Thesis Literary Review

Korrin B.

November 15, 2010 - 1:07 PM

This weekend, I spent a majority of my time trying to be productive with the whole writing a thesis thing. I am looking forward to next term when I will be taking eight credits of thesis research. This means that I will be able to devote more time to my thesis work without other class work making that difficult. It gets a little exhausting trying to work on my thesis while I have what seems like one thousand other things to do for my other classes. The saddest part is how much I want to work on my thesis! It brings me so much joy! Yet, I can't devote as much energy to it as I would like. Winter term will be fabulous!

Anyway, the main thing that I worked on this weekend was finding good sources for the literary review section of my thesis. This section involves looking at the scholarly articles already out about my topic and learning what I can from them and seeing how they relate to what I find out in my research.

I found a lot of great articles this weekend simply by doing a search on Google Scholar. What is really handy about using Google Scholar on campus is that there is a nifty button that appears next to the search results that says "UO FindText." This allows the user to have immediate access to the University's various databases that have pdfs of many of the articles.

As always, I found myself with much more reading that I wanted to do than what I really need to do. There were just so many articles that sounded so interesting. I decided to focus my search on articles that related to the idea of the Housing First approach when addressing homelessness. Housing First shies away from emergency shelters and emphasizes permanent housing. This relates to my project, as the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) is aimed at prevention and, well, re-housing. The policy sees the importance of not just putting the homeless into the cycle of shelters, but back into stable, prolonged housing when at all possible.

So, now I have all of the articles I could really ever need, but the next part requires a bit more work. Now comes to time for actually thoroughly reading them all and beginning the written section of my thesis. It will feel so good to start finally writing the pages of what shall be one of my proudest UO accomplishments.