Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

First... let me just say that getting IRB approval for research with children can be time-consuming... especially for developmentally different children. It will require a full review from the IRB (which takes a long time... running 6 weeks for expedited review here, let alone full review)... and even then, they could say that the risks outweigh the potential benefits and require changes before you can do the research. Honestly, it seems like art therapy wouldn't be high risk... but experiments involving children are scrutinized like crazy. Just... expect that. Children are a protected research group.

Not to put you off at all. It's a worthy research area. Just a bit of warning for your time frame. It takes time. And once it's in the IRB's hands, it's a waiting game. How much time, start to finish, do you have before you need to submit a final thesis? If this is your first semester, then it's not a big deal at all.

Lit Review--

First, I recommend identifying one key phrase that's crucial to the research. "therapeutic riding" + "children" + "autism OR autistic". Something like that. See how many articles that is. If it's too many (like... 500 or something), read enough about it to narrow that down further. Maybe, toddler or a specific type of therapeutic riding or... maybe a combination of that therapy with another form... or maybe its effects on a certain issue (attention span, emotional bonding, etcetcetc).

What database? That is a pretty key thing. I'd do a Google Scholar search... and then, if your uni's search doesn't aggregate... I'd go to as many databases as seemed relevant. You want to get a really good idea of what literature is out there. 50 seems like... not a whole lot unless you've got it narrowed down to the last 2 years or something. How recent is "recent"? I'd go with 10 years or so... Google Scholar pulled up 816 articles since 2008 for "therapeutic riding" and "autism". Five years is 507 articles. I imagine you'd want at least 5 years. Otherwise, can you really say that you know what research has been done?

But that's fine because you can get into some sort of specific area to narrow it down further.

Ideally, I'd try to get it narrowed down to about 80-150. Then, start weeding through them. Find ones that are heavily cited and read them first (Google Scholar search by proxy with your university is helpful in addition to university databases). I also recommend Zotero for organizing your sources. Click a button, it saves the article's info and/or link... you can make notes, tags, copy/paste bits from the article, etc. Very very convenient.

I also copied down some forms that might be useful: "Lit Review templates" . If you fill them out for every article you open, you'll have some really solid info to start synthesizing the content. In Zotero, you can literally just paste the appropriate form into a note and fill out the info. You can see where this would be super helpful. I also keyword a whole lot. Like, I had "age" as a keyword for research done specifically on old people or children... since that is something particular. You'll start seeing these things too. Just tag the heck out of your stuff so you can just search for a tag and find all the articles dealing with that. Trust me... soooo much easier than randomly opening stuff like... where is that one article that talked about that one thing...?

Honestly, narrowing it down takes a while. And reading takes a while. And writing it takes quite some time. I did a very thorough lit review (thorough enough so that it's going to be published shortly in the International Journal of Volunteer Administration-- stoked about that). You should be able to get by with a pretty brief review... 10-15 pages (not counting references). It just takes some work to get to the point where you know enough about what's going on in the literature to synthesize it.

Personally, I was taught to scan through every single article within my parameters... if it's too much, you adjust your parameters. And then... yeah... I'd fill out those forms I linked you to for at least 30 articles... ones that you can cite in your paper and sort into something that makes sense. [Not that you have to CITE 30... but if you find that many, writing will be way easier. I'd plan on citing at least 15-20]

Not to freak you out, but I think my literature review took me like... 40 hours? More probably? I spent a good 8 hours or more before I even narrowed my topic down to something useful.


Just so that I'm clear on this... you want to do a lit review on BOTH therapeutic riding + autism AND art therapy + autism? Hmmm... if that is the case, your research would need to involve both of those elements to make sense. So... you want to do something like... what? See how kids react to therapeutic riding vs those who only do art therapy or...? I know this gets into methodology, but man... for a thesis, that seems like a tall order. Simple might be best.

As my committee says: A thesis is not your life's work. A thesis proves that you can do independent research.

Speaking of which... the purpose of a lit review? 1. To make you an expert... to make you qualified to do the research. 2. To make a case for why your research is needed. Keeping that in mind helped me a fair bit.