Lit Review and progress

Although I concur that (in my experience) writing a lit review is 'not the main focus', or 'less important' than the research (or outcomes) itself, I do believe your epistomology, ontology, and axiology will certainly determine the 'quality' or even the 'type' of lit review you produce as a researcher or a scholar. I use the word "or" to distinctly separate the two, which Boote and Biele (2005)do so well. So very true that education is so extremely "messy and complicated" (Boote and Biele, 2005), but so are the researchers and their studies. With so many ways to contribute to the field of your specialization, it almost seems impossible to determine what is "good". The rubric used by the authors seems to be in line with my perceptions of a lit review should be (still I will find it difficult to construct)but what of the alternative dissertations discussed earlier? What I found most interesting (and a possible sticking point) of the article is that some dissertation lit reviews conducted in their (small) study "...were mere disjointed summaries of a haphazard collection of literature" (Boote and Biele, 2005). This I find hard to believe--is it ignorance (which was a point mentioned by the faculty, librarians, and the doctoral students on retreiving information) or 'doing it to have it done because it must be done?', or, was it just that author's point of view and how s/he saw that the literature pertained to his/her study and contribution to the field? Then it becomes a question we've already discussed--when do you stop reading (finding, searching, collecting) and start writing? Were these "bad" lit reviews due to the person not reading enough? Or not the right things? Or did they ask the librarian and take only that person's word? We won't ever know, but it seems strange to me that anyone that earns their degree would have mumbo-jumbo in the lit review. On that note, for my work thus far, I have found 7 books on ethnography in order to steep myself in the literature of my chosen (and at this point preferred) methodology. I am just starting to read them, and I should have a lit review of a few of these for my group by the next workshop-maybe I will use the rubric in the Boote and Biele article to rate my own--or have my group members do this--maybe not--we will see how the discussion goes tomorrow. I will also have at least one observation (going there in the morning) and plan to have that on the table too. We have decided to read a piece that uses case study as a methodology, which is Journey's methodology, but Ann and I are using ethnography, so they will certainly overlap. We are all focused on methodology and methods more heavily than data collection, so this will be great for us.