Literature Review Direction...

Hi,
I would like to start my literature review for my third year project in psychology...the projects hypothesis are:

1- there will be a difference in Indian and Pakistani individuals who are married and not married, in their beliefs about the causes of domestic violence.
2- In addition it will examine whether there will be a difference in younger and older Indian and Pakistani individuals on what their beliefs are about the causes of domestic violence".

The questionnaire that will be distributed is broken down into four sections which are perpetrator blame, societal blame, victim blame, and situation blame. Alongside this 4 vignettes are going to be distributed these focus on environmental causes, biological causes, mental illness as a cause and other factors such as work stress and family stress.

I have been advised to focus my literature review on environmental causes biological and mental illness causes as factors of causing domestic violence.

So does anyone have alternative suggestions as to how I could write my lit review? its has a 4,000 word limit (therefore I can write a lot), any help would be appreciated.

Reply 1

LatinMachine

Ok, for a start is this a research project, dissertation or extended essay(lit review) thing? Because you say you're doing a research project, so if the whole research project is going to be 4000 words, your introduction needs to be <1000 words so you can fit the method/results/discussion in.

Your description of your project is not very clear e.g.
"Alongside this 4 vignettes are going to be distributed these focus on environmental causes, biological causes, mental illness as a cause and other factors such as work stress and family stress."
What vignettes are these? Which questionnaires are you going to use - ones you have designed yourself or ones from other projects? What are you going to ask them? And how are you going to make sure that social desirability effects are not going to present?

And if your project is going to be comparing the attitudes of Indian and Pakistani individuals and "young" and "old" individuals, how does this have any relevence to causes of domestic violence? Your aims sound like you are conducting a social psychology project, so surely you should be searching for previous research that has surrounded the *perceived* causes of domestic violence in ethnic groups?

Reply 2

ClaireR

Hi,
the project is my third year dissertation, which in total is 12,000, broken down my lit review has a 4,000 word limit on it.
The questionnaire is not self-designed the domestic violence blame scale will be used, the vignettes have been self-designed focusing on the 5 areas mentioned above (environmental, biological, mental illness, family stress, and work stress).
Social desirability can occur with almost any experiment. I will be talking about that in my discussion section of my dissertation.
While searching the literature I have found that young and old differ in the views on what they believe causes domestic violence hence the reason for my hypothesis focusing on the young and old.

Reply 3

LatinMachine

ClaireR

Hi, While searching the literature I have found that young and old differ in the views on what they believe causes domestic violence hence the reason for my hypothesis focusing on the young and old.

Ah ok, your uni differs in its definitions I think - where I am, a dissertation is basically a massive review paper, and everyone does a research project separately. But I think you've answered your question about the lit review - start with searching papers that are immedietely relevent then expand to theories etc etc. I always use a tool like PsycInfo to do searches, it lets you see who more recently has quoted a paper, which is a useful thing to use to explore.

Literature Review Direction...

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