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You should not think of your literature review as writing one paragraph about each
work you read and linking them together with a concluding paragraph. Instead, your
literature review should be organized in a way that allows you to build to a point and
you should integrate the evidence you’ve gleaned from several works to support this
point. You should provide a moderate level of detail about each study—e.g., the dataset
or methodology used and the major finding. But rather than just listing this information,
you should employ it strategically by comparing or contrasting it with other work
to support your main idea about this body of work.
The culmination of the literature review should be a discussion of how your thesis
fits into past research. Are you filling a hole? Testing or applying a theory? Expanding
empirical work? At the end of the literature review, it’s often helpful to include a more
developed or detailed version of the research question now that your reader has been
provided with an overview of related research.
Data and Methods
The goal for this section is to explain to your reader what you did—both how you
collected data and how you analyzed them. You can separate this into two separate
chapters if you would like. Generally, this section is 10-15 pages.
Data
Walk the reader step-by-step through the process through which you gathered your
data or how the data were collected by an outside agency. Start with the six important
questions: when, where, who, how many, how, and why.
• When: Over what time period were your data collected? Is it from one time period or are there
multiple time periods?
• Where: Is your data from one city? Is it national? Is it from multiple countries?
• Who: Describe the final analytic sample of subjects (or source materials, in the case of content
analysis/historical projects). What characteristics does the population you studied have? Are you
analyzing a subset of the data? How did you choose this population to work with?
• How many: How many cases do you have overall? How many cases are in each key subgroup?
What was the response rate?
• How: This encompasses how the data were collected, how the key variables are worded, etc. Did
you collect the data or is it from a secondary source?
o Describe your sampling method: How did you contact them? If you’re considering a case
in-depth, how did you select your case? If you’re doing content analysis, how did you select
the data you analyzed? If you are not collecting original data, how did you select the data-
set you used? Describe the sampling methods of this dataset—what is the population?
o Describe your instrument: What kind of instrument did you use? About how long did it take
for each subject to complete the data collection process? If you’re doing an ethnography,
how often did you visit the field? How long did you stay in the field? What did you do while
you were there? If you are doing content analysis, where did you access the media you
You should not think of
your literature review as
writing one paragraph
about each work you
read and linking them
together with a concluding
paragraph. Instead, your
literature review should
be organized in a way
that allows you to build
to a point and you should
integrate the evidence
you’ve gleaned from
several works to support
this point.
A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology | page 43