How a Literature Review Helps

A literature review will:

• Broaden your thinking by providing context for the issue. It’s possible to be so consumed with the immediate work at hand that you miss the big picture. A lit review will correct that. An inner-city mission might be founded to feed the hungry. As they read about hunger they will find that it is very much related to poverty and poverty is related to several issues, including mental health and joblessness. So the mission might add counselling and job skills training to its services. But causes related to individuals are just part of the problem because there are systemic reasons why poverty exists. So the inner-city mission may engage in advocacy work, seeking legislative change or systemic change that will help minimize poverty. A literature review will help you think BIG BROAD thoughts!
• Take you deeper into the nuances of the issue. It will help you think DEEP thoughts. While writing my dissertation about church-agency relations, I started with the understanding that the divisive issue between them was one of control. Most of the authors framed their discussions this way, and yet as I did the literature review and dug below the surface of their arguments, I realized control wasn’t the issue – responsible relationship was. The solution to the problem could not be resolved if the debate centred on control, but it is easily resolved once we address the underlying goal that was shared by every one of the authors. This is the subject of my book The Church At Work: A manual for church-agency relationships that will be coming out by the end of the year. Exploring the breadth and depth of your mission will stimulate all sorts of creative ideas.
  
• Reveal the points of controversy and the resulting key choices you need to make. Let’s say you are a Bible study ministry producing educational materials. A literature review will show that adults and children learn differently and that there are various theories of learning that compete with each other. There are methods of studying the Bible that compete with each other too. There is even controversy over which version of the Bible is the best one to use for study. There are many choices to be made in each of these topic areas and by understanding the points of controversy or divergence, you can make an intelligent decision for what your ministry will do and you’ll know why it is the best choice.
• Keep you up to date in your field. Missiology, for example, has changed enormously in the last 50 years, and even the last 10 years. If you are a sending agency and are still using a missions model developed in the 1950s or 1960s, you are badly out of date. Missiologists have changed their thinking on relationships between sending and receiving countries and created a new paradigm for global mission. Not only has the theory changed, but so have the practices. A lit review will help you be a leading-edge ministry.

What to Do a Literature Review On

Review your theory of change and logic model to find researchable topics. The topics might not be explicitly listed, but look at each box and ask, “What topics are related to this box?” Based on my previous post about the program review of our annual conference, some possible researchable topics for our program review include:

• conferences: trends, promotion, logistics, why people attend, business models etc.
• adult learning theory and converting learning into doing
• networking

How to Find the Literature

• Books often have the most thorough treatments of a topic. Look especially for recent books based on primary research. For help in selecting books, read this post. Don’t forget to go to the library to see what you can borrow before buying a bunch of books.
• Online websites, blogs and journals are where you will likely find the most up-to-date material. If you are referred to journals that only have excerpts, or if you have to pay for the information, check if your your local university, college or seminary subscribes to the journal. If not, you can likely do the search from within the library and see the results because they have already paid for access to databases of journals and you can read them or print them out at the library.
• Ask people to recommend sources for you. If they are in the same field as you, they can usually recommend either a title or an author.
• You can stop looking for additional literature when you find that all of the citations and references are to articles and books you’ve already seen, or when you find the material has become repetitious.

How to Analyze the Literature

First of all, the purpose of this literature review is to design better programs and services. For a real-life excellent example of how to do the lit review, see Andy Harrington’s example which I highlight here. Since you are not doing an academic literature review, the only issue to resolve is whether or not the information is useful to your ministry. How you analyze the literature depends on whether you are reading about application and execution (to tweak a program) or about ideas and theories (to test the design of the program).

If you are looking for application and execution ideas, you simply make a list of the ones you find in the lit review that you want to consider. For example, a list of technologies that can enhance a conference experience. If you are researching at the theoretical or idea level, then you have some additional work to do to get below the surface of differing opinions:

• What are the premises on which the various opinions are based? Are they valid? Do they apply to your situation? Especially in the social and political spheres, you have to ask if the premises and conclusions are theologically acceptable.
• What are the authors’ goals and values? Can you reconcile their various views? Can some be discarded because they conflict with your goals and values? Sometimes their goals and values are explicit and sometimes not, in which case you have to try to infer them. In my dissertation research on church-agency relations I discovered that some authors were primarily concerned that individuals be able to use their gifts while others were more concerned about showing unity to the public. Some had a Christological focus while others had a Trinitarian focus. Some used very strong language heavy on the ‘control’ aspect yet when they gave examples of what the relationship should be, the examples were much more moderate in tone. I was able to reconcile the positions of authors who at first appeared to be diametrically opposed to each other. The result was a new model of church-agency relations that all of the authors should be able to live with. In fact, one of the authors I critiqued read my work and said he agreed with the end result even as he disagreed on how I got there!
• Finally, look at the recommended action steps or the model they propose. Have they made a convincing argument to support their recommendations? Do they make sense to you?

