Literature Review and Hypotheses 

Research Question -“Does having a multigenerational workforce facilitate employee collaboration?”

Professor Comment/Suggestion-Try to focus on a more specific target population of employees (e.g., public employees at the local, state, or federal level).

This is the second component of the research project for this course. After choosing a focused and well-defined research question, you need to find out what is already known on your topic. Your task in this assignment is to:

1.     Write a literature review (up to 5 double-spaced pages) on your research question.

2.     Formulate your hypothesis/es about the expected relationship/s between your major variables and explain how they are informed by theory or previous research (up to 2 double-spaced pages).

3.     Cite all literature used in your review. You should cite a minimum of five sources, and at last three of them should journal articles. Choose a reference style (e.g., APA, MLA) and use it consistently. For help with reference styles: APA Style Guide (Links to an external site.)

Developing a Good Literature Review:

Although you might be familiar with the process of developing a literature review, it is worth noting those characteristics that distinguish good from bad reviews. Many students and scholars alike view literature reviews like hurdle races or slalom courses where studies are viewed as obstacles to overcome or gates to be touched – often as quickly as possible. From this perspective, the purpose of the review is to illustrate to your audience (professor, reviewer, grant agency official, whatever) that you have read the “relevant” literature on a topic. Such reviews are often study-focused on that paragraph are built by stacking together one- or two-sentence summaries of studies, much like one might stack blocks. Reviews with these characteristics are easy to write, but they are generally poor reviews. 

So, what do good reviews look like? First, the purpose of a good review is to tell a story rather than to navigate a course or run a race. The extant literature is what you use to tell the story. The story itself can highlight new or underappreciated implications of the theory, reveal what we do and do not know about particular topics, employ new frames to examine old questions, etc. Second, good reviews are centered around ideas, not studies. Studies are aggregated in various ways to illustrate elements of the story you are trying to tell, and the studies themselves become (literally) parenthetical to questions and ideas. Moreover, the same study may help to illustrate different elements of the story. Thus, crafting a good literature review is more like painting a picture or weaving fabric (where studies are paints and thread) than like stacking blocks. Of course, the painting can’t be abstract, and the fabric must have a very clear pattern, but you get my point. This does not mean that good reviews cannot identify or focus on individual pieces of scholarship. Seminal works by seminal authors deserve to be emphasized, but this focus should be the exception and not the rule. 

 Developing Causal Hypothesis/Hypotheses:

The second part of this assignment asks you to formulate causal hypotheses from a theoretical orientation. Research hypotheses are predictions about the nature and direction of the relationship between your dependent and independent variables. What does your theory tell you about the relationship between these variables? Evaluating evidence in the light of various theoretical perspectives is our best assurance that the story told by this evidence will be relevant to other times and other places. The theory is perhaps the most important element separating scholarship from journalism. Please note that your hypotheses should be logically tied to your research question and informed by theory and previous research. They are statements about the effect in which we are interested and its direction. 

Rubric

Literature Review & Hypotheses (Spring 2022)