Q: What would be the review of related literature (RRL) for my topic?

Detailed Question -

My topic is ‘Marital conflict to academic performance of students.’ However, I can’t find the RRL.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

There are a few parts of your question that don’t seem very clear. Firstly, the topic sounds a bit incomplete. Perhaps you mean something like ‘The effects of marital conflict on the academic performance of students.’ Also, you may need to specify the location of the conflict; I assume it is the home of the student. Finally, it’s not clear what you mean by “can’t find the RRL.” Perhaps you mean that you can’t find related literature for your review. So, let us first look at what an RRL is and then see where and how you can find related literature.

Writing an RRL

An RRL is a detailed review of existing literature related to the topic of a thesis or dissertation. It is quite comprehensive and forms a sizeable portion of the paper. It involves discussing the key concepts in existing literature related to your topic. If you find any gaps in the reviewed literature, you can discuss these gaps and also how your study plans to address some if not all of these gaps.

When writing the review, you need to organize the literature chronologically, thematically, or some other way. At the end, you need to synthesize all the reviewed literature. This involves explaining how the key concepts in each paper reviewed are related to each other. You may do this through a table or matrix if needed. You will find more information about an RRL in this related question: How do I do a review of related literature (RRL)?

Sourcing related literature

An RRL, of course, begins by identifying related literature. So, for your topic, you need to look at papers on the same topic, similar topics, and related topics, including marital conflict in general, its effects on families as a whole, and its effects on students and their academic performance in particular. When identifying related literature, ensure you are saving these documents for referencing later. Here are some resources to help you conduct an effective literature search:

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