QUESTIONS ONE

A literature review is a part of the research report where the researcher analyzes and discusses
published information or past research relating to the subject area under research. This is a
summary of a past research in your subject area. This gathers information from sources such as
published articles, books and other sources that are relevant to a particular issue, area of research
in the form of a summary. It is important to reference your sources of information correctly by
using citations within the text and a list of referenced material at the end.

The reasons for conducting literature review is as follows;

To demonstrate understanding and highlight the possibilities that have been overlooked;
Thus, when you identify, summarize and critically assess past researches that are relevant to your
own work, it helps to demonstrate your understanding of what you are doing. For instance, when
you are done with a research on tax evasion and you now go ahead to look for past researches
relating to taxation and analyse and discuss with respect to your work after which you correctly
reference. this shows that you really understand what you are doing since this activity will
discover some important things they did not touch on in the past research.

To help avoid repeating work that has already been done; Thus when you conduct a
literature review it helps you to assess researches that have already been conducted on the area of
your subject matter. So in the process you will know that whether what you are stating in your
work about that topic is in that past research or not, so that your work will not end up as a copied
work. For instance, when am conducting a research on the cause of unemployment., if I don’t
critically assess and analyses other research that have been conducted earlier, I might end up
stating the same causes they have stated in my work as mine. But literature review is conducted
this will be identified and corrected.

To justify your research and support your findings; Literature review plays an important role
in justifying your study and setting your research questions. This is because examining past
research allows to identify gaps in the literature, which you can then attempt to fill or address
with your work. Also the importance of the result you will achieve will depend to some extents
on how they compare to those reported in the existing literature. When you now write your
findings, your literature review will therefore provide a critical point of reference. For example,
if your result replicate past study your work supports existing theories. If your results are
different, though you will need to discuss why and whether the difference is important.
It helps to adopt more appropriate methodology for the research by examining the
strengths and weakness of an existing research in the same field; Thus when you conduct a
literature review it helps you to adopt more methods, practices, procedures and rules used by
those who have already conducted a research in that same field of study. Thus for instance when
someone conducted a research on the reason for tax evasion. And the person gathered
information through questionnaire, survey and interviews etc. this will help you to know
whether you have adopted the right methodology in this particular area of study if no, you
correct that.

It helps to identify key questions about a topic that recommend for further research; Thus
when you review what has already been done on your topic, you may discover new angles in
terms of questions that need further exploration. For instance, research may suggest that listening
to music whiles studying might lead to better retention of ideals, but the research might not have
assessed whether a particular style of music is more beneficial than another. Hence, a researcher
who is interested in pursuing this same topic will then do well to follow up past studies with a
new study, based on previous research, that tries to identify which styles of music are most
beneficial to retention.