Any advice on doing a literature review for a social sciences degree?

havent been given much of a clue about how to do it, what to include etc. HELP!!!Any advice on doing a literature review for a social sciences degree?
I am having the same headache, so I know what your going through, I am currently writing my literature review for my law dissertation. From my reading on how to construct one, here is the basic idea:





The idea of the lit review is to inform your supervisor of the current thinking in your chosen topic area, informing him of the current arguments and that you have justified your research problem by providing a fill to gaps in current research.





The questions you need to address are:





Identify the arguments in your field of study





Is there gaps in the knowledge of your topic area from academics etc





Conflicting arguments and consensus of academics on the topic area?





Group together the arguments and link this back to your own work, evaluate the arguments for and against, what is your work going to bring to the argument?





Hope this helps, there's some great info on the web from uni websites how to construct your lit review. Also check out the books in your library on how to write a disseration/project/thesis and they all contain chapters on lit reviews.





Hope this has helpedAny advice on doing a literature review for a social sciences degree?
The purpose of a literature review is to set the stage for the paper you are about to write. You want to show why your paper is interesting; why it furthers the information available. So what you do is to look for everything that has been written on various aspects of the subject matter of your paper. For example, let's say your paper is about the growing crisis of anorexia among teenagers in Russia (I'm making this up; I have no idea if there is any anorexia there). You would find literature about anorexia, about teens and eating disorders, about eating disorders in Russia, along with basic information about anorexia, teens, and Russia. You would try to show that we know things about anorexia among teens, about anorexia in Russia, about teens in Russia, but no one has previously looked at anorexia among teens in Russia.





How do you do this? Well, you would probably start with a trip to your library (or a look at your library's web page) to find out which databases would contain the kinds of articles you are looking for. Get help from a librarian on this; they are usually pretty knowledgeable on where to find things. Put in key words ';anorexia';, ';teens';, ';Russia'; to get what you are looking for. You may also try to use googlescholar.com, which is a pretty good database you can get online.





Then once you have looked at all the relevant literature, you weave key findings from that literature together to tell a story about how your paper is plugging a hole in the existing knowledge. Look at some of the academic papers you find; every one of them has a literature review following the introduction.
I did my degree in social sciences and graduated this year - what is your dissertation titile? Let me know and I'll send you all the info I can
Go on the web and type in a series of search words. That should give you papers and references.