The Literature Review: Some Pointers

A video based on this blog filmed with Rory at Counselling Tutor

Aims

The purpose of a literature review is to bring together what is known, so far, in relation to the question(s) being asked. So, for a decent literature review, the first thing is to be really clear about its aims and the questions you are asking (see Research aims and questions: Some pointers).

A literature review is not an essay. When people write an essay, what they generally do is to draw together various bits of theory and research to try and make one (or several) points. An essay is about constructing an argument and then justifying it. But a literature review is different. You’re not trying to make a point in it or prove something you already believe in. Rather, you’re asking a question and then trying to answer it by searching out all the relevant literature in relation to that question. If you know the answer to your question(s) before you’ve done your literature review then something is not quite right. A literature review, as with all research, should be based on answering a question you don’t know the answer to.

The Scope of a literature review

From degree level to Master’s level to doctoral level (Levels 6, 7, and 8, respectively, in the QAA Frameworks for Higher Education Qualifications), a literature review should demonstrate a systematic understanding of some element of a particular field. In addition, from Master’s to doctoral level, this should be increasingly at the forefront of a discipline and creating original knowledge; and, at doctoral level, meriting journal publication. To achieve all this, it means that your research question(s) needs to be focused and narrow enough to allow for a systematic understanding.  If there’s too much literature on your question to know it all, your question is probably too broad—try narrowing it down.  

Ask yourself, ‘What might I feel confident in saying that I systematically understand, that I can be a leading expert on?’  If that feels way above what you can achieve, narrow your focus down until it’s really possible for you to believe you’re a leading expert in it. So, for instance, if you’re asking a question like, ‘What is the relationship between empathy and therapeutic outcomes?’ you’ll soon find out that it’s going to take a lifetime to lead expertise here: there’s hundreds of research papers on it. But the relationship between self-disclosure and therapeutic outcomes in person-centred therapy—there’s maybe a dozen or so key papers here that means that some level of leading expertise is within your grasp. 

Remember—particularly for Master’s and doctoral level—you also need to be at the forefront of a field.  Not what was talked about 20 years ago, but what is being discussed and debated now.  If you find most of your references are back in the 1980s and 1990s, think about why there’s nothing more current.  Is it that people have stopped being interested in this question?  Is it that you’ve missed the latest research?

At Master’s level, you need to demonstrate mastery of a field.  That is, not just that you know the literature, but that you can do things with it: e.g., evaluate the reliability of different sources of evidence, compare, and contrast ideas. At doctoral level, you should be able to demonstrate, not only mastery, but an ability to do things with the literature in independent and original ways: e.g., come up with new interpretations and perspectives. So at both Master’s and doctoral level, you need to be able to go beyond simply describing relevant literature or findings, towards producing a synthesised understanding of the current state of knowledge in relation to your research questions.

Be critical.  This doesn’t mean insulting or attacking specific pieces of work—e.g., ‘What a tw*t Smith (2007) is for saying…’—and it doesn’t mean finding flaws in research for the sake of it. What it means is being able to extract from the literature what is relevant to your own research question(s), and to evaluate its importance to you.  That might mean, for instance, saying that the participants in a particular study were all White, so the findings may not be generalisable to people of other ethnicities; or that the use of quantitative methods means that we don’t really understand the mechanisms of change.

It’s not the end of the world if there’s one or two or papers that you’ve missed. Everyone misses things, and your examiners/assessors are likely to understand. But try to avoid having big gaps in your review, where whole areas of literature have been overlooked. That’s where systematic reviews can really come in handy.

doing a literature review systematically

Systematic literature reviews are reviews of the literature that have a series of explicitly-stated stages. This might include specifying your search terms, reporting on your ‘hits’, and systematically analysing your findings. They also focus on answering an explicitly-stated question. Different teaching programmes have different requirements about whether a literature review should be ‘systematic’ or not but, often, it’s an indication of higher quality, robustness, and transparency. However, there’s not one form of a systematic literature review and, in general, it can be considered on a spectrum: from highly systematic reviews (including, for instance, multiple coders, see below), to reviews with some systematic elements (such as an explicitly-articulated search strategy). A literature review may also have one or more systematic sections, rather than being a systematic literature review in its entirety. For instance, you might start a literature review by exploring a particular area, identify a question that seems of importance, and then go on to conduct a systematic review of what is known in relation to that question.

