Literature Review Guide

A good research topic is something you're interested in and is related to your program at Adler.
If you have a very broad topic of interest, consider how you could refine it:

• How does this interest relate to my future career?
• What do I want to know about this interest? Do I want to learn about diagnosing/assessing or perhaps about treatment or causes?
• Do I want to know how this relates to a particular group of people? To a particular diagnosis? To a particular type of treatment?

First, think of all the key concepts that comprise your topic.

• A manageable research topic contains 3-5 key concepts.
• Use nouns--they are the best key concepts. Try not to have a concept that's too vague such as "causes" or "effects". Instead, consider what some of those might be.

A good way to start is to visualize your topic as a Venn diagram (see example in box below).

• Break your topic into 3-5 bubbles
• Think of each circle or bubble in a Venn diagram as different key concepts or facets of your topic.
• Once you have your bubbles, brainstorm all the related terms and synonyms you could narrow/expand those terms.

Sometimes your topic starts fairly broad, like "Alcoholics Anonymous and spirituality".

Clearly two search terms are:

• Alcoholics Anonymous
• Spirituality

But this is not yet a research topic. What about these terms do you want to learn? When you try to refine a topic consider:

• How your terms could relate to each other.
  • How spirituality impacts the success of those in Alcoholics Anonymous?
  • How being involved in Alcoholics Anonymous changes someone's ideas of spirituality?
• What population
  • Recovering alcoholics?
  • Society's perceptions of alcoholics?
  • Therapists' perceptions of recovering alcoholics?
  • Therapists' perceptions of spirituality?
  • Specific demographic? (gender/age/ethnicity/sexual orientation/etc.)
• How does this topic relate to your program?
  • Consider treatment outcomes, theories, techniques

​From these two terms, here's an example of a full topic:

• "What are therapists' attitudes towards Alcoholics Anonymous and spirituality?"

We could think of "therapists' attitudes" as a third circle in the Venn diagram, but sometimes it's helpful to break it down further into "therapists", "attitudes":

Look at the small intersection point between all the topics. That small space is YOUR TOPIC. It's very likely there are not many articles written about that exact topic. That's why it's helpful to visualize your topic by separating the facets. 

Next, think of other terms for each of the circles or bubbles. Think of both narrower & broader terms. So your diagram might look something like this:

Most topics can be visualized with only 3-4 bubbles. However, some will get more complex, especially for dissertations, and might need 5-6. If you only have 1-2 bubbles, it is not yet a topic. If you have 18 bubbles, you have a bit of a mess, as that would be unwieldy for a single topic.