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Box 3. 7 sample text from a literature review
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BOX 3. 7 SAMPLE TEXT FROM A LITERATURE REVIEW
The sociology of policing has persistently entertained the debate as to what constitutes ‘policing’. Johnston argued that one of the major limitations of this area of criminology has been its tendency ‘to conflate policing (a social function) with police (a specific body of personnel)’ (1999: 176–7), leading to a preoccupation with the role and functions of the state police forces as opposed to the wide range of bodies engaged in policing activities …
Definitions of ‘policing’ have abounded in recent years, highlighting the difficulty in encapsulating in a few words the diversity of objectives it might encompass and the range of agencies engaged in their pursuit.
… The first interpretation of policing as a ‘regulatory process’, formalized in the nineteenth century in Britain through the establishment of a public police force, encompasses the activities of multiple agencies, in common with the more recent conceptions of policing as ‘governance’ (Shearing, 1992), ‘networked nodal governance’ (Kempa et al., 1999) and the ‘governance of security’ (Johnston and Shearing, 2002). It may be argued … that as policing is becoming increasingly ‘segmented’, it is taking a form that appears less and less as an explicit and unified ‘process’ of regulation, in a reversal of nineteenth-century developments.
For the same reason, the usefulness of the interpretation of ‘policing’ as ‘the work of the police’ must also be called into question.
} relational marker indicating the writer’s relationship to the audience or scholarly community in which they are writing
} attitude marker indicating the writer’s assessment of an issue. An alternative would be to include ‘Johnston perceptively argued’
} hedging expression making a statement about the degree of certainty of a question, as contrasted with an emphatic expression relating to the strength of the claim or the writer’s level of confidence in it
Source: Based on guidance provided by the University of New South Wales (2009); extracts from Wakefield (2003: 3, 4, 15)
SUMMARY AND REVIEW
A literature review is an evaluative overview of the state of knowledge on a research topic. In broad terms, its purpose is to show you have read widely around the chosen topic, gained a good command of the issues, acknowledged the work of others and set your study in the context of the existing body of literature, highlighting gaps in research. It provides a critical, evaluative synthesis of the research literature on the topic at hand set out according to a number of organizing themes. Examples of lit- erature reviews include narrative reviews, in which the researcher seeks to identify trends and categories in a broad field of scholarship, and systematic reviews, used for the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention in order to support evidence-based policy making.
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The literature review process begins with the devising of an appropriate search strategy. Once gathered, a useful way both of organizing your research material and of making notes is to put together an annotated bibliography. In the process of writ- ing, your literature review needs to engage critically with the literature, speaking directly to your research question and sub-questions. Your task is to show how the literature addresses these questions, supporting or extending existing knowledge.
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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
The definitive textbook on literature reviews is Hart’s Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination (1998). Chapter 5 of Criminological Research for Beginners: A Student’s Guide (2014) by Caulfield and Hill is focused on critiquing the lit- erature and the process of writing the literature review, whilst Galvan and Galvan (2017) provide an easy to follow, sequential step-by-step guide on Writing Literature Reviews in the social and behavioural sciences. Additionally, Denney and Tewksbury (2013) outline ‘How to write a literature review’ specifically for students of criminology. Criminological researchers could also consult the annual journal Crime and Justice: A Review of Research for examples of authoritative literature reviews on a range of criminological topics.
Many examples of literature reviews carried out by and for government agencies can be found online, on such sites as:
· the research pages of the UK Home Office and Ministry of Justice hosted on the GOV. UK website (www. gov. uk/government/organisations/home-office/about/research and www. gov. uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-justice/about/research)
· the Australian Institute of Criminology (www. aic. gov. au)
· the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (www. bra. se/english)
· the US National Institute of Justice (https: //www. nij. gov/)
· the World Criminal Justice Library Network, an excellent starting point for identify- ing annotated bibliographies and other subject reading lists, albeit of varying age and quality: http: //andromeda. rutgers. edu/~wcjlen/WCJ.
Detailed information on systematic reviews can be found on the websites of the Campbell Collaboration (www. campbellcollaboration. org) and the Cochrane Collaboration (www. cochrane. org), and guidance on rapid evidence assessments is provided by the UK gov- ernment’s Social Research Unit. Some guidance is now archived at http: //webarchive. nationalarchives. gov. uk/20140402164155/http: //www. civilservice. gov. uk/networks/gsr/
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