Ideally, the stages of a systematic literature review are set out before you start as a written protocol. You can see an example of one here, which we developed to examine the factors that facilitated and inhibited integration in child mental health services (see published paper here). This protocol covers such areas as:

• Aims

• Eligibility criteria for studies (i.e., which studies you’ll accept for review)

  • Study characteristics (e.g., only empirical studies, only studies of young people)

  • Report characteristics (e.g., only studies after 1990, only English language)

• Information sources (i.e., where you’ll look for studies, see below)

• Study selection procedures

• Planned method of analysis

Feel free to use the headings from our protocol for your own review.

There’s a very well-established set of guidelines that set out standards and expectations for reviews (particularly quantitative ones), the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). All the elements detailed here aren’t normally considered necessary for a Master’s or doctoral level review, but even if you don’t do a full systematic review, you may want to draw on certain parts (such as a ‘flow chart’ of the references you used, see below).

At minimum, for any kind of literature review, it is generally useful to show how you went about ensuring that you identified relevant literature in your area. For instance, you could include your search terms, and information about the databases searched, in your Appendix). Probably what’s most important is to show that your literature search, and write-up, weren’t just ad hoc. That is, that you didn’t just ‘cherry pick’ certain bits of literature, or arbitrarily select the papers from a five minute search of Google Scholar. However, you do it, you want to make it clear that you conducted a systematic, comprehensive, and meaningful review of the field: one that gave you the best chance of answering your own research question(s) to the fullest.

Study selection procedures

Generally, the best way to start finding articles for review is by setting out the different concepts within your study (for instance, as a table), and then brainstorming all the different terms that might be used to cover those concepts. For instance, if you were doing a review of research on person-centred therapy and autism, you might develop one set of terms for research (e.g., ‘empirical’, ‘study’, ‘evidence’…), one set for person-centred therapy (e.g., ‘person-centred’, ‘client-centred’, ‘client-centered’…), and one set for autism (e.g., ‘autism’, ‘asperger’s’, autistic…). To begin with, try and generate as many relevant terms as possible, and don’t forget that you want to include US-spelling as well as UK-spelling (like ‘person-centred’ and ‘person-centered’). Different search engines have different ‘wild cards’ that you can use (like * or $), which is where you specify just part of the word. For instance, if you want to search texts with ‘counselling’, ‘counsellor’, ‘counseling’, ‘counselor’, ‘counselled’, etc., you may be able to just use ‘counsel*’ (check the help sites on the specific search you are using). Importantly, you’ll also need to select the field that you want to search in. For instance, do you want to find sources with this term in the title, the abstract, or anywhere in the text—different field selections will give very different sets of results.

Below is an example of the search strategy that we used for our paper on interagency collaboration in child mental health services. You can see that we searched for terms about integration, and then also about children/young people, and mental issues. They needed to be post-1995 (and the study was conducted in 2015). The asterixes are wild cards that we used to ensure we didn’t miss terms with slightly different endings.

Example search strategy for review of integration in child mental health services

Although, ideally, this search strategy is set out before you do your search, it is inevitably going to be an iterative process: moving between testing out particular strategies, seeing how many hits you get, then revising the strategy to either broaden or narrow down the number of hits. For instance, you might start with a search that has ‘child*’ anywhere in the text, but because you get tens of thousands of hits, you revise this to require ‘child*’ to be in the title. As you start to see your hits, you may also want to include additional search terms for your concepts.

Very approximately, you want to find a search strategy that gets you, initially, something like 200 to 2000 hits. More than that becomes unmanageable. Less than that and you’re possibly missing some key articles. What you then do is to go through all the titles, or maybe the titles and abstracts, and identify just those that seem relevant to your review. Inevitably you’ll reject the majority of your hits: for instance, they might not be empirical papers, or they might use the term ‘person-centred’ to mean something entirely different from what you are looking at. That will then leave you with a smaller number of articles where you then might read through the whole paper to see if the article is relevant. Again, when you do that you’ll end up excluding a lot of your papers.

Ideally, particularly at Master’s and doctoral level, you should be keeping track of all the hits/articles you are reviewing and selecting/excluding at each stage. The ideal way to present that is through a Study flow diagram. Below is an example of such a diagram from our study of integration in child mental health services. You’ll see that there were a number of stages, and we explicitly state why we excluded certain papers. This level of detail may only be needed for doctoral or journal publishing level, but at any level you can use even a simple flow diagram to show key elements in the study selection process.

Example study flow diagram for review of integration in child mental health services

Just to add, at publishable level (and, ideally, at doctoral level), it’s good to be able to show some degree of ‘inter-rater reliability’ in the study selection process. What this means is that the selections made were not just down to the particularities of the individual researcher, but would be replicable across different researchers. The way that you do this is to have someone else (say a course colleague) do some of the selection process to, and then see how much similarity there was across selections. For instance, based on reading the full papers, what proportion of papers that you identified as eligible did a colleague also identify as eligible? If that’s less than, say, 50% or so, it suggests that there’s a lot of individual variation in what would be considered eligible for your review, and the criteria may need some tightening up.

