Final Year Project/Dissertation HELP please - Literature Review??!!

[RoyMum]

Hi Y'all ;)

So I'm off a year to have my baba and wanted to get my FYP thingy done. Understandbly (sort of) my lecturer is caught up with existing students so hasn't been replying to my anguished emails (!)

Please can someone explain what I need to do for a literature review, when I'm doing secondary research?!

I'm doing 'exploring WHO breastfeeding guidelines...' and am therefore already reviewing all the existing literature, so why the heck do I need to do an additional literature review (in a separate chapter for crying out loud!) which is basically doing what I'm already doing isn't it?

Thanks a bunch if you can help :)

A literature review should be a review of papers and findings either motivating your research or focussing on the same research question as you. Are you doing a systematic review? Then you need to review other systematic reviews and first work out what is the gap in the literature and second work out how you are going to do yours. What kind of publications will you look at, will you have a minimum sample size etc?

Oo what's a systematic review? I only have one paper that encouraged me to look at my topic :( arghhh

okay sorry to have worried you. For your dissertations you need to have a research question and a methodology
so your question could be "what is the evidence base for the WHO guidelines?" and your methodology could be examining all the relevant studies. (or as you rightly point out a Lit Review). There is no harm, however in including a section which reviews other papers (or web sites) that come to a consensus on the issue

I've just handed in my dissertation and like you took a year out. During the time off, the focus of my dissertation (and the research question) changed...as did my supervisor. When I had a meeting with him in late October he suggested I put in a lit. review, whereas before, I was going to use my introduction to broach all the issues I was covering.

Your lit review can cover other studies similar to yours, other research methods similar to yours, and general findings - which basically sets the context for your research and either supports your findings or shows that your findings are new and unique.

I ended up with about 2000 words in mine, which should have been around 1/5 of the overall paper, but my discussion and results sections were both quite weighty.
:)