 The Outcomes of a Literature Review

• A literature review should make you aware of what the choices are for how your program is designed and delivered. Based on this, the program review would then assess if the current design would benefit from a change.
• It may determine questions you should ask as you do the program evaluation.
• It should help you identify hidden assumptions you have made, which you can then test to see if they are valid.
• It might suggest that some further research is needed in a particular area.
• It could provide a shopping list of enhancements to the current program or a list of ideas for new programs and services.

Conducting a literature review will help ensure that, as you progress through the program evaluation, you are well informed and up to date on the subject you are evaluating, and it will help you focus on the areas that need more scrutiny.

The post Program Evaluation 3 – Literature Review appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

“If I as a pastor want to help believers and inquirers to relate science and faith coherently, I must read the works of scientists, exegetes, philosophers, and theologians and then interpret them for my people. Someone might counter that this is too great a burden to put on pastors, that instead they should simply refer their laypeople to the works of scholars. But if pastors are not ‘up to the job’ of distilling and understanding the writings of scholars in various disciplines, how will our laypeople do it? This is one of the things that parishioners want from their pastors.”

Develop and Equip

These sentences point to a key leadership responsibility which is to develop whoever we are leading. We know from Ephesians 4:11-12 that the reason Christ gave his church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers is for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ. The principle of equipping people to build up the body of Christ applies to all Christian leaders. We equip people to fulfill the Christian mission.

Whatever your field of ministry is, you should read the deep thinkers in your field. You are likely already doing this so that you can write your sermons and speeches, and better design your logic model, strategic plan, program evaluations and your case for support. Keeping up with the thought-leaders contributes to your own personal development too, and their ideas are the sparks that ignite your creativity to generate new ideas for your ministry.

Make Good Scholarship Accessible

I’m suggesting you take the extra step of interpreting the experts in your field for your staff and supporters by repackaging their ideas into an easily understood, user-friendly format. The people you lead will better understand what your ministry is doing and advocating, appreciate that you are being responsible in how you do it, and will be better equipped to tell others why what you are doing is so important. You will have contributed to their personal development and will raise future leaders and champions for your ministry.

Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through the ‘heavy’ writing of deep thinkers in your field. If you’ve done the reading, you’ve done the bulk of the work already. Follow through and leverage the value of the time you have already invested.

So, if you are:

• a pastor, read great Christian theologians and help your parishioners develop a richer theology;
• a seminary or Bible college president, read educational theorists and show your supporters how your school excels;
• an inner-city mission leader, read experts on poverty, addiction, and the systemic conditions that create the problems in the first place and let your supporters know how you not only are responding to the fallout of these problems, but are working to prevent them from happening at all;
• an executive director of an evangelism ministry, read missiologists and let your people know about the nuances and sensitivities of working cross-culturally and how you are being responsible in creating self-sustaining churches around the globe;
• and, well, you get the idea.

The post Leaders – Bridging the Worlds of Scholarship and the Street appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I saw it in the Harvard bookstore when I was on a course and thought, “Someday I should read that.” I returned a week later with my family to sight-see and I of course went back to the bookstore because that is what I do – I buy books, lots of them. And I saw it again. And I thought, “Well, if I don’t buy it now I guess that proves I am a procrastinator.” And since that conflicts with my self-image (although not necessarily with my experience), I bought it and I felt great.

But now it’s the last thing I see before I climb into bed every night, and every night I feel a little more guilty about not reading it. I even turned  it over so I couldn’t see the title anymore. But then I finally felt so abysmally guilty that I read the first chapter, Understanding Procrastination. And then I put it down. And there it sits.