If you know there are papers that are relevant to your review but aren’t coming up through your search strategy, that means there’s something wrong with the strategy. Have a look at why it’s not picking up those key papers and revise the strategy accordingly: if it’s missing those papers, it’s also possibly missing other papers that are important to your review. At the end of the day, saying ‘Well, I excluded Papers X and Y because they didn’t come up in my search strategy,’ isn’t enough. Your search strategy should be a tool for finding relevant texts, not the criteria, per se, of what is or is not relevant.

As well as using search engines, a key source to draw on is the reference list in the articles that you have found. Citation searches reverse that process, and can also be extremely helpful. In a citation search, you take key articles and then look at the subsequent articles that have referenced that article. That way, you find the very latest research related to that work. To do a citation search, you simply find the key article on a database and then click on the ‘citations’ link (or in Google Scholar, ‘Cited by…’). You can see this circled in red on the screenshot below:

Example ‘Cited by’ hyperlink in Google Scholar

By the end of this study selection process, you want to end up with somewhere between about five and 30-40 papers for inclusion in your review. More than that and you may well struggle to meaningfully integrate the findings. Less than that and your review is going to be more and more simply a re-statement of what the papers found. But if you’ve asked a really important, meaningful question, conducted a really thorough search, and then just found there isn’t anything out there—or only one or two studies—that can be a meaningful outcome in itself. Importantly, too, don’t take it as a sign of personal failure if you haven’t found any literature out there. The reality is, on a lot of counselling- and psychotherapy-related questions, there just isn’t much research. But identifying that can be really helpful in letting the field know areas to focus on for future.

Information sources

This may depend on the databases that your institution has access to. At minimum, you would ideally want to search Web of Science and PsychInfo, two of the principal sources for psychology-related papers. Google Scholar makes a useful addition to this: it can help you identify a different range of papers, more of the ‘grey’ literature. Don’t worry too much about your university or college library: that’s inevitably going to have a relatively limited array of books and journals.

How do I make my case?

As emphasised earlier, if you’re thinking, ‘How do I construct an argument so that I can show that I’ve got some good ideas here?’ you may be asking the wrong question for a literature review.  That’s fine for an introductory section of a thesis—showing why your question is of importance and relevance—but, as above, the aim of a literature review is to provide a balanced review of what we know so far in relation to a particular question, not to convince the reader of something.  So if the structure of your literature review goes something like, ‘Well x is really important, and so is y, and that means z is likely [and so I’m going to do some research now to show it is]’ you may need to backtrack.  Remember, ask yourself, ‘What is it that I don’t know that I am trying to find out?’  Trying to prove a point is never a great basis for a piece of research.

Format of the write-up

In most cases in the counselling and psychotherapy field, reviews will be of a qualitative nature (i.e., written up in words)—and that’s what I’ll address here. There are also reviews that mathematically combine data, known as meta-analysis. These have their own particular methods (see, for instance, Practical meta-analysis) and are best conducted using dedicated software, such as Comprehensive Meta-analysis.

Use headings and subheadings in each of the sections to keep a clear structure to the paper, and make sure that the hierarchy of these headings is clear to the reader: i.e., make the higher level headings bigger, bolder, etc. as compared with lower order headings. Some pointers on formatting and presenting your work are available here.

You will probably want to start your literature review with a short section detailing the method by which you went about your literature search. Even if you didn’t use a systematic method throughout, it’s worth saying something of how you searched the literature, so that the reader has a sense of what you might have found—and missed.

A table of the final articles that you included in your review can be really helpful, either at the start of the review or as an appendix. Each paper can be a row, and then you can have various key features in the columns, such as the location of the study, the number of participants, key findings, etc. An example—the first few rows from our review of integration in child mental health services—is below.

Example table of studies for review of integration in child mental health services

Try to avoid ‘laundry list’ reviews: ‘stringing together sets of notes on relevant papers’ (McLeod, 1994, p.20) one after another.  For instance:

• Smith (1992) found that…..

• And Brown (2011) found that…

• And Jones (1996) found that…

• And then Patel et al. (2001) found that…

Or narrative/historical version of a laundry list review: For instance:

• First, Smith (1992) found that…..

