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LITERATURE SURVEY 63

Once the interviews are conducted, the next step for the researcher is to tab-
ulate the various types of information that have been gathered during the inter-
views and determine if there are discernible patterns in the responses. For
instance, it might be observed from the qualitative data that some problems are
frequently mentioned by employees at several levels in the organization. Certain
factors such as insufficient lighting, untrained personnel, or inadequate tools may
be brought out forcefully in the interviews by several workers. When the tabu-
lation reveals that such variables have surfaced quite frequently, it gives the
researcher some good ideas about how to proceed in the next step of surveying
the literature to see how others have perceived such factors in other work set-
tings and defined the problem, before arriving at solutions. Because literature
survey is one way of summarizing secondary data and is an important step in the
research process for defining the research problem, we will now discuss it in
some detail as one of the preliminary data-gathering tools.
It is important to keep in mind that information from secondary data can be
extracted from various sources, including books and periodicals, government
publications and information sources, the media, census, stock market reports,
and mechanized and electronic information of all kinds such as the bar code,
scanner data, and the Internet. Secondary data can be culled from the historical
records of the organization itself, from information already available on the
Intranet, or from external sources such as the ones mentioned above, either
through the Internet or otherwise.

LITERATURE SURVEY

Literature survey is the documentation of a comprehensive review of the pub-
lished and unpublished work from secondary sources of data in the areas of
specific interest to the researcher. The library is a rich storage base for sec-
ondary data, and researchers used to spend several weeks and sometimes
months going through books, journals, newspapers, magazines, conference pro-
ceedings, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, government publications, and
financial, marketing, and other reports, to find information on their research
topic. With computerized databases now readily available and accessible, the lit-
erature search is much speedier and easier, and can be done without entering
the portals of a library building.
The researcher could start the literature survey even as the information from
the unstructured and structured interviews is being gathered. Reviewing the lit-
erature on the topic area at this time helps the researcher to focus further inter-
views more meaningfully on certain aspects found to be important in the
published studies, even if these had not surfaced during the earlier questioning.

Reasons for the Literature Survey
The purpose of the literature review is to ensure that no important variable that
has in the past been found repeatedly to have had an impact on the problem is
ignored. It is possible that some of the critical variables are never brought out in
the interviews, either because the employees cannot articulate them or are