the more social constructivist ideas of impact through teaching and learning. But there is a risk this relevance debate descends into a buzzfeed world of hints and tips.

More attention could be spent justifying to society why the theoretical and conceptual work political scientists already do is intimately valuable in any democratic society. relevance of political science. 2015. what more is there to be said in the debate on relevance? to the extent that there ever could be a debate, it now surely remains settled, with the breathtakingly swift institutionalisation of impact case studies into the ref agenda, the plethora of blogs and buzzfeed style hints and tips for the impact savvy social scientist, and the growth of completely un self consciously parodying terms like deep impact. What more then, is there to say? according to stoker, peters and pierre in their new edited collection the relevance of political science. For them, the key agenda is how best to understand the obstacles that need to be resolved in achieving relevance and the potential for relevance that could thereby be realised.

So the how question is now central: we all want to be relevant, and indeed to accuse political scientists of irrelevance might be viewed either as an eyebrow raising political move, or a deeply patronising misunderstanding. But the key is how to make that relevance less a rhetorical trope and more of an empirical reality. the relevance of political science helps to highlight the range of answers to the ‘how?’ question, particularly the relevance of teaching, but could go further in stressing the importance of conceptual and theoretical reflection about politics.

answering the how? question importantly, the relevance of political science starts not from the argument often pushed rather too frequently that political scientists are intellectual hermits who need to be cajoled into believing in an abstract relevance crusade. Colin hay in his contribution wittily terms this the ‘glasnost’ movement, echoing the american perestroikans of the early 20s. Instead, the book begins with the meat of the problem: how can political scientists, in all their theoretical, conceptual and empirical diversity, achieve the perception that they are relevant? the answer is a strongly pluralistic discipline, with a diversity of approaches to relevance, and in particular how ‘post positivist’ political science finds relevance within the classroom. Here, john gerring offers the clearest explication of how post structuralists view the relevance agenda: although arguments for relevance are rarely stated explicitly, it seems clear that writers like jacques derrida, michel foucault and slavoj zizek view the scientific pretensions of social science as not merely wrong but also damaging to society. Their war against social science is correctly viewed as an attempt to liberate society from a false idol. It is not at least not usually waged with a dionysian intent simply to amuse and distract. Many recently minted approaches to political science that reject the scientific label often do so for the very reason they are criticised the very issue of relevance.

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