• Then Jones (1996) found that…

• Then Patel et al. (2001) found that…

• Then Brown (2011) found that…

Remember that, particularly at Master’s and doctoral level, a literature review is not just about précising previous research in the field: providing summaries of what lots of different studies said.  It’s about drawing the research together in coherent and meaningful ways.

So wherever possible, adopt a thematic style of review.  ‘This strategy involves the identification of distinct issues or questions that run through the area of research under consideration. Thematic literature reviews enable the writer to create meaningful groupings of papers in different aspects of a topic.  This is therefore a highly flexible style of review, in which the complex nature of work in an area of area can be respected while at the same time bringing some degree of order and organisation to the material’ (McLeod, 1994, p.20).  In a thematic review, it is likely that several different sources will be cited in one paragraph.

• Some research has shown A… (Jones, 1996; Smith, 1992)

• But other research has shown B (Patel et al., 2001; Jones, 1996), although there are some problems with these findings (Grey et al., 1990).

• More broadly, we know that Z… (White and Brown, 2001; Yellow, 2010).

• And there is also some research to suggest X (Blue, 2003; Grey, 1994).

• What we know so far, then, is that A seems very likely, and that is supported by Z and X, though B raises some problems about this.  

When you review the literature, you don’t need to ascribe every study equal weight and space.  Indeed, if you are, it probably suggests you’re being too descriptive and not discriminating enough.  Some of the studies you look at will be spot-on relevant to your own research, some only tangentially so.  So if you’re extracting what’s really most meaningful to your own questions, you should be taking a lot more from some sources than others.  You’re not reviewing to make all these authors feel like they’re being paid due regard.  You’re reviewing to take what you need from their work to say what we currently know in relation to your question(s).  If content isn’t relevant, leave it out.  If it’s highly relevant, say a lot about it.

A thematic approach really allows you to show a high-level, synthesised understanding.

Whenever you make claims about how things are (for instance, ‘empathy is a key factor in therapeutic outcomes’), you must always provide some reference for this.

Make sure you explicitly state somewhere, either at the end of the literature review or in your design, what the main aims/objectives of your study are, and, if relevant, your hypothesis/hypotheses.

Wherever possible, go back to the original sources and reference those, rather than ‘cited in….’  Citations never looks great—that you haven’t bothered to consult the original sources.  If you really can’t access the original source (e.g., it’s in another language, or out of publication and unavailable), that’s fine, but use citations sparingly.  And be really careful not to take references from a secondary source and cite them as if you have read them: find out what the original authors really said.

EVIDENCE or theory?

Your literature review might be of evidence in relation to a particular question: for instance, ‘How do clients experience person-centred therapy?’ Alternatively, it might be of theoretical propositions: for instance, ‘What is a relational psychodynamic theory of development?’ It could also combine evidence and theory, for instance, ‘What is the relationship between alliance and outcomes for young people?’ There’s no right or wrong here—it is entirely dependent on your question.

What is important, however, is to be clear about when you’re reviewing theory and when you’re reviewing evidence. So, when you write up your review, try not to mix up theoretical statements like, ‘Rogers hypothesised that….’ with empirical statements like, ‘Greenberg et al. found that…’ What someone thinks (even if it was Carl Rogers!), and what someone actually found, are quite separate things. So if you are covering both in your review, it may be an idea to write them up as separate sections.

Just to note, also be careful about mixing up primary studies (e.g., specific pieces of empirical research), with reviews or ‘meta-analyses’ of the field. For instance, you may find through your search strategies a number of papers which review primary studies in relation to a particular question. That’s great, but then use that review to identify the primary studies, and include or exclude those primary studies in your review, as appropriate. You could then note the reviews papers in your introduction, and say about how your review is different. Alternatively, you could do a review of reviews in a field—if there’s a logic in bringing them together and it would be redundant to replicate the review process. But, again, don’t mix that up with a review of primary studies—do one or the other, and be clear about which it is.

The 'target' approach to structuring your literature review

One way to think about structuring your literature review is like a ‘target’. Start with the evidence that is most relevant to your research question (and perhaps do a systematic review of it). Then what else might be most closely relevant? For instance, if you’re doing a study on negative experiences of young people in person-centred therapy, you’d want to start by looking comprehensively for everything on that specific question. But if there’s not much, then you could review the research on negative experiences of young people in other therapies, then negative experiences of adults in person-centred therapy. The more literature there is at the ‘bullseye’ of your target, the less you need to go broader. But if there’s really not much (and that’s fine), then broaden out to literature from which we might be able to extrapolate potential answers to your question(s).

Target approach to writing up a literature review

The ‘pyramid’ approach to structuring your literature review

Another common approach is the pyramid one, where you start with the broadest area of literature on your topic, and then narrow downwards to more specific knowledge leading on to your research question.

