The key role of deductive reasoning in the Agile Literature Review Approach: a note

To fulfill the purpose of being agile, the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA) adopts the practice of producing a prototype of "a pair of diagrams" at the early phase of its application. The two diagrams are (i) a management-concerns diagram and (ii) a level-0 theoretical framework. The management-concerns diagram provides the justification for the intellectual response to the client system's key management concerns as chosen by the researcher. It helps the researcher to answer the following questions on his/her intellectual response (as expressed in the form of a level-0 theoretical framework):

Q1: What's the point [of adopting the researcher's research proposal]?

Q2: Who care about [the adoption of the researcher's research proposal]?

Q3: Why bother [to adopt the researcher's research proposal]?

The level-0 theoretical framework considers a set of coherent evaluative tasks using academic topics and ideas as an intellectual response to the the key management concerns of a client system, as depicted by the management-concerns diagram. The level-0 theoretical framework establishes very early on in the research project a list of academic topics to conduct literature review by the researcher. In this regard, the theoretical framework [level-0] enables from the outset, the researcher to conduct literature research with a clear sense of direction. As a consequence, the researcher is able to produce in an agile mode a level-1 theoretical framework with a set of academic ideas and topics (with clear referencing) to guide the research design as well as to conduct theory-driven evaluation and analysis on the findings from the employment of research methods.

Such a literature review process that chiefly relies on a theoretical framework to guide and, subsequently, analyse, explain and evaluate research findings is primarily grounded on deductive reasoning, rather than inductive reasoning. [It is certainly still feasible to employ inductive reasoning within this broad ALRA pathway]. As most students new to dissertation projects are not experienced in producing this pair of ALRA diagrams, they need much coaching and academic support from their dissertation supervisors.