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SOCW 4362 Social Research

This guide is intended to help students learn basic research skills for the SOCW 4362 Social Research Course.

Step One: Define Your Research Question & Determine Your Search Terms

Define your research question:

  • What is the specific research question you want this literature review to define or prove?
  • Search for other literature reviews to confirm that your literature review aims to define a question that has not already been defined or proven.
  • Based on your specific research question and what you hope to achieve with the literature review generate search terms and keywords to use in your literature search.

Determine your search terms:

  • From your research question, brainstorm keywords that will help you answer your question.

This can also work the other way around. If you have your search terms already, use those terms to formulate your research question.

Step Two: Put Your Search Terms to Work: Identify Your Literature

Use your search terms and utilize the Boolean Operators to maximize your search and get the most relevant results.

Boolean Operators are AND, OR, NOT. Multiple operators can be used at once.

When using Boolean Operators it is important to remember:

AND means;

  1. All selected search terms must be present in the article results,
  2. Narrows your search results to the selected search terms.

Example: "Social Work" AND "Ethics" will result in a search of articles that ONLY have both terms present in the title/abstract.

OR means;

  1. Either selected search term may be present in article results,
  2. Expands your search results to include articles with EITHER/OR search term.

Example: "Social Work" OR "Ethics" will result in a search of articles with either search term present in the title/abstract. Not all articles retrieved will be relevant to your topic and/or research question.

NOT means;

  1. The second search term will be exclude from the search results,
  2. Refines your search results

Example: "Social Work" NOT "Ethics" will result in a search of articles on Social Work that do not include/discuss the topic of Ethics in Social Work. Articles could include Social Work care practice implementation in rural areas, or Social Work innovative practices.

Step Three: Analyze The Literature

During this step you will analyze the literature you have identified as important to your review. When analyzing the literature there are four major things to keep in mind while reading the literature.

  1. Is this literature relevant to your research question and your overall purpose for conducting a literature review?
  2. Identify common themes throughout the literature.
  3. Compare the methodology used and the results.
  4. Identify gaps within the research.

Step Four: Track Your Progress

Tracking your progress and noting important ideas or connections is imperative to writing a concise and well structured literature review. You are pulling research together from multiple sources so, it is important you keep your thoughts straight and connected to the right piece of literature.

You will find your own way to annotate and keep track of your progress as you research and analyze the literature. Some ways that could help with this annotation and tracking are:

Create a color scheme while highlighting. For example; yellow = something to note, orange = methodology, blue = keywords or themes, green = further research needed. Another example of tracking is creating a Word or Google Doc to track your thoughts. Create a small outline consisting of what you need to track while reading the literature.

Another way to track your progress is to create an outline for each resource consisting of the items you need to keep track of. The outline could look like this in a Word or Google Doc:

Sawyer, M.G., Carbone, J.A., Searle, A.K., Robinson, P. (2007). The mental health and wellbeing of children and adolescents in home-based foster care. Medical Journal of Australia, 186(4), 181-184. http://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2007.tb00857.x

  • Themes

    • study sample of adolescents aged 6-17

    • home-based foster care

  • Keywords

    • Mental health issue

    • depression

    • suicidal ideation & behavior

  • Methodology

    • Questionnaire (administered to children, questionnaire approved by government entity)

  • Results

    • children in home-based foster care have a higher prevalence of mental health issues

      • higher prevalence of attention problems, aggressive and delinquent behavior

      • no differences in prevalence between males and female children

IMPORTANT: Organize Your Resourses