Pyramid approach to writing up a literature review

Summary

Ultimately, a literature review is not about showing that you are smart and know things, or that you can follow a pre-specified methodology.  It’s about drawing on all your knowledge and skills to present your best understanding of the answers to your question(s), to date. 

You are to become the master in this field. And your reader is looking to you to give them an informed, rigorous, and up to date understanding. Sometimes, the hardest bit of doing a literature review is feeling the confidence to be able to do that (see my blog on the Research mindset). But you can, providing you choose your scope and your methods wisely.

Further reading

There are several texts on how to write a literature review, relevant to the counselling and psychotherapy field. Torgerson’s Systematic reviews is a good general introduction. 7 steps to a comprehensive literature review has been recommended to me, and there is the popular Doing a literature review in health and social care. John McLeod’s classic Doing research in counselling and psychotherapy gives some excellent guidance on reading the literature (Chapter 2).

Acknowledgements

Photo by Jakirseu, CC BY-SA 4.0

Disclaimer

The information, materials, opinions, or other content (collectively Content) contained in this blog have been prepared for general information purposes. Whilst I’ve endeavoured to ensure the Content is current and accurate, the Content in this blog is not intended to constitute professional advice and should not be relied on or treated as a substitute for specific advice relevant to particular circumstances. That means that I am not responsible for, nor will be liable for any losses incurred as a result of anyone relying on the Content contained in this blog, on this website, or any external internet sites referenced in or linked in this blog.

Choosing Your Research Topic: Some Pointers

If you're doing a research project in counselling, psychotherapy, or counselling psychology, choosing your topic can be one of the hardest things to get right. And often one of the things you get the least advice on. So how should you go about it?

Read through previous counselling/psychotherapy/counselling psychology research theses

Invaluable! Essential! Probably the most useful thing you can do to get you started. This will give you a real sense of the ‘shape’ of a research study in this field, what is expected of you, and the kinds of questions that you might want to ask.  Should be in your college library or ask a tutor.

originalITY is not everything

Often, in my experience, students come into Master’s or doctoral research projects thinking, ‘I must do something original… I must do something original.’ So they work away at finding some dark corner somewhere that no-one has ever looked into before. Of course, there does need to be originality in your research, but if you’re burrowing away into a corner somewhere then there’s a real danger that no-one else is going to be particularly interested in where you’re going—you’re off into a world of your own. So instead of asking yourself, ‘What can I do that no-one else has ever done before?’ ask yourself, ‘What can I do that builds on what has been done before?’ And that means…

…Get a sense of the field

What are the key questions being asked in your field today?  What are the issues that matter and that are of relevance to practice?  It’s great to draw on your own interests and experiences, but also make sure you develop some familiarity with the field as it currently stands.  This will help to ensure that your research is topical and relevant—of interest and importance to the wider field as well as yourself.  A great thing to do can be to find out what your tutors are researching and what they see as the key issues in the current field.  And do remember that there may be the possibility of developing your project alongside them in some way, so that you can contribute to a particular national- or international-level research initiative.

Also, right from the start, think about how your work and your research question might have the capacity to influence practice and policy.  This may be the biggest research project you’ll ever do.  So make it count.  Think about doing something that can really help others learn how to improve their practice, perhaps with a particular group of clients, or with respect to a particular method.  If it’s a doctoral level project, you’ll become a leading expert in that field, and you’ll be in a position to teach the rest of us how to be more helpful.  So think about what you’d like to find out about, which you can then disseminate to the field as a whole.

If you want to make your research count, have a really long think before you dive into doing research on therapists’ experiences or perceptions.  Lots of students study this: it’s reflexive, and it’s a relatively easy group to access.  But it also raises the question of how interested people are really going to be in how therapists’ see things.  After all, we’ve all been trained in particular beliefs and assumptions, so if we’re the subject of research, we’re often just going to reiterate what we’ve been taught to think.  Generally, clients make a much more worthwhile participant group, because you’re hearing first hand what it’s really like in therapy, and what works and what doesn’t.

Consult the literature

Once you’ve got some idea of what you’d like to look at, find out how other people have tried to answer that question. If no-one has tried to answer it before, that’s great, but you need to be really sure about that before going on to furrow your own path—after all, you don’t want to get to the end of your research to find out that somebody ‘discovered’ the same thing as you decades ago. So have a look on Google Scholar, and particularly on social science search engines like PsychInfo. Undertaking such searches also ensures that your research will be embedded within the wider research field, and it may well give you ideas about the kinds of questions that are timely to ask.

