Book Review: Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper
DOI | 10.1177/1035719X0700700117 |
Published date | 01 March 2007 |
Date | 01 March 2007 |
Author | Darrel N Caulley Oam |
Subject Matter | Book Review |
BOOK REVIEWS
Evaluation Journal of Australasia, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007
66
Reviewed by:
Jenny Neale
President of AES;
Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand.
Email: <jenny.neale@vuw.ac.nz>
empower the participants—a view rejected by
AEA members. Therefore, it is likely that more
AES members would fi nd this book of interest.
I can see the usefulness of having EE as part of
an evaluation tool kit, especially for evaluators
committed to community involvement. In
retrospect, I consider that Empowerment
Evaluation Principles in Practice is most
probably for those already converted to EE;
those for whom the debates and questions have
already been answered rather than those looking
to be convinced of the utility of EE for them.
Title: Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper
Author: Arlene Fink
Publisher: Sage, Thousand Oaks, California
Publication date: 2005, second edition
Extent/type: 245 pages, paperback
Price: A$77 from Footprint Books which offers a 15% discount to AES members, phone (02) 9997 3973
ISBN: 1-4129-0904-X
Evaluators, before they do an
evaluation of a program or
group of programs, may have
to do a literature search and
review of the research on the
topic about which the programs
are concerned. Another
situation that may occur is when
evaluators are funded to do a
stand-alone literature review
on a particular topic to inform
policy, often government policy.
I fi nd the fi rst chapter of this
book the most useful and I refer
this chapter to my students. The
other book I refer students to is
the book on literature searching
and reviewing by Chris Hart
(2001), but this book does not
cover the material in Fink’s fi rst
chapter. The fi rst chapter of the
Fink book deals with how to do
online searches of the research
literature using bibliographic
or article databases. The use
of literature databases has
become the way to do literature
searches in the last decade or
so. The chapter explains in clear
detail how to do this and is
particularly useful for students
doing theses. The chapter
provides guidelines on how to
formulate and ask questions of
these databases, how to choose
keywords and how to search for
the information, using keywords,
thesauruses and Boolean logic.
In addition, the chapter discusses
methods for supplementing
online searches, including
manual or hand searches of
reference lists and guidance
from experts. The author gives
some valuable words of caution
on the use of articles obtained
from the Internet. The chapter
ends with a discussion of how
the researcher can store on the
computer the references and
their abstracts that have been
found via the search, but this
discussion is inadequate. Most of
the students at my university use
the computer program EndNote
for this purpose and report that
they fi nd it very valuable.
The book mainly refers
to research that involves
randomised control experimental
research. There is a signifi cant
controversy in the United
States since federal government
agencies mandated that
evaluation should be done
‘scientifi cally’ by the use of
experimental designs in any
federally funded program
evaluation. This old controversy
has resurfaced since, in the 70s
and 80s, experimental designs
were roundly rejected as the
way to do program evaluation.
With the re-emergence of the
use of experimental designs for
evaluation, those evaluators
who use qualitative methods
have been up in arms. A recent
book edited by Julnes & Rog
(2007), containing chapters by
well-known American evaluators
and which was sent to members
of the American Evaluation
Association, deals with this
controversy in the United States
where a signifi cant amount of
program evaluation is done
using experimental designs.
This is not true in Australia or
New Zealand where the federal
governments do not mandate the
use of any particular approach
to program evaluation. From
my experience of attending
AES evaluation conferences in
Australia and New Zealand,
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