Matriarchal Families Deal, Essay Example

To ensure that my literature review will be effective, I will search primarily using the Google Scholar and PubMed databases to identify original, peer-reviewed research that is related to my topic. I will include all articles that were published between 1980 and 2014, excluding articles from an earlier time period. Although most research papers utilize only information during the last several years, an exception will be made because a lot of pioneering work on structural family therapy was conducted during the 1980s. Therefore, many of the original research articles that are the basis of this work and are continually cited today fall within this category.

Since my research question deals primarily with the differences that patriarchal and matriarchal families deal with in this type of family setting, the key words that will be used in the literature review searchers will include “patriarchal”, “matriarchal”, and “structural family therapy”. More specific key words may be used to identify the patriarchal and matriarchal experiences faced in different religious and cultural communities, so terms such as “African American”, “Islamic”, and “Caucasian” may be searched as well.

The goal of the literature review is to determine what is currently known on the topic of structural family therapy as it pertains to specific groups of individual’s. It does not currently appear that much research has been done on the topic, which is what makes it novel and interesting. Therefore, it is necessary to determine what is already known, so that the information I uncover in my project can be built upon it in a meaningful way. Ultimately, the goal of this literature review is to understand the gaps that currently exist in this field of knowledge so that they may be filled.