Make sure it's related to therapeutic practice

Choose a topic which is related, at least in some way, to the field of therapeutic practice. Most directly, this may include things like: clients’ experiences of helpful and unhelpful factors, how psychological interventions are perceived from those outside the field, or the applied role of counselling in such fields as education. Exploring people’s experiences of a particular phenomenon—for instance, women’s experiences of birth trauma—can also be related to therapeutic practice, but just be clear what the association might be. For instance, could that help therapists know how to work most effectively with that client group, or to know what issues to be sensitized to.

Find yourself a clearly-defined question

Try to find a single, clearly defined question as the basis for your study (see my Research Aims and Questions pointers). This can then serve as your title. If you can't encapsulate your research project into a single question/sentence at some point, the chances are, you're probably not clear about exactly what it is you are asking.

That's ‘question’, not ‘questions’

One of the biggest problems students face is that they ask too many inter-related questions, with too many constructs of interest, and therefore get very muddled in what they are doing. For instance, they’re interested in attachment styles, and how it relates to dropout as mediated by the client’s personality in EMDR for trauma. But that’s five different constructs (attachment styles, dropout, personality types, EMDR, trauma—and, indeed, a sixth implicit one, which is the outcomes of EMDR for trauma), and generally you want to focus down on just one or two constructs (particularly in qualitative research), or maybe three at most if you are doing quantitative. So, for instance, you could focus on how attachment style influences dropout, or how clients experience EMDR for trauma, or the role of personality styles in mediating outcomes in EMDR for trauma. Or you could even just focus down on how clients experience dropout. All nice, straightforward questions that you can really get into at Master’s or doctoral level depth. So think about the constructs that you definitely want to focus in on, and let go of those that are maybe less central to your concerns. Of course, that’s difficult, and three of the main reasons why are given below—along with the things you may need to remind yourself of:

'I won't have enough material otherwise.'  Your word limit may seem like a lot, but you'll be amazed at how quickly it goes. If you just focus on one question, you will be able to go into it in a great amount of depth—far more appropriate to Master’s or doctoral study than trying to answer a number of questions and subsequently coming away with numerous superficial answers.

'There's lots of different aspects of this area that I'm interested in.' That's great, but you won't be able to cover it all in this one project. You can always do further research after this one. In limiting yourself to just one question, you may well experience feelings of loss or disappointment as you let go of areas you're really interested in, but it's better to feel that loss now than after you've put months of work into areas that are just too dispersed.

'I've already started to ask this other question, and I don't want to lose the reading that I've already done'. Again, it can be painful letting go of things, but there is no value in ‘throwing good money after bad.’ Sometimes in research you need to be brutal, and cut out areas of inquiry that don't fit in—even if you've sweated blood over them. Remember what authors say: the quality of their book is defined by what they leave out!

That’s ‘question’, not ‘answer’

Some of the most problematic projects come about when researchers try to show that a particular answer is the correct one, and consequently won’t let anything—including their own findings—get in their way. So if you really believe something about psychological therapies, like ‘person-centred therapy is much more effective than cognitive-behavioural therapy’, or ‘women make much better counselling psychologists than men’ then you may want to steer clear of this topic. That is, unless you can really get yourself into a frame of mind in which you are open to the possibility that you might find the absolute opposite of what you want—and you can enthusiastically write about the implications of this finding. Good research is like good therapy: you put to one side your own assumptions as much as possible, so that the reality of whatever you are encountering can come through. So, in trying to work out your research question, here’s something to really ask yourself:

What is the question that I genuinely don’t know the answer to (but would love to find out)?

And ‘genuinely’ here means genuinely. It means you really, actually, don’t know what the answer to that question is. If you can find that question, it’ll help enormously in your whole research project, because it’ll mean that you’re genuinely open to, and interested in, finding out what’s out there. That’s research!

But make sure there’s not too much literature on it

If you ask a question on which much has already been written—like the effectiveness of person-centred therapy—then you’re likely to be drowned in material before you even get to the end of the literature review. So narrow down your question—e.g. the effectiveness of advanced empathy in person-centred therapy—until you’ve got a manageable number of references in your sights. Don’t worry if it seems too few, you’ll no doubt pick up more references as you go along. And remember, you need to have full mastery of the literature regarding the question your asking, and it is a lot easier to master the information in five or six papers than it is in hundreds.

What’s often ideal is if you can move one step on from some pre-existing literature: e.g. extending a study about depression in men to looking at depression in women, testing out a theory that you’ve found in a book, or using qualitative research to address a question that has previously only been addressed through quantitative research. So don’t get too hung up on being totally ‘original’: in fact, if you try to be too original you can end up in a sea of confusion with no theoretical or methodological concepts to anchor yourself to. Having an original twist is often much more productive—you’re saying something new, but you’re building on what’s already been laid down.

