LITERATURE REVIEW

A literature review is typically an important part of a grant application. In it you wish to describe the problem you are addressing and why your proposed intervention is likely to work. Beyond that, you are also trying to convey to readers that you have a detailed understanding of the problem. For this assignment you will prepare a literature review to support your proposed grant intervention. The write up should be about 4-8 pages double-spaced with an additional page for references. There should also be an addendum that briefly describes your methods for the literature review. Where did you do your searches and what search terms were used? In your literature review, try and make use of existing systematic reviews.

For the literature review and grant, you are approaching it as an existing community organization. You need to identify this organization and review its mission and goals.
The literature review should not simply be a list of articles and a summary of their results. Rather it should try to tell a “story” and be written in clear sentences. For example, in writing about the impact of COVID on mental health, one paragraph might look something like this (the studies are fictitious):
COVID is clearly having a major negative impact on the mental health of communities. This has now been evaluated in three studies. Jones et al. in a study from New York City demonstrated that hospitalizations for mental health problems increased by 30% during the height of the pandemic and suicide rates nearly doubled (ref 1). In a study surveying older people living at home, Smith et al. reported that 40% of men and 30% of women demonstrated significant anxiety or depressive symptomatology (ref 2). These findings were confirmed in another study which also found that mental health symptoms were especially prevalent in people with a prior history of mental health problems or those living alone (ref 3). These findings clearly suggest that interventions to address mental health problems are needed during the COVID pandemic.
The literature review should be divided into discrete sections that illustrate the main points you want to make. For example, if your proposal was to implement mental health counseling during the COVID pandemic in the Cambodian population, you might organize your literature review with the following sections:
1) Mental health problems in the Cambodian population in Lowell
2) Impact of natural disasters on mental health problems
3) Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of communities
4) Community-based interventions effective in helping communities in crisis
5) Unique challenges in implementing mental health interventions in the Cambodian population
There is no right way to organize the literature review. The challenge is to make sure that it flows logically from one section to the next. By the end, you should have convincingly made the argument for the importance of the intervention you will be proposing in the grant.
There will be both an individual and a group grade for this project. The primary person working on each section should be identified. However, everyone is expected to edit and suggest improvements on the individual components so as to create a cohesive and compelling story. That will be considered in the group grade. The due date for this assignment is February 29. Make sure you are working with our TA on the literature search in preparing your drafts.