Department of Sociology
Georgetown University
SOCI 437-01: Senior Seminar Professor Marullo
Lit Review Guidelines
This is where you demonstrate that YOU are the expert on your topic. For readers
knowledgeable about your topic, you need to convince them that you are familiar with the latest
research and nuances of theoretical debate on your topic. For those less familiar with your topic,
you need to provide enough background information so that they can understand what your
research is about. For both types of readers—those familiar with your topic and those less so—
you need to convince them why your work is important enough for you to undertake it and for
them to read it.
There are three kinds of literature for you to include in your lit review: theoretical, previous
research, and programmatic or applied scholarship. The theoretical work will frame your
topic within one or more broad sociological perspectives (conflict, functionalist, symbolic
interactionist) and provide a model of how you believe the world works with respect to your
research topic. This level is rather abstract, at the level of concepts, and describes how you
expect the concepts to be related to each other. As a mental exercise to get you thinking in these
terms, ask yourself: what would Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber think about the
problem I am studying and how would he explain what I am seeing. By way of practical advice,
you should look at the theoretical references cited by other researchers in articles related to your
research project as a means of discovering the theoretical literature related to your project.
The previous research done on your topic, or related to your topic, is important for you to know
and understand because it makes clear what you are contributing to our knowledge of the topic
in light of what is already known about it. Your work can be seen as an extension of previous
work in terms of population studied, new time and place coverage, or new conditions into which
relationships are being extended. The research you draw on may share similar content, or
methodology, or research interests. The burden on you is to indicate what you have learned from
this previous work and to explain how/why what you are doing is different from the previous
research.
The scholarship of application is all-too-often given short-shrift in the scholarly journals, but
for your project is it quite crucial. You want to see how others have applied their learning to
your topic, or how previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of a particular practice
or program. You may use others’ research for evaluation tools or survey instruments that you
have adopted for your study. The application may be in the area of policy research, which
examines the outcomes of different policy approaches to your topic. You may want to explore
“promising practices” from other programs in order to provide guidance as to what your
community partner may find helpful for organizational improvement.