Think methodology from the start

It’s no good coming up with a brilliant question if there is no way of actually answering it, or if answering it is going to be such a headache that you’ll wish that you never started in the first place. So as you come up with ideas, think about how feasible it might actually be to put them into practice. This is something you may really want to discuss early on with a colleague or research tutor.

Respondents MUST be accessible

In terms of the feasibility of the study, probably the most important question is whether or not you are actually going to get anyone to participate—to respond to your interviews, questionnaires, etc. It is essential to the success of your study that you get a good response rate, so thinking about who you do research with is often as important as thinking about what you do (see my research pointers here on recruiting participants). A number of factors will determine how good your response is likely to be: how big the population is in total, their motivation to help you, how easy it will be for you to get in touch with them, how cautious you will need to be as a consequence of ethical safeguards. So don’t just come up with an idea and hope blindly that someone out there will be interested. However hard you think it will be to get participants, you can guarantee that it will actually be several times harder than that, so make sure this is something you think about, and address, at an early stage.

Ethics come first

The principles of non-maleficence—doing no harm to your respondent—and, ideally, beneficence—promoting the respondent’s well-being—should be an integral part of your research design. So, right from the very start of your project, think about ways in which your research might benefit those that are involved; and also make sure that you have read and familiarised yourself with appropriate ethical guidelines, as well as any other sets of relevant standards.

Aside from ‘doing the right thing’, the issue of ethics will be an important one for you because, in any research study, you will need to submit your project to an ethics committee (see above), and the more sensitive your work, the more committees and the longer the time this is likely to take. For instance, if you wish to carry out research in the National Health Service, you will almost certainly need to go through an NHS ethics committee, which can take many months to consider and respond to proposals. So, as you start to develop your research ideas, be aware of the ethical issues and processes that it might raise, and try to find out about the ethical submissions that such a study is likely to entail. That way, you won’t suddenly find yourself facing a long and uncertain wait before you can proceed with your work -- or, if you do, at least you’ll be prepared for it.

Writing: Some Pointers

We all have different ways that we like to write, but it's not something that often gets talked about. So here's the stages that I go through when I'm writing something academic. It's maybe not the most creative and free-flowing method; but it ends up with a fairly coherent, clearly structured and comprehensive text which, ironically, people often say reads with a real flow. If you're just setting out on writing essays for a course, or have been doing it for some time but want to improve, you may find some useful ideas here for your own writing.

1. I start off by spending some time reading through books, chapters and papers on the topic. This might involve a literature search, for instance on Google Scholar. Years ago, I used to make handwritten notes on everything I read; but these days I just pencil notes directly onto the book (except if it's a library one!) or paper. This makes the process vastly quicker, meaning that I can cover much more literature in whatever time I have. My notes generally just consist of a word or a short sentence, reminding myself of what I want to cover in my paper. Being obsessive/pedantic, I've even developed a 'star system' over time: two stars if I definitely want to cover a point, one star if I want to review it later, and underlining any other text that seems important.

2. Either before, after, or alongside the reading, I work out a 'skeleton' structure for my paper. I'll either do that using the Style/Headings feature on Office Word (and I always do that at some point, see below), or I'll do it with the bullet point feature, so i can do higher and lower level bullet points. I'll revise and check over that a few times, to make sure it makes sense, and that it's answering the question. If you're writing an assignment for a course, this is something that can be really helpful to run past your tutor or supervisor, so that you know you are on the right lines.

3. I go back over all my notes and type out the points and quotes I want into my document, under the appropriate heading/sub-heading/sub-sub-heading. This is where the headings and sub-headings on Office Word are essential, to give a structure that I can then flesh out. At this stage, I always make sure I add in where the reference came from (both text and page number): so that I can go back to it later if I need to check, and also so that I don't have to scrabble round for references at a later date. Referencing software, like Endnote, can be invaluable here.

4. I read over what I have in my document, move things about using cut and paste, change headings and subheadings, etc. Until I'm a bit happier with the structure.

5. I do a very very rough first draft. What I call 'Draft 0'. It's awful, I give myself permission for it to be, but it's essentially just getting all my points together in some kind of logical sequence so that they roughly follow on one from the other. This often involves some changing around of the structure. I'd never let anyone read it at this point!

