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question. Empirically, you should report on similar studies to the one you’ve proposed,
and you should also report on basic demographic facts about your question. For example,
here, you might investigate and briefly report on the number of mixed race
families in the U.S.
Once you have brainstormed some key theoretical and empirical issues to investigate,
you should start locating sources. First, you should ask your adviser or other
faculty members who are experts in your field to recommend seminal books or articles.
Often, reading the theoretical chapters or literature reviews of these influential works
will orient you to the field and you will learn what the key debates are. Second, you
should look in the Annual Review of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the
American Journal of Sociology for recent articles on your topic. You can link to these
journals through the HOLLIS catalog and search through their contents electronically.
As you read the most recent articles about your topic, the literature review and works
cited list become an important tool to discover other key readings. Third, you should
use Google Scholar and other library resources (see Research Tip Box on p. 10). You
can sift through these articles to make sure you’ve found all the key works on your
question.
As you search for sources, you should keep a Word document of every source you’re
potentially interested in investigating. As you find articles or books that look somewhat
relevant, you should copy their titles, sources, and abstracts if available into a Word
document. You can begin to organize the titles you find by topic. Once you have a
working list of sources, you should discuss it with your adviser. It is doubtful that your
adviser really has time to go through your works cited list carefully, so you should send
an email to them or set up a meeting to report on: (1) What theoretical or empirical
bodies of work seem relevant to your question; and (2) Who you think the key authors
are/what you think the key works are in each section. That way, they can quickly assess
if you’ve missed a major theorist or finding.
You should also begin reading during this time. Your working source list will grow
and shrink as you read and discover what really is and is not relevant to your topic. You
should keep notes on each source you read—an example is in the text box below. After
you’ve read about 60-70% of the works on your list, you should start to draft a literature
review. Look at recent journal articles for an idea of how to organize it, and how much
detail to give on each article. Remember, you should not write a paragraph about every
article you read—instead, you should organize the literature review by topic, including
key sources as you write.
Example Note Taking Format
For each source you read, make note of:
• Bibliographic information for the article
• What question is the author trying to answer?
• What theories is he/she informed by (briefly)?
• What data or methods does he/she use?
• What are his/her key findings?
A literature review is an
analytical summary of
the past work relevant to
your topic. An analytical
summary is more than
just writing a paragraph
summarizing the main
point of each article you
read.
A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology | page 19