The Need to Be Selective

This got me thinking about how I choose whether or not to read a book, and I thought my evaluation criteria might be helpful for you. Now, it is true that sometimes I choose to read or not read a book just because I feel like it. But most often, when it comes to reading for my work or for self-development, I use my criteria. I have to. Reading is a key source of fresh ideas that are critical to providing good leadership, yet there are so many books, far more than I could possibly read in several lifetimes just on leadership alone! Amazon has 90,239 leadership books including 11,864 in the business leadership category and another 8,997 in the Christianity category. That’s way too many! And I want to read far more widely than just leadership.

Solomon was a wise man, and he said “…My son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.” I might add “And to the mind too!”

So, I’ve become very selective over the years as to which books I will read. I thought I would share with you how I evaluate whether or not to read a book.

But first, for help finding good books read my post that contains a paragraph on how I find books. One thing that I didn’t mention there is that when I visit leaders in their offices, I always scan their bookshelves to see what they have read, and I also ask them what they are reading. I love getting recommendations from people because they’ve already vetted the books and they usually find authors I might not have found on my own.

Book Selection Criteria

Now, here’s how I consider whether to read a book or not.

• First thing I note, after the title and author name, is the publisher. Although it is not foolproof (sometimes a publisher will surprise you), generally the publisher tells you a lot about the book right away because each publisher has its position in the market. When you know the publisher, you have a pretty good idea what type and quality of book you are looking at.
• I read the book description, the flaps and the back cover looking for what makes this book special. Is the topic and the angle interesting?
  • I don’t want to waste time reading idle theories, so I go first for books that are based on solid, credible research.
  • Even if the topic does not lend itself to objective research, I will ask, “What does this book contribute to the field of knowledge?” I want to know how it will add to my thinking beyond all the other books I’ve read on the same topic.
  • Another reason to read the book is if the author is a contrarian. We tend to follow the herd in what we think, so contrarians are very good at forcing us to do a reality check.
  • I’ve also found it fruitful to occasionally read books that I expect to disagree with. Sometimes I’ve been surprised to find the author has a point and I need to adjust my thinking. Other times, it helps me to understand a position that I disagree with, or crystallize in my own thinking why I don’t agree with it.
• Next I consider the author.
  • Is it by an author I already enjoy reading? If so, is the author saying something new or is it a rehash of what has already been said?
  • For an author that is new to me, I ask “What are the author’s credentials for writing this particular book?” Do they have a PhD? Are they a consultant with a vast amount of experience? I find professors are generally the thought-leaders and the researchers. Many consultants write their books far too early in their careers, and so have little worth reading. I look for consultants who are nearing the end of their careers and find them particularly good, the few that I read, for practical application of ideas. With new authors, I ask if I have seen them quoted elsewhere or heard their names before.
• I check the publication date. I will read classics that are still classics regardless of how old they are, but otherwise I give preference to books published in the last ten years or so. Both in theology and in leadership, there have been significant advances since the 1980’s.
• Now it’s time to flip through the book.
  • I review the table of contents to see how broad or deep it is. Sometimes I want broad, especially if the topic is new to me, and most times I want deep.
  • I check the book’s bibliography to see who the author is reading.
  • I’ll scan an interesting chapter and/or the book’s conclusion, to see where the author ends up and whether or not I think that will be helpful to me.
  • I’ll look for an illustration of a model, to see what the author is proposing, and decide if it looks reasonable.
  • I check who is endorsing the book. Who they are is more important to me than what they say. An unknown author can borrow the reputation of a person who endorses the book.
• Then, if I’m at a computer rather than in a bookstore, I read book reviews, either at Amazon or by googling for a review. (Amazon.com has a whole lot more reviews than Amazon.ca by the way). The important thing is not whether the reviewer recommends the book or not, but why the reviewer does or does not recommend it. Maybe they see things differently than I do. Perhaps they had different expectations of the book than I have.
• Has it been recommended to me? Or is it required or recommended reading for a course? (I do check course syllabi for books.)
• Is there a good reason to read the book that is not related to the book itself? Sometimes, for example, you read a book because of who gave it to you.
• Finally, with so many books to buy, I come back to the question, “In light of everything else that I want to read, how important or urgent is the topic to me right now?”

So where did I go wrong in my evaluation criteria for the procrastination book? I think it was the last one, the topic just isn’t all that urgent! Some day…

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