6. I go back over it all and try and get a half-decent first draft. Now that I don't need to be consulting my sources when I'm writing, I can get more flow into it. Often, at this stage, I'll be rewriting the whole of what I wrote at the previous stage, or large parts of it. Personally, I often find that rewriting from scratch gives more sense of flow. But only if I'm feeling in flow! This is also where being a fairly fluent typist helps. It's really difficult to do this if you're poking away one finger at a time (see 'Six things that can really help improve your writing' blog entry).

7. And then I go back over it and over it again until I'm happy with it -- sometimes three or four further rewrites; sometimes from scratch again, but building up on the previous text and ideas. A lot of it is dependent, as above, on whether I'm feeling in flow and can just 'run' all the way through it, or through particular sections of it. But having the previously drafted text there is really essential for me in terms of having the content and the material to build on. So even if I am re-writing something afresh, I've always got in front of me what I was trying to say. At this stage, a lot the process feels to be about really trying to bring out the essence of what I am wanting to communicate. It's not about trying to find cleverer words, but going back over it again and again and thinking, 'What do I really want to say here?'

8. Getting feedback from others is essential for me, as part of finishing off a piece of writing. Generally, apart from the skeleton structure, I won't ask for much feedback until I'm at least two or three drafts in, and am fairly happy with it. I ask a few people that I trust, and who I know will be honest with me. And, ideally, I can say to them the specific things I'd like feedback on and the level at which I'd want it (for instance, if I'm a few days away from a deadline, I'll make that clear to people so they don't spend time giving me extensive comments I won't be able to work through). If you're working on an assignment, I would really recommend that you try and run it past peers or friends or family at some point. And the more specific you can be about what you want from them, the better you can use their time.

For me, the process of writing is a bit like what I imagine painting can be. You start off with building the canvas, then some loose pencil sketches to get a sense of what you are going to do, then slapping things down, then refining over and over again with an increasingly fine brush. I don't always love it, but I do love getting to the end and seeing the finished product. and there's everthing I want to say there: in the right place, and saying it like I really want it to.

Five Simple Ways to Radically Improve your Papers

A lot of us hate writing essays or papers.  And there's nothing worse than going to all that effort and then getting your work failed, rejected or slated. So here's five things that you might want to learn (if you don't know them already) that can help you improve your writing--and perhaps even help you enjoy it a little more.

1. Touch typing. If you're poking away at your keyboard with one finger at a time, it's really going to make it difficult for you to write with fluency and gusto. You want to be able to capture all those ideas flowing out of you, and then you want to feel fine about writing and rewriting and re-editing without worrying about how much time it's going to take. So try out one of those touch typing programmes if you're a slow typist. Yup, that means using your little finger too, but it'll be worth it. I said to my 12-year old son just recently that touch typing was one of the most important skills I ever learnt in my life (Answer, ‘Dad, that’s so sad!’).

2. Styles. Not Harry. Yes, those annoying things at the top of your screen on Microsoft Word. They might seem pointless, but they're a great way of being able to organise your essay, particularly the different levels of headings. Essentially, if you attribute a style to your headings, and then use the headings tab in navigations, you can see the outline of your essay as you are going along. It means that you've always got a sense of the overall shape of your essay, can put things where they need to go, and means that you'll end up with a much more coherently structured piece of work.

3. Reference software. Programs like Endnote or Refworks are amazing, and there's ways of using them on the Web for free. Essentially, they keep a list of all the text you've read through, and then you can really easily paste them into your essay as and when needed. Brilliant thing is that they also do the reference list for you and if you need to change your style of referencing... hey presto! They can do that at the touch of a button. Never scrabble around amongst your files for references again.

4. Formatting. There's so many things about how to format that are really easy to learn. If you're doing a psychology or counselling course, I'd strongly, strongly recommend getting hold of the APA 7th Publication manual, having a really good read through of it, and then just keeping it as a deskside guide every time you're writing essays. It tells you everything you need to know: how to reference, what to put in the different sections of a research paper, how many spaces you should have after a full stop, etcetera, etcetera. Of course, it's the content of an essay that ultimately counts, but if you use a standardised format your writing will look really professional and you'll be able to express your ideas in the clearest possible way. And once you get into the habit of it it will just stick with you, so why not learn it now?

5. Citation searches. Say you've found a really brilliant book, or research article, on just the topic you're working on. Great. Only problem is, it was written back in 1957: Has anyone done anything relevant since? Citation searches are a really cool way of finding out. Go to Google Scholar (or even better an online database like PsychINFO if your library gives you access to it), search up the text you like, and then click on 'Cited by'. That'll tell you everything since then that references your original text. And, of course, if you find anything else you like, you can citation search that one as well.