Conducting and Reviewing Research

 There are many steps to take for conducting research, and for the topic that I have chosen, this is how I would begin:

1.  Review secondary sources. For my current hypothesis pertaining to homeless students, I first looked in the Handbook of School Counseling which I found in the school library. Secondary sources, like this handbook, are overviews of the research done on the topic you are researching. Once you have found the overview of your topic, you can pull from the resources that the authors of the secondary source used. This will lead you to the next step.
2. Review primary sources. The resources found within the handbook are considered the primary sources. Using the online library catalog is a great way to hopefully find copies of these sources. My homeless youth topic sadly did not have any overview in the handbook, which leads me to believe that it was not a big enough topic at the time of the handbook being compiled.
   Since I could not find any primary sources in the handbook, I take to the online library catalog and start research the topic by itself. I used searches like homeless students, homeless children, McKinney-Vento, unaccompanied youth, and others.
3.  When using a search engine to find sources, you must make sure that the source articles you find are from peer-reviewed journals. Typically there is a way to narrow the search to show only peer-reviewed, but once you open the article up you must make sure it is not from a private journal that publish articles that may be bias in their favor.
4.  Hopefully there will be a lot of articles for your topic. Once you find the ones that apply to your topic, the next step is to summarize the information found. This summary will become your literature review.

Writing a Literature Review:

• One very important thing to remember about literature reviews is that it will be sectioned into topics and not by the articles you found. This means you will have to summarize and combine all the information from multiple articles about each part of the topic you are researching. For example, I will not write a paragraph about everything that I found in the book "Homeless Students" (Tower & White, 1989) and then write another paragraph about what I found in the article "Services to Homeless Students and Families." (Jozefowicz-Simbeni & Israel, 2006)I will instead take any information found about the McKinney-Vento act and put it into one section and then another section about the affects on the student's education.
• In the review, you should identify all the variables, subjects, and instruments found in the primary resources. These can be your different sections. Also, describe the procedures used to get the information that was found in the articles.
• You must also be sure to write about any weaknesses that you found in the articles, why it is important to the readers and to the world today, as well as any important quotes.

For my literature review on my homeless students topic I have found information (so far) mostly on the McKinney-Vento Act and how it affects the education system as well as how being homeless affects students. These two topics (and hopefully others that I find with further research) would be great subheadings within my review.


Resources

Jozefowicz-Simbeni, D., & Israel, N. (2006). Services to homeless students and families: the mckinney-vento act and its implications for school social work practice. Children & Schools, 28(1), 37-44. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=65eeda72-3062-445f-bdbb-a833a778a428@sessionmgr11&vid=2&hid=19
 
Tower, C., & White, D. (1989). Homeless students. Washington, D.C.: National Education Association