Topic: The effects of work life balance on job satisfaction
SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW-
For those on work-only placements, or on study-only placements where the study is not assessed, the systematic review is the most important part of the assessment of your placement. It allows you to survey, research, and report on a topic related to your placement area. It also gives you the opportunity to practice various academic skills (e.g., literature search, formulating questions, evaluating evidence, structured writing) and as such it is an extremely useful exercise in preparation for your final year project. The purpose of a systematic review is to search and critically evaluate published empirical research on a particular psychological topic relevant to your placement, thereby focusing on three elements:
(1) a theoretical research question,
(2) a presentation of evidence pertaining to (1)
(3) a critical evaluation of the evidence in (2) in order to evaluate (1)
A common mistake is to approach a systematic review like an extended essay. It is not. In an essay, you usually describe what is known about a given topic and/or present a variety of arguments pro or against a given position. In a systematic review, instead, you want to provide an answer for a question of interest by considering the empirical evidence available in the literature. This means that a systematic review has to be based on a topic/question on which research has already been carried out, but for which there is no obvious answer. The purpose of the systematic review is to evaluate the research available to decide whether there is enough evidence to provide some positive answers to the question of interest (or whether, instead, results are too mixed to reach any conclusion). A systematic review can help to understand the balance of arguments in favour of particular scientific theories, and can guide future research or practice. For example, it can help to understand how much debate there remains on the topic of investigation, and what the
quality of the evidence is for and against current theories and hypotheses.
For your systematic review:
-Choose a topic related to your placement interests. We give several broad topics in Appendix 2 which can be tailored to your particular area.
-Systematically search and identify a representative sample of literature addressing that topic.
-Document your search strategy and your method of reviewing literature in detail. Note this is similar to what you did for PY2238.
-Critically evaluate your chosen sample of literature in line with your topic
-Present your findings in a report of maximum 4,000 words (the word count excludes bibliographic references).
Often the question can be broken in different sub-questions. A lot of the merit of a good systematic review is in how you break down your main question in different sub-questions and evaluate the existing evidence to provide answer to them. Hopefully, you will be able to answer at least some of your sub-questions.
The evaluative part is also very important. As always, your conclusions need to be based on scientific evidence, and this means solid, quantitative evidence, and not on general opinions you may have formed by reading the literature.
Note that published systematic reviews often include a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a statistical analysis which is conducted to evaluate evidence gathered from independent studies. You are not asked to do a meta-analysis. Indeed, you are not required to do any statistical analyses for your systematic review.
However, it is important to provide some form of quantitative summary of your reviewed studies (minimally the number of studies that have obtained positive vs. negative results for the questions of interest). Here it is also important that you use your critical evaluation skills to decide whether you can subdivide your studies into good ones and less good ones, depending on the soundness
and power of the research.
Examples of systematic reviews in psychology can be found below. These should give you an idea of the format for your review. However, it is important that you realise that we are not asking to produce a review on the scale of these published reviews.
