Hello!
My supervisors asked me to put together a couple of paragraphs describing what I’m hoping to get out of my literature review. I’ll be discussing it with them this afternoon, but I also wanted to share it here. Partly to get suggestions from all of you on what I’m missing, partly in the hope it might help someone feeling stuck with their own literature review, and partly because I’m curious to see how this blog feature works and whether anyone actually reads them!
A little bit of context, I’ve only just started my PhD and my (provisional) title is “Understanding and measuring Failure Demand in Scotland”. Failure demand is the money that the government spends reacting passively to economic, social and environmental problems (as opposed to spending money on solving those problems).
What is failure demand?
How have others conceived of failure demand? What other terms are used to refer to the same concept(s) in other disciplines? Which topics have been looked at already through the lens of failure demand (or equivalent)? How and why were those topics chosen to investigate? What other concepts beyond failure demand have been used to capture and quantify the negative impacts of the current economic system on people and the planet? (Thinking in particular of externalities, foregone taxation, and shadow pricing).
How can we measure failure demand?
What datasets could/have been used to measure failure demand? How did the researchers get access to this data? How were causal pathways and/or counterfactuals identified and what were they? How large are the estimates of failure demand that have already been produced?
How can we turn our research into action?
Where and how have other estimates of failure demand been published? What outreach efforts have other projects made to the general public / policymakers / other NGOs and campaigning bodies? How successful were these attempts and why? What would I have found helpful for them to have included in their published work that we could add? What frameworks already exist for conducting failure demand research and how could we add to them?
Update: I originally tried posting this blog before the meeting, but I couldn’t get it to work. The main feedback I got from my supervisors was that what I’ve actually done is think about what the point of reading the literature is. That’s useful to have done, but it’s not the same thing as what will be in my literature review or what the point of my lit review is. I hope it’s still useful for you though, and I’m still very keen to hear your thoughts on reading the literature and writing literature reviews 🙂
Responses
Just so you know that someone reads the blogs (not very often tbh!). Your PhD sounds fascinating, Jamie. Until today, I had not heard of ‘failure demand’…I think the point of a systematic literature review is to see if you can answer specific questions, and if the literature you find does not answer those questions, perhaps that is the gap in knowledge for your PhD to fill. Sometimes the literature review sends your research down a path different to that which you expected. Mine did! I’m now in 2nd year, just starting data collection. Best of luck with it!
Hi Clare, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Thank you for being brave and posting! I wonder if you have to use a specific framework or methodology for your literature review in your school. This was something I found tricky, but I landed on a scoping review and a systematic review as I am looking at two ‘fields’. It would be good to learn how you get on with this.